There are times in your life that disappear into the over-cooked chowder pot of experiences where the details mesh and blend into statements like, "I've done that before, but don't ask me any specifics." There are also events in your life that are so crisp and clear in your memory it's like you can smell the over-chlorinated pool of an over-crowded campground whenever your memory is jogged. Today, I smell the pool.
I was lucky enough to have the childhood of many kids' dreams. Like many kids, I didn't fully appreciate that at the time but it is coming to me. One of the things that made my childhood special was that my parents, along with another family, bought a camper to share. If campers were allowed this classification it would have been called "a hoopty." It smelled funny, it creaked and groaned (when it stood still), it was held together with copious amounts of duct tape (literally), and it was a magic carpet that took our family to some of my most vivid memories. It slept 5, exactly. And that meant one person on the floor. Heaven help you if you were the person at the back of the camper and woke up needing to go to the bathroom at the front. On the floor, you learned rather quickly how to sleep pressed over to one side. And I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self to never complain about anything in that wonderful vehicle (except for the 'Night of a Million Mosquitoes' in West Memphis...nobody should be required to live through that).
As we traveled from state to state on my dad's generous amount of vacation time, we kids had two criteria for where we would pull into camp. "Do they have pinball machines?" (yes, I am that old), and "Do they have a pool?" An answer of "no and no" rarely swayed the decision to keep looking, but we had to ask. On this occasion the answer was blessedly, yes!
In thinking about this campsite I cannot remember where we were but from all the clues I have I would guess that it was somewhere in Arizona near the Grand Canyon. It was hot. No, I mean it was thirty eight feet from the sun hot! It was packed. That rarely happened except near the larger tourist destinations. And it was like an oasis where everyone gathered at the watering hole. I had never seen this many people in a swimming pool before. It was like a movie in two respects, the sheer overwhelming crowd and the fact that I saw something happen in slow motion.
I had been trained by my ever-helpful mom to keep an eye on things. If you see a kid at the fair who is walking slowly, looking from side to side, and on the verge of tears...try to find his mom. If someone on a field trip looked like they didn't have anything to eat for lunch...give them some of yours. If someone in a crowded pool appears to be having trouble swimming or even staying above water...well, we never got to that lesson. Too bad, because that was what was playing out in front of me.
I was in the water with what seemed like a hundred people and I saw a little boy slapping the top of the water and looking as if he didn't want his mommy as much as he wanted air. I was about twenty five feet from this poor kid who, according to every after-school-special on water safety I had ever seen, was about to drown. I looked around. There were at least eight people more qualified than me (otherwise known as adults) within arm's reach of this boy and to my horror and surprise, nobody was doing anything. I don't know if they didn't notice or didn't think he was in trouble but for them, life was just going on as normal. I thought about calling out, "Hey! Is that kid in trouble?!" But I didn't think anyone would have heard me because of the sheer number of people, along with the fact that I was a kid and was used to not being heard by random grown-ups.
I decided to act! I grabbed that red torpedo shaped thing! Put the rope around my well muscled and tanned neck and hairy chest! Pamela Anderson gave me a kiss on the cheek for good luck! I dove in...oh wait, that was a TV show...about fifteen years in the future.
What I did do was scoot my moderately overweight and white t-shirted body over to the boy. It wasn't easy. I had to move around a great number of people. It was like trying to get through a crowd of people to the front row of a parade. I was just tall enough to tip-toe hop above the water level and I finally made it over to the still struggling kid. It felt like, and reading about it feels like I'm sure, it took ten minutes for all of this to occur. In reality, it couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty seconds. When I finally got there my plan... hah! I had no plan... was to say, "Are you ok?" In the back of my mind I was thinking that this kid may just be really animated and I am going to feel stupid when he just swims away, doing the breast stroke. But I wanted to be sure. What really happened was, I got close to him and reached out to tap him.
When he felt my hand...let me pause here to say that I have seen some fast things in my life. I saw Gene Wilder, through movie magic, out-draw everyone in Blazing Saddles. I have seen a rocket car go speeding down the drag strip at the now extinct Baylands Raceway and blast through the hay bales at the end. Just yesterday I watched my son's very hungry snake grab a mouse before I could even say, "How is he going to..." When this boy felt my hand he crawled up my arm and wrapped his arms around my neck, and his legs around my body faster than any of those. I had my own version of the alien that jumped out of the egg and grabbed that guy's face (again, from the future). He was locked on. I understood perfectly why 'they' say, "Don't grab onto someone who is drowning. They will take you with them." Luckily I could still hop stand to stay about the water. He was breathing heavily. He was wild eyed. He was about half my age. He was about a quarter my size. And unlike me and my turn red...peel...turn red again skin, he looked as darkly tanned as anyone I had ever seen. He looked like he spent every waking moment in the water. Today just wasn't his day.
I hop stepped him over to the side of the pool, and when we got there he released his death grip on my neck and grabbed the side to lift himself out. He gave me a look that was kind of like 'thank you' but he never said a word. He disappeared into a crowd, arms hanging down but bent away from his body as if he had just been splashed by mud and didn't want to get it on himself. And I never saw him again.
Over the years I have thought that I should have told his mom what had just happened. I was sure he would tell. I've thought. I should have made sure he was ok. At the time I figured that he was running in the opposite direction of the pool so he was safe from the water. In times when I have been down on myself for not having accomplished as much as I would have liked by that point in my life, I have even thought that it didn't really happen, it's just a phantom memory. No way. If I had any artistic ability at all I could paint a picture of this little tanned boy and the panicked look on his face. It is as real to me as any other life changing event, and I was just reminded of it this morning. I have never written about this and I don't talk about it much. I didn't even tell my parents that it had happened.
I have often wondered what happened to that little guy. He was just small enough to forget it as he got older but just big enough to remember it forever. If you are that kid, from the crowded pool way back when, and you want to shake my hand and say, "thanks" I will gladly accept, and call it even. I hope you have had a great life. Until then, I will be over here watching my own kids as they play in the pool.
Playing with words is fun. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do writing them!
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