A back yard pool is a sad sight in November. Even if a few mild days still lie ahead, the pool is yesterday’s news. The Halloween witches have already vanished from most front yards, and the lawn furniture is being packed away, but what do you do with a pool? You can’t hide it in the garage like a barbecue, or put it out for garbage collection like a broken lawn chair.
It must be a poignant moment for pool owners, especially when we have had such a lovely fall season. In fact most private pools don’t seem to be used very much, even in high summer. We can always hear when our neighbors’ pools are in action. Apart from the splashing noises, there are shouts and screams unique to pool activity, unlike any other sounds uttered by suburban homeowners in everyday life. But this happens on just a few hot weekends every season. The rest of the time the pool just sits there, quietly soaking up money at the rate of about fifty dollars a week for maintenance and electricity. It would make more sense for a street or a subdivision to share one big pool, but that would be communism.
The pool owner’s life is a constant struggle against pollution, cloudiness, dirt, green algae, dead leaves, incompetent ducks and other hazards. A sparkling pure blue pool, like perfect health, is not easy to achieve, and almost impossible to maintain. If you are going to do it right it is a full-time job, which is why pool maintenance is a major local industry.
At the end of the season a pool cannot just be ignored. It must be “closed” at just the right moment: too early and you get algae bloom in spring, too late and you get an ice rink. Closing is a huge operation, comparable to mothballing a Boeing 747. All the water has to be drained out, of course, typically four or five thousand gallons, and the lengthy closing ceremony ends with the installation of a cover, which has to be strong enough to prevent well-fed visitors falling through. One advertisement in a local paper shows a baby elephant standing on the pool cover, which may be exaggeration but it makes the point.
Like many people of my generation, I rather dislike swimming pools. Apart from the embarrassment of displaying a body that is well past its sell-by date, and watching others do the same, pools bring back some unhappy childhood memories. My school required swimming lessons once a week. Every Tuesday, winter and summer, we were driven to the unheated public pool to be half-drowned in chlorine, exposed to horrible diseases, and forced to dive from the high board into icy water.
All that has changed of course. Pools are fun now, not a form of legalized torture. Families here on Long Island began installing small pools as soon as the suburbs started to grow in the 1950s. They too probably had painful memories of public swimming pools, and a backyard pool also allows the family to avoid the beach and sea, which is a public pool shared by all the peoples, nations, and industries of the world.
When I was a kid I would come back from my weekly semi-drownings in the public pool, stricken with hypothermia and incipient pneumonia. My mother would instantly put me into a nice hot bath. When your backyard pool has been closed down, and even if it never opened, remember that there’s nothing like a nice hot bath.
Copyright: David Bouchier
