SWIMMING LESSONS

When I was growing up in the early 1960’s, every kid that I went to school with took swimming lessons at Stevie’sPond. Poor kids who lived across the tracks close to the mills, the scattered children of care-takers who lived on the large estates  and the farm kids on the east side of town all dipped their toes into that melting pot that did not judge or segregate. We held our breath and counted to twenty, and kicked fiercely while holding onto the buoy lines over which you would never dare to cross. To this very day, my grand nieces and nephews swim in that amber pee hole we held so dear, and it baffles me that generations of children going as far back as my father, who is ninety-four years old, have wet their whistle in the coming of age at Stevie’s Pond.

In 1963, when I was barely eight years old, mothers would drop their fledglings off in the gravel parking lot. We would pour, un-tethered by seatbelts which were not yet conceived of, from the Buick station wagons, Falcons, and Ford Fairlanes which our mothers had only recently learned how to drive. Shivering in the cold morning June, we would claim our turf on the sandy beach with its coarse pebbles that were round and hard like ball bearings beneath our toes. Clad in striped towels, too small to be of use, and rubber tongs (flip flops) that came apart in the roughness of the sand, we waited for the god-like life-guard and the red-cross swimming instructor to anoint us in our right of passage.

From a 21^st-century perspective, it’s a bit appalling that my mother would simply abandon me in such a way – gently nudging me out of the car in my little sear-sucker cotton bathing suit, and pathetic towel, along with other children my age who stood shivering in the misty morning light like tiny birds waiting to be pushed out of the nest. Who knew where our mothers went after they left us there in a cloud of blue smoke from mufflers that propelled them into a moment of freedom that seemed like an eternity to us. Did they convene in coffee shops? Beauty Parlors? Doctor Offices? Lover’s arms? Where did they go, while we dipped our toes into that amber colored water, with its dubious source?

We would stake out our claim with our shiny quarters folded secretly in our towels so that we could buy a Creamsicle at the concession stand, and wait for the glorious moment when the whistle would blow and we would be allowed to wade into that murky water that had baptized our mothers and fathers and older brothers and sisters. We practiced the dog paddle, the frog kick, and the crawl until we were able to propel ourselves out to the altar, a rickety and slanted raft that seemed like it had been placed on the horizon of the Atlantic for us to prove our stealth.

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve – the years went by quickly, but the summer ritual remained the same. Each year a new adventure, a new hurtle, a new swimsuit. Childhood challenged. Adolescence advanced. One year, the weeds choked me and tried to pull me down to the black muck just outside the ropes. Where was my mother? Where were my friends? It was my fault – outside the box again. Alone.

When you reached a certain age, you began to explore beyond the small world of the swimming area. There was a trail that led to a dam that divided the mill pond swimming hole from the reservoir. Here, was a frightening world that my cousin Tina and I happened upon one day in our Lewis and Clark innocence for wanting to explore the world. Girls in bikinis, boys in swimming trunks, cigarette butts in the gray silt, rope swings that hung like lynching poles into the forbidden lake, the source of our drinking water. It was uncomfortable. We were not ready. At least I was not.

All throughout my childhood, Steven’s Mill dominated the ambient background noise and the culture of the town. The echo of the looms reverberated through the night – second shift, third shift into the dawn. It was the pulse of my childhood – stronger than the heartbeat of my mother, those mills that churned cotton and wool for more than a hundred years. Ca – junk – ca – junk – ca-junk – across the great Lake Chochicowick, separated by an earthen dam as if that were enough to keep the workers at bay – to segregate the haves from the have-nots – to keep a child from dreaming big.

In the late 1970’s, I went home and discovered a discomforting silence. Steven’s Mill was gone; it had been torn down and replaced by upscale elderly gated condominiums with the quaint appointment of title:  Mill Pond. But nothing of the “mill pond” was left except Stevie’s Pond (the town beach), which had somehow lost its appeal. I could no longer hear the roar of the looms across the lake, and therefore could not sleep to the foreign lullaby of silence. The “town beach” was no longer the amber cream soda in which I swam as a child. It had become somewhat gentrified – the sand not so coarse – the parking lot paved – the concession stand somewhat less primitive with bathrooms that flushed automatically.

I wonder if an undercurrent still flows through the pond – that secret code of childhood which guides us to our stages of being: swimming to the ropes, making it out to the raft and back, spying on teenage girls who have wandered into forbidden territory. Is there still an earthen dam that separates the pond from the lake and the poor from the rich?  Does anyone shiver as I did in that dark water and wonder what twist of fate has tethered them to the weedy shallows while others tread water in turquoise painted pools? I hope so. After all, what is the worth of swimming lessons in a world where everything comes easy and you expect to float on the surface of things in some dreamy pretense that there are no differences and everyone starts out on equal terms? You have to learn to swim against that tide of entitlement or it will suck you down and try to keep you in your place. You have to learn to hold your breath under the weight of water, eyes wide open and ready to break through the surface toward light.