It was like climbing the gallows, and the attentive crowd below was watching for the fall. The wooden ladder up the high dive at Mill’s Westside Pool had a dozen or so mossy steps leading to the jumping-off place. At the top was a square platform that overlooked it all: springboard to the right and the back of Mills’ store with its concession stand and dressing rooms straight ahead. To the left was a wide concrete deck, a place for drying off, and for those who suited up but didn’t swim. A place for spending one more afternoon in the sun.
Those days the air was full of summer scents. Mimosa trees across West Clay. Coppertone suntan oil, sometimes combined with iodine for the premium tan. Chlorine. A faint service-station scent from the pumps out front.
The pool was enclosed by a tall, wire, honeysuckle-covered fence. A well-worn path led from the front of Mills store along the east edge of the pool to an unexplored area of town known at the time as The Bottom. This path was for foot traffic mostly, and an occasional bicycle or two.
Inside the fence we sprawled on towels. Transistor radios blared “Louie, Louie,” and the Beatles’ first hits. Once each afternoon a freight train rambled by on the track beside the pool, muffling the screams and splashes, the lifeguard’s whistle, and the crackle of Fritos and Moon Pies being unwrapped.
From a bird’s eye view Mills’ pool was a glimmering blue rectangle, just two blocks from the town’s one stoplight. I could walk there from home and from my grandmother’s imposing carpenter-gothic house a block away.
Mills’ pool had been the summer gathering place for decades. My dad spent his high school years as a lifeguard there. Usually reserved, Dad became a champ when he swam. His diving style amazed us when the whole family trekked to the once-yearly Fourth of July swim.
Dad taught me to float holding his palm under the small of my back. His touch gave me the confidence to let go and rise to the surface on my own. Later my brother and I were enrolled in morning swimming lessons. We dreaded these, mainly because of the icy morning water. Mr. Mills and his college-age son Don taught the young swimmers to dive by positioning us in a forward bend, tipping us until gravity took over, and then pulling our ankles from under us. In spite of this, we learned to love the water.
All this meant that my brother and I – often sheltered—were allowed to go to the pool alone at a fairly early age. We shoved and splashed next to the “No Horseplay” signs. We dove for pebbles and coins on the floor of the pool. We sidestroked, backstroked, and butterflied our way through the weeks.
Almost every swimmer who was allowed in the deep end could cannonball off the high dive. It was a maneuver more about effect than style. To cannonball was about leaping from the platform, knees hugged to chest, and making the biggest splash possible. It was geared to soak anyone who was drowsing in the sun. Another objective but rarely realized point of the cannonball was to douse Mr. Mills, who periodically knelt at the edge of the pool to sample the chlorine content in the water. The cannonball was a boy’s showoff dive.
Diving off the high platform was different. There was some danger here. A daydreaming swimmer could move into the path of the diver and cause a collision. A bad entry meant the whole body was slapped by the force of the water. Sometimes the diver would become disoriented and struggle toward the floor of the pool. To come up with sinuses painfully full of water was almost a certainty. An unspoken fear came from the stories we’d all heard about broken backs and necks that could come with a diving accident.
But diving was necessary proof of adulthood. The first few steps were easy enough for me, and it was no big problem to mask fear as I climbed since all the divers were shivering.
By thirteen I had mastered the dive and I did it not once, but perhaps a dozen times that summer. I learned the adrenaline rush of the climb. I liked the drama of standing on the water-slick platform and hooking my toes over the edge. I learned to push off and glide at an angle into the water. I practiced arching my back to make a smooth entry. I concentrated on keeping my calves taut and my feet pointed and firmly pressed together. I understood that the dive was some sort of test, and I had passed.
I was initiated in more subtle ways as well. Girls changed in a communal dressing room and in this damp and largely unlit enclosure we surreptitiously checked each other out, taking note of whose figures had changed with adolescence. We knew who kept tampons and love notes buried in their wire clothes baskets. Outside, the girls watched boys and boys watched the girls. At Mills’ pool we became aware of the miraculous changes in our physiques as we grew older.
We played water tag, a game which was largely about touching bodies. We experimented with underwater kisses from boys we didn’t like, feeling sexy in the protection of the underwater world. We rubbed zinc oxide on each other and felt the full-body caress of sun on bare skin. Near closing many of us would lie flat in the on the rim of the pool, cooling our hands in the water and liking these new bodies of ours.
For a few minutes in that summer of 1963, I was on top of the world. Then there was a shift.
When I broke through the water on those late August days, my life was not the same. The underwater touches and surreptitious kisses were something I couldn’t reveal to my parents. I stopped watching the divers, stopped worrying about the changes in my own body. Bob Dylan was singing about war. People were whispering about Martin Luther King’s March on Washington.
I was suddenly able to see beyond the wire fence of Mills’ Pool, beyond the tangle of kudzu and honeysuckle to a scant procession of real kids, slender black children who were—by custom-- not allowed inside. I became aware that the youngest of these would stand and watch us, fingers loosely hanging through fence. And I saw their older siblings, heads down, unsmiling kids who just walked by.
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drawing: No Horseplay
micron 005 on paper
