Swimmin' holes

There was a brief scare in town: several children who had swimming lessons in the town pond got a weird bacterial infection that doctors at first thought might be leptospirosis---caused by moose pee. Or perhaps bear pee.

Gross.

But tests came back negative. Have they asked whether the children sucked each other's thumbs? Because that's how my sister and I both got trench mouth when we were little ...

... don't pass that around.

We never went swimming in the James River in Virginia: the river was solely for throwing rocks into, except for the one time I went fishing with Kathy. The river is very broad, deep and swift in the middle.

For many years we'd go swim in Pat Price's pool. The Prices were the rich folks in the neighborhood, classic Virginia horse-country sorts of people, though I don't think they were horsey. They were wealthy and friendly, with a perpetually untidy house, giant dogs, and muddy boots, but they were very selective about the company they kept. Pat really liked Grandmom (what's not to like?), which is why we got to use their pool. It was loaded with chlorine and COLD.

Then my aunt and uncle, Patsy and Bill, moved into Bill's family home up the road, and they put in a pool. Good lord, we would pack that thing with cousins. And it was always freezing. They put in a slide: bliss!

The thing I liked about these pools was that I was related to all the people in them at any given time, so I did not have to pretend to have dignity. This meant that I could participate in my favorite childhood sport: silly diving.

It's really very funny until someone loses a bathing suit top. Then it's only funny to everyone else.

Before Mimi and Gogo moved to Vermont, we could use their neighbor's pool in Syracuse. There are a lot of pictures of me in a red Winnie the Pooh bikini and a pink bathing cap (I had tubes in my ears). I remember loving that pool: I remember innertubes, laughing a lot, and that the man who owned it was always laughing.

Our cousins up the hill have a pool in Vermont, which I haven't yet been in (what is WRONG with me?). I think I'm over mud and salamanders now, as well (getting wimpy in my middle years?), which dampens the allure of the ponds:

Thorpe's pond: just up the hill. Has the best dock for diving, made of creaky old wood. Gently sloping on the "beach" side, grassy on the far side. Always well stocked with giant inner tubes (the real kind, from tractor tires). Cold but with little warm spots. Now it's full of fish, so NO THANK YOU.

Camp pond: the pond at Camp Ken-jock-etee, which is the whole reason why my family ended up in that town in the first place (except for the Tyson cousins, who opened the mine). Way up a steep hill, with a broad, gravelly beach, charcoal-grey water, and a bunch of big rocks on one side. Freezing. Even when I was a little kid willing to scream and wail about wanting to stay although my lips were blue, I had a limit at the camp pond.

Dickinson's pond: on a hill behind the main street: black water and bright green grass. Unbelievably, even colder than the camp pond. An excellent pond for ascetics and masochists. Much better for painting than swimming in.

Cousin Rosa's pond: just up the hill, Cousin Rosa had this rattletrap cottage that some of us would stay in now and again. The last time I was in it, you had to walk like a pirate with an inadequate peg leg, because the floors were so uneven. It fell over one day, and there's nothing left. The pond is filling in.

This was the warmest of the ponds: shallow and very muddy. The field around it was not much mowed, so this pond was not a favorite of the moms. Because the water was so warm, this pond was full of salamanders, and they were so blissed out that they were easy to catch. Often they'd be full of eggs. One summer I tortured my sister by throwing salamanders at her every time we went to the pond. That girl has a good shriek on her.

Kingdom pond: One of Mimi's best friends (and the most elegant woman I have ever met) owns the top of a mountain. Her husband bought it for her not long before he died, so that she could have a retreat. She is a shy person but full of resolve, so for many years she was a selectman in town, and she loved to have this far-away place, up a steep, switchbacked, dirt road, as her sacred place. The cabin had one wall made of glass, and the tub was half of a giant redwood barrel.

I always felt so privileged that she invited us up there, knowing that it was her private haven. We would have cookouts by the pond. I had cucumber-dill soup for the first time at the Kingdom, and it was so strange and shocking to me that it was years before I realized that I liked it.

The pond is small and chilly, but you can float in it and see across to New Hampshire, so it's perfect. It's kind of muddy, but that's no matter, in a place surrounded by mountain and green, with a huge sky arching overhead, just above the dark tops of the pines.

One year my brother had a toy---Max something---an Army guy in a neon green suit, which he dropped in the water. My dad and I dove and dove for what seemed like 7 months until Dad found it. The water was so dark that I felt like I would never see the doll, and after a while I was really frightened to keep diving down into that dark water, reaching toward a bottom that I couldn't see, didn't know how far away it was, and so didn't know what I might touch. I kept going, but that fear stayed with me for a long time, and I haven't liked dark water since then.

Town pond: when they first opened this, it was the "community pond," which of course we always called the connudity pond. How could you not? It had a nice sandy beach, quite large, and a rope with floaters across the middle to keep little kids in the shallow area. Mimi (and sometimes Mom) would go to the other side of the rope, wearing her skirted bathing suit, to swim sedately back and forth. Mom and Mimi are/were both side-stroke swimmers, with the tops of their heads dry and the conversation never stopping.

It's a pretty nice pond, I guess, but it's always full of people. Better to go to the invitation-only ponds, where it's just family.

You know, for the silly diving.