The Killer and pools that can fit in your backseat....
It’s officially pool weather. Even if you don’t have a pool.
Nobody had pools back in the day. Pools were the for the houses on the hill. Eventually we all tried one of those put-together pools that you could get at Sugerman’s, but they were so flimsy that they’d inevitably collapse when the neighborhood fat kid tried to climb into one of ‘em. You quickly learned that if a pool can fit in the back of your car, it’s not REALLY a pool. These tin cans have been replaced today with the Wal-Mart blow up pools, which can be capsized by a mere pin-prick, which they’ll tell you can be patched with a “kit” that is included, but this is merely their way of laughing at you from Arkansas. You can’t fix what you can’t find. And if every new thing you bought contained a “kit” to put it back together when you inevitably broke it, you might question whether you were buying the right stuff. If your neighbor buys one of these things on a Friday, by Sunday night it’s probably already in front of the house with the trash cans.
We had one friend who spent his summers down the shore in a summer home, which seemed impossibly exotic to guys who were swimming in muddy creeks and spraying each other with garden hoses. He’d come back to school in September all bronzed from the sun, bragging about all the girls he had to choose from, like he was Travolta getting it on with Olivia under the boardwalk. It was annoying and everybody grew to hate him, which is the risk you take when you are the only rich kid in a gang of poors.
Even if you have a pool now you’re probably still poor. Debt has become a state of mind, and so many people are out of so many fucks that if the bank wants the house back, they can take the pool too.
As I noted earlier, as kids we were forced to improvise. This usually meant packing a bunch of snacks, grabbing some towels, and finding the nearest creek or pond. You’d hope to get there before the “older kids”, otherwise you’d be shunted into a small corner. There was a pecking order, and we knew we were at the bottom of it.
These places usually had a few things in common. For one, the water was filthy. It was freezing. The rocks and ledges were incredibly dangerous. And it was illegal just to be there. But such things were worth it, because you’d get to see girls wearing short jean shorts with bikini tops.
An NEPA right of passage was making your way to the Nay Aug gorge and launching yourself off what was almost too casually called “The Killer”, a high ledge with rocks below that you had to jump beyond to reach the water. Most of the guys doing this were filled with beer (or other illegal substances) already, and it amazes me to this day that I never saw anybody die there. There were some close calls for sure, a few broken bones or split heads, but that was all. For the record, I never even had the balls to climb up there, much less jump off. So it was a rite of passage that I never passed, to my shame. But recently, every few years somebody dies up there, and rescue crews have to fish the body out of the water, and I’m reminded that common sense never really goes out of style.
The older you get the less fun hot weather gets. You go from swimming in the gorge with nubile girls to spending $8 for a single bag of pool shock and getting into brawls with the above ground pool’s solar cover. Growing up sucks.
It’s not even official summer yet. I’m not sure who chooses its first day, but that person needs to be slapped. Summer starts when school is finished…..not mere days before the absolute hell that July brings. Somebody fix this.
And so it goes. The heat will die down. Eventually. Summer is to be endured, and only knowing that what awaits its demise are the cool autumn breezes and the explosion of her colors makes it endurable.
That and a nice, preferably dirty, body of water to call your own.
In a bit…
—tf