The great and perhaps only advantage of riding the Long Island Railroad is that it allows us to relax and enjoy the scenery. The landscape doesn’t rush by in a blur, as it does when you travel on the French TGV or the Japanese Bullet Train. The LIRR train jogs sedately at the speed of a horse and carriage, so passengers can appreciate the passing show.
It’s a social and perhaps even a sociological experience because the track passes by hundreds of backyards, offering a peep show into other people’s lives. It’s surprising to see how many houses have pools: big and small, above ground and in-ground, square, round and curved pools, now looking rather sad on a chilly September morning. Even if a few warm days still lie ahead, those pools are yesterday’s news. Halloween witches have already appeared in the supermarket, and the Christmas catalogs began arriving in August. The first snowstorm can’t be far away. But what do you do with a pool in winter? You can’t hide it away in the garage like a barbecue, or put it out for garbage collection like a broken lawn chair.
Most pools lie unused most of the time, even in the best summer. Here in the Northeast, a pool is an optimistic investment, although this may change with global warming. In all the times I’ve traveled up and down that line, I can’t remember ever seeing anyone in any of those pools. You can hear when your neighbors’ pools are in action. The shouts and screams are unlike any other sounds uttered by suburbanites in everyday life. But you probably hear them on only three or four hot weekends every season. It would make more economic sense for a street or a subdivision to share one big pool. But that would be communism. Some hardy souls, who hate to waste a good investment, keep their outdoor pools running into October, and even into November. We can sometimes hear their shrieks of joy, which could almost be mistaken for shrieks of agony, when they plunge into the frigid water.
But all good things must come to an end, and a pool cannot just be ignored when winter comes. It must be expensively “closed.” This is a huge operation, comparable to mothballing a Boeing 747. Closing must be done at exactly the right moment: too early, and you get algae bloom in spring; too late, and you get a pool full of dead leaves. All the water must be drained out, of course, typically four or five thousand gallons, and you have to wonder what happens to all that chemical-rich water. Then elaborate rituals of purification must be carried out, with chlorine and algicide, ending with the installation of a cover strong enough to prevent large but clumsy visitors from falling into the empty hole. One advertisement in a local paper shows a baby elephant standing on the pool cover, which may be exaggeration, but it makes the point.
Closing the pool must be a dispiriting as well as an expensive process for the owners. But perhaps backyard pools are more symbolic than practical. Even the closed pool, its tarpaulin weighed down with rainwater and leaves, is a harbinger of hope, like the Michaelmas Feast day tomorrow, or bulbs planted in October, or spring fashions in December, or the darkness just before the dawn. Summer will come again. The pool guarantees it.
