Summer Oasis
This piece was originally published in the August-November 2019 issue of our journal, Vol. 5, Issue 2: Together.
There’s a piece of land on the north side of Jackson that looks pretty much any other open lot. It sits at the edge of town just beyond an abandoned golf course and right behind VFW Post 1848. You could walk on that open lot and never have any idea that underneath your feet lay broken pool tiles, aqua blue concrete steps, maybe a piece of an old diving board—remnants of bright summer days, now covered in dirt and twelve feet below the surface. Sunsoaked afternoons of Marco Polo and Chicken are buried without a tombstone, invisible pieces of memory smothered underground.
There were days, though, of laughter and sun and long Jolly Rancher candy sticks. There was the sound of plastic bats and cheers as bare feet rounded imaginary bases in the field behind the pool. There was splashing and diving and human cannonballs being launched from a spring-loaded plank. Sometimes, I like to imagine spectral images in a summer haze bringing those memories to life in that vacant lot. Ghosts of summers past float into my mind every so often, and I remember endless summer days at the VFW swimming pool on North Highland.
There was a Facebook fad earlier this year where a user would show how old they were be saying things like, “I am watching-Saturday-morning-cartoons years old” or “I am renting-entire-gaming-systems-at-Blockbuster years old.” The point was to show how old you were by sharing the things you enjoyed as a child. It was incredibly annoying. But I guess if I were to have participated in that fad, mine would’ve gone something like this: “I’m piling-in-the-minivan-with-neighborhood-kids-and-going-swimming-at-the-VFW-pool years old.” I grew up at a time in Jackson where public swimming pools were still a thing. There was Sun-N-Swim near Lions Field, a public pool behind T.R. White Sportsplex in East Jackson, and, of course, the VFW Post 1848 on North Highland.
Our memories are tricky devices. They deceive us even more the older we get. They construct events out of stories we hear from other people. They smooth away the actuality of certain experiences like a sanding machine wears away the rough edges of a table. They iron out the wrinkles and cut away the excess fat until we have a story that we’re able to process, whether it’s completely real or not. I can imagine my memories of the VFW are a lot like that—snapshots of summer days that neatly flow reel to reel in my brain free of annoyances like miniscule details.
Of course, I don’t remember my first visit to the VFW pool or how old I was when that happened. (If I had to guess, I would say I was close to eight or nine.) I’m not sure why my family picked the VFW over Sun-N-Swim; my assumption is that it had something to do with my grandfather being a veteran and a discount because of that.
Like landline phones and compact discs, public swimming pools have all but disappeared. The idea of a public pool in the late 1980’s is somewhat fascinating if you take the time to think about it. The kids were there to swim, but the adults who brought those kids were there to get a tan and socialize. And by socialize, I mean gossip.
I can’t tell you the number of times I would run—I mean walk briskly—to my mom’s chair and dig through her bag for a dollar and overhear the adult conversations. There are things I still remember from those conversations that I’ll take to my grave.
The pool was social media before there was social media. Parents would talk about current events and movies they’d seen and their child’s baseball game from the night before. Kids would embellish their fear of Freddy Krueger and recite Jose Canseco’s stats for the month of July. The pool was socially communal, and I don’t know that we even had a clue how important that was.
“The pool was socially communal, and I don’t know that we even had a clue how important that was.”
After rummaging through my mom’s swim bag and dripping copious amounts of water on everything, I would come away with a few wrinkled one-dollar bills that would tear if the wind blew a certain way. Then it was straight to the concession stand at the bottom of the hill where Mr. Brown would be waiting. Since time is the great pruner, the only two things I ever remember buying were Jolly Rancher sticks and Mello Yello. Nine-year-old Gabe was the picture of health. I can remember needing to drink as many Mello Yellos as possible because each can had a picture of a World Championship Wrestler on it. I would take those empty cans and stack them on the bookshelf in my room like some pretentious frat boy stacking empty cans of Natural Light.
Riding the wave of the incredible sugar rush, I would dart back to the pool for more swimming. I would dive for Star Wars figures on the bottom, gradually going deeper down the slope toward the bottom of the twelve-foot end. Touching the bottom was a rite of passage. It took me a few tries to finally make it down there. The pressure would get to me. The ear ringing would be too much. But one day I finally did it. I frog swam as hard as my skinny arms would flail, and I placed my hand on the grated drain at the bottom. It was as if I was in another world—some silent universe where gravity and sound were tempered.
I didn’t visit the bottom of the pool much more after that. My ears couldn’t handle the pressure, but I remember the night after I first touched the bottom. I was so proud of myself for doing it. I recall trying to bring it up in conversations with adults in my family without just coming out and saying, “I touched the bottom of the deep end!” Two days after my voyage to the bottom, I got a horrible ear infection. I would visit that world less and less as I grew older.
At the height of fun in the pool, there would be a sound that would cause the clouds to cover the sun—a sound so shrill that our collective hearts would sink like a pencil jump off the diving board. Two short whistles followed by a long whistle and two words that rang out like an insurrection: “ADULT SWIM!”
Adult Swim is exactly what it sounds like it is: no kids in the pool, only adults. We hated Adult Swim. The parents (mostly moms) would slowly rise from their lounge chairs and make their way gingerly down the ladder and into the shallow end. They wouldn’t even swim! Our preteen brains couldn’t understand how what they were doing was fun. They would just stand in the water and talk.
One day, as we were pouting on the edges of the lounge chairs, something changed Adult Swim forever. The lifeguards starting doing flips and dives off the diving board. We all scampered down to the deep end and sat on the edge of the pool in awe. There were frontflips and backflips and double flips and half-gainers and full-gainers. The lifeguards were everything we were not; they were the gods and goddesses of this summer universe.
Thirty years later, I can only remember three of their names: Amy, Adrian, and Bill.
Amy wore a blue bathing suit and had blonde hair, and I had a crush on her because of those two things. (It didn’t take much for a ten-year-old boy to fall in love.) I never faked drowning in order to receive mouth-to-mouth, but in retrospect that may not have been a bad idea.
Adrian was the one that I wanted to be like. He had dark hair and muscles and could do so many cool things off that diving board. I was barely able to dive with my scrawny arms and bird chest, and my favorite singer was Richard Marx. I had a long way to go to be Adrian, but that didn’t stop me from annoying the heck out of him by making requests of his skills on the diving board.
Bill was the other male lifeguard, and he also had muscles and could do all the flips. He rocked a pretty sweet mustache, too. I remember his reverse gainer and the way he could contort his body in mid-air like a trapeze swinger without the trapeze. He’s now the assistant principal at the school where I teach. I know he’s the same person he was all those years ago, but our lives back then felt like they existed on a different plane, one that doesn’t exist on this timeline.
If the lifeguards weren’t in the mood to put on a show, a group of us would make our way to the field behind the pool and set up a Wiffle ball game. We would use random objects as bases: first base may have been a flipper; second was a water mask; third base was a snorkel. Grass would stick to our wet feet while horse flies chased us around the bases. We would play until the chlorinated water on our bodies was replaced with sweat; then we knew it was time to get back in the pool.
The pool closed at 6:00 P.M. There were days when the sun was setting opposite the diving board that I would let myself sink to the bottom of the shallow end in a cannonball position and then spring up toward the surface launching my body through the surface of the water. I would repeat this process over and over and over again. I liked the feeling of being between two worlds for a few seconds—under the surface of the water and then above it and then under it and then above it. Linear time didn’t exist between those worlds. One day I would bounce between worlds for five minutes. The next day it would be forty-five minutes. They both felt like the same amount of time. That’s really what summer is, though, isn’t it? Unbounded time where days can either stretch for years or can be over in the snap of a finger.
While I don’t remember my first day at the VFW pool, I do remember my last. It was one of those late August days that was overcast and cloudy and unseasonably cool—one of those days that tricks you into thinking that fall is right around the corner. I was in eighth grade. A lot of the kids I used to see at the pool were no longer there. In fact, there were fewer kids there in general. A lot of families were beginning to get their own pools.
I was on the diving board that day when squealing tires interrupted my jump. I don’t remember hearing the aftermath of that squeal or the impact of the mistake the drivers made, but I still remember the scene in pieces. A motorcycle lay in the grass on the side of the road, a helmeted man motionless on the ground. While the lifeguards rushed to the scene, the pool patrons gradually made their way close enough to see what was happening, but far enough away to not be mortified at the result of the accident. I stood at the back of the crowd while all this was happening, shivering.
I knew that this was the last time I would be at the pool. It wasn’t because of the accident. It wasn’t because of the weather. There are times in all of our lives when we step from one section of life to another. We realize that it’s time to move forward. I had outgrown the pool. My friends had outgrown the pool. Those summer days had begun to seem not as long they used to be. Our Wiffle ball field felt just a little bit smaller. I could touch the bottom of the deep end just by diving off the board. It was time to go. The VFW pool closed for good in 2007, but it closed for me that August afternoon in 1992.
My grandparents are buried in Highland Memorial Gardens, just down the road from the VFW. A few years ago I visited their graves. Leaving the cemetery, I could see the lot where the old pool used to be. Unless you knew a pool used to be there, you would simply think that the property had always been an open lot. But I knew better. I could still see those ghosts of summer leaping off the diving board or playing ball. I could still hear the whistle blasts for Adult Swim. That’s why memories are so important; they give us a reprieve.
In his song “Atlantic City,” Bruce Springsteen sings, “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” We all long for certain parts of our past lives to be resurrected even if those memories aren’t exactly accurate. Nostalgia is a toxic drug.
That open lot behind the VFW may not be open for much longer. The ground above the remnants of that pool could be opened up once more so an entire new generation of kids can have experiences like mine and so many others. There is talk of once again having a public pool on the property of the VFW.
Like public parks and basketball courts and softball fields, public pools have played an important and understated role in our community. Let’s hope the VFW can find the funds to once again enhance summers for another generation of families and kids who will all have their own stories to tell one day about their summers in the pool.
The VFW Post 1848 is located at 3803 Highway 45 North. To learn more about it and to inquire about fundraising for a pool, visit their Facebook page or call them at 731.668.0951.
Gabe Hart is an English and Language Arts teacher at Northeast Middle School. He was born and raised in Jackson, graduating from Jackson Central-Merry in 1997 and Union University in 2001. Gabe enjoys spending time and traveling with his daughter, Jordan, who is eight years old. His hobbies include reading, writing, and playing sports . . . even though he’s getting too old for the last one. Gabe lives in Midtown Jackson and has a desire to see all of Jackson grow together.
