Saturday, July 12, 2014



Slow Lane
Once in Nelson, Canada, a snow-town like Tahoe,  I visited an indoor public pool. A massive yellow spiral slide was at the head of the building, along with a diving board and hot tubs that harry men gathered in like something out of The Godfather. I pictured the public pool here in Tahoe to have the basic section for laps and a for pool play, and if I was lucky maybe an Al Pacino. Another charming thing about pools are the older women doing water aerobics bouncing around wearing floral swim caps. This time of the year would make small talk about how they plan to not eat as much this Thanksgiving. Sympathizing with each other and agreeing to be supportive of healthy lifestyles through the holidays. However once out of earshot they would all decide to call their husbands to add that they’re picking up pie for dessert tonight on the way home, because they just can’t wait another month. This is when Al Pacino would say that pie was for babies and shoot the kneecaps of those naughty grandmas.
My own grandmother goes to her morning aerobic classes and would often ask me to join. I knew that if I was to ever tag along I wanted a vintage one piece, a pair of cat eye sun glasses and a swim cap with more than just two dimensions. I hold fond memories of looking through a box of old photos that showed my Mother wearing fluorescent one pieces that hiked up past her hip bones when she taught water aerobics classes while in college. My expectations for the pool were high, as high as one pieces used to hike up in the eighties.
The recreation center also had a weight room, I anticipated that the machine room would be busier than the pool. Weight rooms are commonly full of men flexing their muscles smiling at themselves or women laying out topography maps with their eyes, scanning all shapes of their figures. There would be so much character in these lonely fat people, I couldn’t wait. At the pool there’s always one old man putzing around wearing red board shorts that creep closer and closer to nipple height. He would slowly swim, back and forth in some combination of doggie and froggie style. I sorely came to the discovery that the Tahoe recreation center was not what I had modeled it up to be.
From the cross street I could see the dome covering the indoor pool--a huge white ball plopped on top of a wooden building, like a scoop of vanilla that sits on the top of your shell cone. The parking lot of the South Lake Tahoe Recreation Center was very large and all the aspens surrounding the building had cycled to the sweet yellow color of fall. As I pressed the lock on my vehicle my brain triggered, “Oy vey…You forgot a towel!” With fingers crossed I hoped that they would have some options available for the off souls who leave their homes with an extra cup of tea but no towel for the pool.
I entered the doors where two women were standing to greet me; one eager and the other uninterested. I mentioned that this was my first visit to the recreation center and wanted to gather information about rates, and might even go for a swim. Visible to me through the door that entered the dome, I saw men in jammers swiveling in unison making flip-turns at the end of laps. Seeing this and, being familiar with this, I felt a bit unsettled. Flip-turns usually mean a coach, a whistle, and maybe a little pressure. These swimmers seemed to be a tad more serious than I had thought. There I was with no towel, no swim cap, and no one peice. Who was I? Very gently the desk clerk answered my question about towels with a wrinkle in her brow and a lift of her shoulders, “I’m sorry we don’t have any towels.” The other woman there swiveled around from her computer and added, “Let me check the lost and found. There might be a towel there for you.” So listen, I don’t have squirmy tendencies, but the idea of a moldy towel still wet from the last use, discarded in a bin with all the other towle orphan towels, made me feel faint. I did not want to use someone’s lost towel, I did not want to find that towel. “No luck”, she said. Convincingly, I replied “O darn, well I’ll figure it out.” Relieved, I thought “Thank you, but no thank you.”
The friendly desk clerk pointed out the locker rooms as I heard the chirp of basketball shoes on a court and the gentle drumming of a ball. I walked past a dozen empty rooms. The weight room was empty, the treadmill out of service, and there were no physical spectators jostling around. When I entered the locker room for the pool it was empty as well.
There were remnants of many women undressing in this room. About eleven lockers had dripping one pieces hanging over open metal doors. I wondered if I had just missed the exercise class I was anticipating. There were no other signs that these women were in the building any longer. Their suits however had enough personality for a first impression--bright colorful suits that looked like some acid trip through the eyes of an elderly woman. I wouldn’t be surprised if at the drawing board for all these designs there was a group of women on acid, screaming out ideas, “Flamingos… yes.. lime green flamingos! Orange monkeys, eating purple bananas!” I placed all my items in a locker and walked out under the dome.
Right as I walked through the revolving doors I read to the right the lane arrangement. I hadn’t seen anything like this before. Starting from left to right it read, “slow, medium, fast, fast, medium, slow”. This pool has a cast system, duly noted. The pool arena had very white light that passed through the dome fabric. The kind of stale light that might be in a doctors office. Music was quietly playing in the background, Tom Petty’s “MaryJane’s Last Dance”. The smell of the pool was the classic sour dry smell of some nasty concoction of house cleaners and chlorine. Crystal, water the ice blue color of the sky undulated in its concrete grave before me. Feeling a little awkward with the two female lifeguards staring at me blankly I gestured hello and stepped immediately into the pool. I saw that the men in the fast lane were whipping around, doing fifty yard sprints, and then checking their time. From this I conjured up that they must have a little more planned this afternoon then a sweet dip in the pool. When they stopped you could see their mouths were open, panting, pushing to make a time limit. Sitting to the right above my lane were the two  young female lifeguards.
They both stared at me occasionally; perhaps they didn’t see many people at the pool that looked like they came to enjoy swimming without preconceived time goals or plans. I began with breaststroke, so I could continue to spy on all of my surroundings. Like a boat leaving port my head glided across the surface of the pool. My nose submerging and emerging with each stroke, occasionally having a snort of chlorine causing my eyes to burn and spicy water to drip down the back of my throat. Through blurry chlorine eyes I read a sign to my right said the capacity for the pool was one hundred and sixty eight. “Maybe if you stacked us up like sardines in the pool”, I thought. “Outrageous, one hundred and six eight people doing laps, thats way over capacity.” I’d like to see how these two chatty lifeguards would deal with that much responsibility.
The pool had six lanes and all but two had one swimmer in them. I was the only swimmer in a slow lane, and also the only swimmer not wearing some slick aerodynamic suit, swim cap, and goggles. The lifeguards continued to stare at me, blankly, the way you stare at the news when they begin to talk about the stock market. In defense I flipped over to backstroke to receive a much needed break from our dull eye contact. Shadows of birds flying above outside projected across the surface like shooting stars across the sky. On one end of the tarp a large cast shadow was draped of a pine tree outdoors. The cast shadow was about the size of the Christmas tree they dress up like a show-girl in New York City. As I passed the lifeguards again there conversation was muffled by the water producing sentences that sounded like the adults in Charlie Brown, “Thats more like it” I thought.
It was odd. I swam laps there for an hour, listening to the swish and swash of the swimmers making their turns and splashing their arms into the water as they did lap and lap again of freestyle. Every person there but myself was swimming freestyle, I even dared to throw in some butterfly to bring some much needed color to the scene. It turned out that I was the old man I expected at the pool, putzing around, watching everyone else as they seriously worked out. I watched the birds fly by over the dome listening to the sounds of the classic rock station and drowned out the lifeguard’s discussion of the affairs that played out the night before. I thought about this feeling like the only orange fish at a red fish convention. How on earth could a public pool leave me feeling so outside? In the end I bought a punch card to visit the public pool again; after all I wouldn’t put it past myself to acclimate to the situation. On my next visit to the pool a week after, I adapted, arriving in a one piece with goggles ready. I didn’t wear a swim cap, but if I ever do go out to buy one it will say, “Team Haley” just to show off how seriously I take myself.

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