Waterworld

Growing up with a swimming pool my parents built when I was in the fourth grade, we kids played watergames as much as yard games. Our Birthdays and Christmases provided us with a continual supply of fins, facemasks, and various flotation devices. We went through endless quantities of goggles and masks, compensating for their frequently broken straps by squishing them onto our faces and inhaling repeatedly until the suction pressure held it in place. The residual headaches and red marks on our foreheads were a small price to pay for razor sharp underwater vision. Swim fins were a must for our pool length races, enabling us to fly back and forth with lightening speed. Full of initiative like our do-it-yourself Dad, we became aqua-engineers, building floating structures out of stacked innertubes and Styrofoam paddle boards so that we could swim around in secret, peeking out of slits between the tubes while immune from water gun attacks. We piled up tubes at the steps on the shallow end, roofing them with upturned wading pools and deflated rafts to make aqua forts. Inspired by TV shows like Seahunt, we longed to spend our days submerged. We tested our endurance by doing as many underwater laps as we could on one breath - in case, like Lloyd Bridges, we would have to perform underwater rescues when our aqualung tubes had been slashed by the bad guys. We would kick around the pool with an inverted bucket over our head and try to submerge with it as if in a diving bell, an exhausting endeavor later replaced with the technique of sitting on it to keep it submerged and taking turns diving under to get a breath from the air trapped inside. Mom was given a metal ornamental frog as a garden sculpture – whose weight, when gripped tightly, made it an excellent device for a quick drop down to the bottom of the deep end for a meditative moment. These underwater activities led to numerous ear infections and much of the time I remember being in the pool protected with cotton, ear plugs, and a stiff rubber bathing cap - which kept out the water as well as much of the sound. After each swim, I learned to shake my head sideways with a NO NO NO NO on each side, hearing the sound of liquid inside slosh back and forth until I could feel the trickle of warm water finding its way out. Eardrops were dispensed daily - I can still hear my Mom timing each side after a dropperful with “one, two, button my shoe …three, four, shut the door… all the way to nineteen, twenty – that’s aplenty”. She stuffed cotton wads in afterwards to keep the medicine inside as I slept – a dry land treatment that shut out the sounds of my busy home much like my waterworld sojourns. My submerged activities were a constant source of enjoyment and even now I thrill with the freedom of a comic book Aquaman, undulating underwater with a dolphin kick and arms stretched out in front as if in liquid flight. The world above becomes less real and I return to those childhood bottom of the deep end moments with the frog, looking up at the rippling surface and wondering what strange land is that above me.