Irenic Road

Swimming Lessons: Just a Bunch of Naked Kids

As a child I naturally looked forward to the end of the school year, but with a sense of foreboding, because I knew that with summer came swimming lessons. Trying to recall these experiences fills me with hesitation. Like a traumatized witness describing a crime, my memory is splotchy and unreliable. Then I flash back to the Adel Municipal Pool, see a horde of naked little boys horsing around, and shudder. Did I really go through that?

I’ve entirely forgotten my first encounter with a pool. My mother, seeking acclimatize me to water and make use of the YMCA membership given by my grandparents, brought me to a class called “Water Babies” when I was 9 months old. This involved about a dozen mothers in a pool with their babies bobbing in front of them while an instructor called out a series of exercises over the inevitable screeching. This must have been a bizarre scene to walk in on, like witnessing some kind of mass baptism at a church that believed in both infant baptism AND total immersion. My Water Babies experience didn’t last long. After three or four sessions I developed a major ear infection, the only one I would ever get, and we didn’t go back. (My mother, bless her heart, was keen to prevent me from repeating her mistakes. She didn’t learn to swim until she was at Girl Scout camp in junior high, when she had to take lessons with the little kids in order to go canoeing.)

Somewhere in the time frame of kindergarten, my brother and I began taking “lessons” at woman’s pool in Adel. Again, my mom’s intent was to get me (and now my brother) comfortable in the water rather than teach us anything specific. We practiced floating and maybe some doggie-paddling, opening eyes under water and fetching different colored rings from the bottom of the pool. It was a lot like being a seal at Sea World, without the raw frozen fish. These were my halcyon days of swimming lessons, and consequently I remember little. Anything I did was good enough, especially in comparison to my little brother, who was terrified of the water. It was an achievement just to get him in the pool.

The next summer we took lessons at house on Ashworth in West Des Moines. Again, my brother was recalcitrant, while I just paddled around and was mostly happy, except when I had to learn how to deal with inhaling water. I hated this. Even now there are few sensations I dislike more than the feeling of water permeating my nasal passages. I would scrupulously hold my head above water, and never ever forget to hold my nose while under it. To teach me some resilience the man giving us lessons would push down on me as I swam from poolside to poolside, so that I couldn’t predict when the water was coming. I did not see the wisdom in this, and recall spending a substantial amount of time clinging to the wall after each pass, blowing out water and snot and whimpering. I did learn to swim underwater without holding my nose, but surface swimming remained problematic.

Private lessons cost more than group lessons, so when summer rolled around again I was sent to the Adel Municipal Pool, where my dad had gone as a kid. He remembered it as sweet freedom from walking beans and picking cucumbers. Unlike him, I wasn’t a very ornery, mischievous boy. Frankly, I preferred being alone and having private lessons, although I couldn’t articulate it at the time (not that it would’ve mattered if I did). So every weekday morning for what seemed like months I was dropped off at Waukee Elementary, where I and scores of other children boarded school buses bound for Adel.

The pool was in Kinnick-Feller Park between a little playground and the softball fields. Built in the early fifties, it wasn’t designed with aesthetics in mind, and time had since added its own embellishments. The entrance was through a brick building that resembled a small warehouse. The sidewalk up to it was rough and bunches of grass grew through the cracks. On either side were a few small bushes with weeds growing up through them, and bare dirt strewn with AirHeads wrappers and Pixy Stix beyond that. A door in the middle of the building opened to a tiny “office” where after lessons a teenager would appear and sell candy to the hyperactive, grasping throng across the desk. From the office, girls went through the doorway to the left and boys to the right.

This was my first experience with a locker room. For a shy, skinny boy, it was a frightening place, hostile to privacy, utterly depersonalizing. Bare bulbs hung from the rafters of the high ceilings to supplement the sickly yellow light filtering through the windows. Everything was painted some shade of blue except the sinks and toilets, and the concrete floor was splattered with blue paint. The toilets did have stalls, but I recall the doors were broken or missing. The open showers were horrifying– why would you take a shower where everyone could see you? Even more mind-boggling were the kids who wore clothes to the pool and changed in the locker room. Inevitably, such clothes and swim trunks would go missing, and more than once a distressed, naked little boy would be led scurrying around the room trying to get his pants back. The scene was always chaotic, and by this time I was a hundred miles outside my comfort zone. After this I’d enter the pool area and stick my belongings in a wooden cubby along the building’s wall, and go to certain spot near the pool where my group met.

The pool, perhaps 25 yards from end to end, was surrounded by weathered and paint-splattered concrete, and that by a high chain-link fence. Pastel-painted lifeguard chairs stood at intervals, caked in layers of flaking paint that couldn’t hold back the rust. At the deep end was a diving board, and a rusting playground slide was rigged up with a hose running water down it, no doubt in violation of some public pool regulation. An amazing number of signs were visible in any direction, all warning the pool-goer of the various dangers awaiting him. NO RUNNING, NO DIVING, DEEP WATER, SHALLOW WATER– 3FT 4FT 7FT 9FT– PUMP ROOM STAY OUT. Many were painted on the concrete around the pool, and when combined with the various red and yellow boundary lines (NO CHAIRS) gave the impression of an airport tarmac. I knew I must remain vigilant.

As for the actual swimming, I don’t recall much of it. I wasn’t exceptionally bad, but I was at a disadvantage for a couple reasons: 1. Being a skinny little boy, I didn’t have anything extra to help stay afloat. 2. For the same reason I had little insulation, and no matter how much extra energy I expended staying afloat, the water cooled me down so that nearly every lesson ended with me blue-lipped and shivering on the blissfully warm concrete. When the morning started cool and cloudy, I knew I was in for it. Now I know the pool itself was to blame for much of this. Being old and decrepit, it leaked continuously through its concrete foundations, so they had to keep filling it with fresh, cold water.

After the lessons were over, I once again ran the gauntlet through the locker room. Now that I was relatively dry and warm, the splattered water and sloppy piles of clothes scattered throughout the room were appalling. I certainly never let my bare feet touch the floor. Today just the mention of swimming lessons takes me back to this locker room full of squirrelly little naked kids running around, snapping towels and slapping each other with soaking underwear. I remember no adults at all, and Lord of the Flies-style anarchy seemed to rule the day. At least once our lessons were delayed because someone released a multitude of leopard frogs into the pool, and despite the chlorine they weren’t at all eager to leave. While waiting for the buses to arrive some of us would go to the nearby playground, where the boys soon organized a kind of chicken-fighting tournament on the monkey bars. Two boys would start at either end of the bars and try to knock each other down using only their legs. Incredibly, I participated in this but went down in an early round. I wasn’t all that opposed to mayhem, so long as it didn’t involve being cold, wet, and exposed. After a few days some adults broke it up.

I eventually learned to swim and even to enjoy it, but swimming lessons were the first situation where I really had to grapple with fear, unpredictability and chaos. As with so many things, they’re much more amusing from a distance.