When foreigners fly over our suburbs for the first time, the first things they notice are all those brilliant blue patches in the midst of the trees and green lawns. Americans seem to have more, bigger and better backyard swimming pools than anyone else on the planet.
We don’t have one ourselves but we participate in the backyard pool experience as it were vicariously, because nobody uses a pool quietly. The screams and splashes carry for half a mile, and are unlike any other sounds uttered by suburban families in everyday life. So we never feel left out.
Our neighbors generally open up their pools around Memorial Day, when the weather may or may not be appropriate. Beyond this symbolic date stretches the endless summer – a total of fourteen weeks, each with a weekend attached. This is what justifies the enormous trouble and expense of a private swimming pool. Fourteen weekends of splashing and yelling are considered by some to be a bargain at any price.
I’ve been enjoying our neighbors’ pools at secondhand for years, and it seems to me that the cost-benefit analysis of a backyard pool comes down rather heavily on the side of cost. Most pools aren’t used very much, even in the best summer. A few fitness fanatics swim laps in their pools every day, but for most, the pool is active for just three or four hot weekends every season. The rest of the time it just sits there, quietly soaking up money at the rate of about fifty dollars a week for maintenance, plus electricity. When we disputed a huge electricity bill a while ago, the very first question they asked was: “Have you put in a pool?” It seems that the first experience of every new pool owner is an electric shock – not from the pumps but from the utility bills.
The pool owner’s life is a constant struggle against pollution, cloudiness, leaves, dirt, algae, reckless kids, 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's a full-time job, which is why pool maintenance is a major suburban industry.
A pool is a magnet, especially for children. I suspect that a lot of pools are installed by grandparents to lure their grandchildren, and it works. Homeowners began installing small pools as soon as the suburbs started to expand in the 1950s. A backyard pool allows the family to avoid bathing in the sea, which is a pool shared by all the peoples, nations, and industries of the world, and it also allows them to avoid the public pools, which may bring back unhappy childhood memories. My school required swimming 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. I would come back from these compulsory immersions in the public pool, stricken with hypothermia and incipient pneumonia. My mother would instantly plunge me into a nice hot bath.
Who needs a pool, when you can have a nice hot bath?
Copyright: David Bouchier
