Archive Columns: Personal

Requiem for a Swimming Pool

      I returned  my locker key and was heading out of Penn’s old Hutchinson gym the other day when Pamela the attendant handed me a flyer that confirmed the recent rumor: Hutchinson’s pool would be closed down permanently.

       It was odd to realize that I had just swum my last lap there, and to find myself brought suddenly to the end of something that had become soaked in my mind with a sense of never ending.

      But now it really was over, at least at “Hutch”.  Built in the ‘30’s, the pool’s ills were beyond repair. The flyer said we will be allowed to use Penn’s good pool, the Olympic-size one that is all shiny and properly blue and far too well lit.  Whenever I used it in the past I came to realize how much I preferred old Hutch with its solid prewar masonry, its quiet early morning dinginess.  Penn would now and then stab at cheer - some new carpet here, the obligatory red and blue paint there - but these could never really obscure Hutch’s gray Spartan soul.  I was glad for that.  Reluctant and groggy, I wanted only dumb routine here.  This was my call to Matins, begun most of the year in darkness, and Hutch’s shadowy monastic gloom matched my mood.

      Now that I will never swim in its pool again, I am conscious of details that regularity made subliminal: a small black spot at the end of one lane that looked to me like a fantailed bird, caulked holes where old lane-marker eye bolts used to be, the unusual original built-in ladder with hand grips in the coping stone.  And then there is the ridiculous familiarity, absorbed in backstroking, of the pool’s ceiling.  Guiding yourself on the queen post of the roof trusses, there’s not much else to do but make a study: the dirty green corrugated skylights, the place along a beam where someone ran out of paint or scaffolding or will, the features that warned you, since there were no backstroke flags, when the wall was approaching: under the vent fan on one end, under the cross braces on the other.   Maybe it wasn’t up to varsity work, but it was home to me.

       And what will become of my fellow guppies, silently mustering all these years by bike and train and footbridge to huddle in the fluorescent light of the entrance, waiting for our keys and towels?  There we might exchange greetings and perhaps a line or two about the weather. But for the most part we were a taciturn bunch, isolated in our lonely watery worlds.  You only glimpsed the others from the side, murkily paddling by, and yet after so many years I sense without even knowing names, a kind of mute bond made of shared ritual repetition, of being alone together.

     I suppose I will see them at the other pool.  And they say one day there will be a new pool in Hutchinson.  It will be bright and cheery, no doubt, and force me to reminisce about the old one, the cozy somber one that after decades of use finally gave in to old age, and where for many years I slogged in the morning hours, trying only to forestall in myself a roughly analogous fate.

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