A Splash from the Past

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

A SPLASH FROM THE PAST

A waft of chlorine hit me as I stepped inside of the white bathhouse with sky blue trim and puddles of water on its plain gray floor. I placed a dime on the counter next to my brother’s dime.

Opening up the pool for the afternoon, a lifeguard flipped on the radio, mingling music with the sunlight already dancing on the water. In 1966, the radio would’ve played songs like “I Got You, Babe” and “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.”

As an adult, I don’t go swimming. It’s just not my thing anymore. But these 100-degree days do bring back those happy childhood afternoons of wet feet on hot concrete, kids shouting, hits playing on the airwaves, and waxed packages of flat taffy from the concession stand. Perhaps you have similar memories.

Mom drove my brother and me to the pool and said she would return in an hour. Leon and I, at 9 and 7, hurried our way through the separate shower rooms, heading for the pool to make good use of our time.

We were supposed to take showers in the bathhouse before and after our swims, but I hated those big beads of cold water that hit like pellets when I pulled the metal hoop. I preferred to get wet by slipping into the pool one toe, one ankle, one calf at a time. The water temperature was always a shock, but the body eventually adapted.

We didn’t get to go to the pool as often as a kid would like. It was a 10-minute drive from our home in Pawnee Rock to the swimming pool in Larned, and we had to beg our mom or someone else’s mother for a ride.

On the way, Mom would tell us about her own summer days. Larned was where she had spent her teenage years delivering newspapers and riding her bike with friends to this very pool.

For several years, my brother and I took swimming lessons at the Larned pool early on June mornings when the day’s sun had not yet heated the water. I don’t remember my first teacher’s name, the one who taught me how to hold my breath underwater and to  flutter kick while clinging to the pool’s overflow gutter, but I do remember another teacher, Robin.

Robin was a young man with blue eyes and rakish blond hair, that hair as long as Paul’s or Ringo’s, and he wore a choker of plastic beads.

We stood just beyond the buoy rope that separated the baby pool from the adult pool, in 30 inches of morning water, my teeth chattering so wildly they bounced off of each other. Here, Robin taught me and a handful of other kids how to float on our backs.

In the afternoons, the pool was warmer, and by July and August, warmer still. It was then that the body was more eager to meet the water. And when I became older, I would stay most of the afternoon, playing tag with friends, zipping down the slide, tossing coins into the water and then plunging to pluck them from the pool’s floor.

When we were feeling rich, my teenage friends and I would combine our money and rent an inner tube for 50 cents an hour. I think the inner tubes came from tractor tires, large enough for four bodies to sit on, our feet braced against the opposite side. Holding hands with the person across from us, we would rock that rubber tube until the wetness slid us off or the momentum flipped us over. Either way, we would go down laughing.

At some point, ready for rest, we’d return to our beach towels and lie flat like a panini, getting grilled on both sides at once, the concrete’s heat rising through the towel, the sun scorching us from above. Our skin dried off quickly, which meant it was time to leap into the pool again. No holding back now, no tip-toeing in the water; it was a full-out jump, making the biggest splash possible.

Pool time passed quickly, whether we were little kids or rowdy teens. Mom would show up at the fence and tell us it was time to leave. On the way home, I sat in the backseat of the air-conditioned car, wrapped in a towel for warmth, my hair hanging in a wet chlorine tangle.

Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh