Life in the Valley 2

Life in the Valley-2

Langdale Pool-Learning to swim

My mind goes back to walking up to the back of my grandparent’s property, trees behind the area they kept mowed were heavily laden with Kudzu and Sumac. We carried our towels and wore our bathing suits and flip flops and covered up in an old shirt and shorts.

 My clown of a cousin, Greg, myself and my older sister, Donna, pushed onward to the paved back road and up a steep hill where we had made a path past a giant oak tree.  We picked up acorns and watched squirrels scamper up the tree when they saw us coming. We moved along the path up to another paved road taking a short cut past the big house the Overseer’s lived in. They were the rich people lived and we loved to imagine what they looked like inside and how they lived.

There was talk around town that one of them had a secret room that was walled up and inside it had toys of a child that had died.  Making our way hurriedly passed the houses Greg made up stories about the house on the end being haunted with the ghost of that child. We were all uneasy when we passed by and laughed nervously

 It seemed like a long walk at our ages and it seemed like it took forever when in fact it probably only took us 15 minutes to get there.  We made our way down the hill and wound past more houses past Overseer’s Row.  To our right you could see the white picketed fence of the little white building of Langdale kindergarten with its ducks marching across all in a row and across the street was Langdale Elementary. Behind the kindergarten was Langdale Pool. 

Entrance to the pool only cost us 10 cents a day. It opened at 12 noon and we were always on time.  The Langdale Mill company constructed the pool, recreation areas, the schools ,a” Picture Show” and  contributed  to many businesses and churches for the residents of Langdale. 

The pool itself was not that big.  It had one diving board, no high dives, and a shallow end and cement walking pads all around. It had a bath house where we kept our street clothes in a wire basket with a number on it. We got a steel Safety pin with the same number on it to attach to our swim suits, so we could retrieve our belongings when we headed home. 

 The lounge chairs were the aluminum kind that had woven webbing on them but we just spread our towels out on the hot cement if we wanted to sit or lay down.  There was no concession stand but they did have coke cola and snack machines.  We usually ate lunch before we left for the pool.  Before we left someone would holler at us, Ya’ll be careful, you’ll get a cramp if you go in the water too soon after you eat.”  It didn’t take an hour for us to get to the pool by foot and we got in as soon as we got there.  To my knowledge we never got a cramp.

On any given day we played in the pool turning upside down in the eater with our feet up in the air.  We did somersaults, tried to do synchronized swimming and occasionally played “Piggy Back” and “Chicken -Rooster”.

 In the game of “Chicken-Rooster” you had to have at least three players but we had the “Mark Twain” effect on all the kids at the pool and everybody wanted to play.  The person who was the Rooster started out with an object that would float.  They got to take it to the bottom of the pool and release it but not without swimming around all over the place to confuse “the chickens” standing around the deep end waiting for it to surface.  When the object surfaced the first player to see it yelled “Chicken- Rooster” and jumped in after it.  Chaos ensued as everyone jumped in as well. The first one to capture it got to be the “Rooster” and hide the object next. 

 We played for hours and hardly knew where the time went when the Langdale Mill whistle blew for the day shift to be over at 4 pm.  And our pool day was over.  We filed in to the bath houses and got our things, put a shirt on and wrapped a towel around us to catch the water dripping off our bathing suits.

Once again, we rushed past the Overseer’s homes as we shared ghost stories and our day at the pool.  Our waterlogged fingers and toes and sun drenched bodies began to succumb to the fatigue of the hours we had spent in the pool. The walk going home was much longer than the one getting us there.  Arriving at my grandparent’s house I could smell the ham and boiled potatoes cooking on the stove. I looked forward to a pone of cornbread slathered in butter, the ham and potatoes and some English peas mixed in just before serving. One of my favorite meals.

It would be another hour until Papo would arrive from the Mill and then we could all eat together.  Coming in off the back porch we grabbed a small green bottle of coke cola pulled the aluminum ice trays out of the refrigerator and broke the ice cubes out of the trays.   We snapped off the lids and poured glasses full with the caramel colored foam and sweet stinging black beverage as we crowded around the kitchen table with a jar of Jiffy peanut butter a box of vanilla wafers and made ourselves a sandwich of about 10-15 of those cookies. It did not spoil our supper in any way. The next day we made our way back to Langdale Pool for another day of the same. 

I was about 5 when I learned to swim. Short for my age, I was given the name “Little Bit” by the pool staff. When I edged close to the deep end from time to time I was very unsure of myself and feared that I would not be able to get back by myself.  My big sister, Donna, got irritated with me asking her for “piggy back rides” She dutifully carried me on her back and then with an evil grin, drop me off near the rope going into the deep end, so I would have to struggle to get back to the shallow area. She let me know she was tired of babysitting.

My daddy grew up in Langdale and went to school there.  One of his summer jobs was working as a life guard at the pool. So, when it was time for me to learn how to swim, he saw to it that I learned how.

He knew if we were going to spend our summers at the Langdale pool we were going to have to learn to swim and he intended to teach me.

 I remember him telling me before we left Papo’s and Granny’s, “Today, I’m coming to the pool to teach you how to swim”. I truly didn’t know what that meant, except that I would be able to jump off the diving board and hang out in the deep end. We played in the water all afternoon until about an hour before it closed he and my mother showed up.  The staff knew daddy, so they just waved him in.

Daddy got in his swimming trunks in the bath house and took me over to the deep end beside the diving board.  He said” Now, you have been watching everyone move their arms and kick their legs when they jump in the pool.  That is what I want you to do, and I’m going to help you”.

I protested, “But Daddy, I don’t know how”.  He smiled and said, “That’s why I’m here.  I want you to get on the board and jump off and when you hit the water I want you to move your arms back and forth one at a time like you are slicing them through the water and kick your legs together back and forth  like a fish and see if you can get back to the side of the pool.

 With my eyes wide, I put my hands on my hips and screamed, “No, I’m too scared!”.  In his gentle coaxing, he convinced me he would be right by my side and told me, “If you want to keep coming to the pool, you need to know how to swim in the deep end.  You have to get over your fear of getting in the deep water.”  I trusted my daddy, so I shook my head as my body shook along with the fear that gripped me.  He helped me on the board and the other kids stepped aside as the yelled and screamed and cheered me on to “Jump”.

  I inched to the end of the board and he gently said, “Go ahead, jump…I will catch you.” He slipped into the water at the end of the board and held out his arms to me.  He counted,”1-2-3, jump!”.  I closed my eyes and took a flying leap and splashed into the water.  No floaties, no life preserver, just my Daddy’s strong arms to catch me.

Daddy quickly held me up and said, “kick!” I practiced with pride the arm strokes and leg moves as my mother and others cheered me on. I rounded back to the board end of the pool and headed up the ladder.  The feeling was exhilarating.  It was as if you were flying when you jumped off the board and I felt confident that I could do it again.  Still shaking, I hopped up on the board and told daddy, “Let’s do it again”.  For about an hour he worked at teaching me to jump and swim.  I loved the attention with him.

  In todays world mothers everywhere use their smart phone to capture moments like this but in my world cell phones would not be invented for another 50 to 60 years.  So, this memory was etched in our minds by my mother and daddy retelling it to my Papo and Granny when I got back to their home.

  Of course, I was the best new swimmer there ever was and my daddy bragged to his father how I swam across the deep end doing the crawl and the breaststroke.  I was so proud of myself that day that I never looked back to the shallow end.  I had learned to swim.