The Giving Pool

It is an aged pool, nestled like an abandoned and neglected bird’s nest, gently amid the expensive all-weather track, the softball field that is more often used as a football practice area, and a recently constructed Fine Arts building, with an excessively high ceiling that gives the inspired student the impression that there is no limit to how far they can soar with their wings of inspiration. It is one of two competition pools in the city of Petaluma, the other being located next to a busy freeway where, pungent, eye-watering fumes from motor vehicles mix with the persistent scent of chlorine, forming an inseparable foul smelling chemical bond that is inhaled by countless athletes. It is also worth mentioning that the illustrious Olympic swimmer, Mark Spitz, trained strenuously at this pool, however, only briefly, until he was whisked away onto bigger and better things.

A recently painted banner, festooned with the vibrant, traditional school colors, purple and white, splashes out of the pool in a flamboyant arc of patriotic spirit and across the concrete wall and ostentatiously reads “Trojan’s Swimming and Diving,” however, the school has never had a diving team, and probably, never will. The only two entrances to the pool both contain low-budget security systems, bought with precious money reluctantly handed over by the school’s athletic department, to stop or at least reduce the shocking vandalism that frequently occurs. One entrance is merely wooden, and offers unending frustration when a person with numb, icy, fingers must fiddle with the indifferent lock late at night, whiles the other, being a metal gate, screeches in protest as it is dragged open across the cracked, earthquake prone, concrete ground.

Two sets of bleachers for spectators are situated on opposite sides of the pool, offering amiable parents a chance to watch their hard-working child accomplish something. The first are the original stands, constructed of wood and sheltered under an overhang, that inject enthusiastic parents with pride for their children, as well as multiple, unwanted splinters. The second are metal, and portable, which morosely face the first, and when touched, compliment the glacial temperatures to which they are exposed, without the generous cover that the first so willingly provide for spectators—human and bird alike.

The pool’s tarps, faded indigo covers that delicately drape the sleeping body of water from the cold night air, are shredded and mangled, falling to pieces as they are quickly and mercifully consumed by the growing mold, and hardly serving their original purpose to keep the pool’s temperature warm at night. They closely resemble a child’s only blanket, heaved and hauled through mud and sand, that has been used for just about every purpose one could possibly think of. The underwater pool lights are have long ago lost their original perspicuity, and are all but broken save one or two, which dimly project a musty, melancholy glow that eerily casts the pool in a dim green aurora at night. In places where bulbs have been removed, there are only dark, gaping mouths of blackness, ominously threatening to swallow anyone that dares to swim near their domain. Every morning promptly at six o’ clock, all the lights encompassing the pool spontaneously flicker off in unison, for an unknown reason, and leave the pool lighted by only the watchful face of the aging moon, assuming that the moon is not shrouded by inscrutable clouds.

During the high school season, the pool’s frequent use quadruples, while the pool is inconveniently and revoltingly still only cleaned occasionally. Trash thrown from careless students litters the bottom of the pool like a foul-scented polluted river at the turn of the industrial revolution. Trash and debris thrown by the wind clutters the encircling deck of the pool which holds the water in its cracked and wrinkled palms. Trash sucked into the drainage system amounts for constant clogging and spasmodic rises and falls in water level like an impetuous tidal system. Two dull grey trash cans can be found standing innocently upright within the circumference of the pool area, and rarely need to be emptied.

The locker rooms that lie adjacent to the pool are filthy, with floors caked in mud and fragments of grass from the football players that stampede through them like a blundering band of silverback gorillas. Most of the lights located here do not shine either, and those that do are veiled by the dark canopy of gloom that floats just beneath the ceiling, amounting to dark mornings that are accompanied with the equally dark interior of the locker room. Hours after the school has been deserted, and late into the evening, the locker rooms are jarringly uninhabited, and the lingering, putrid stench of sweat could just as easily be the odor of the deceased. Various imperious black gates divide the locker room into subdivisions, so that it feels somewhat like a ghostly jail.

The pool has acted as a shimmering and seductive watery cemetery for many years, housing a variety of deceased animals that could not escape its intriguing resemblance to a watering hole, including birds, rats, mice, large insects, and the occasional deer. It is positioned in a more rural area of Petaluma, past the ornamented, and elaborate Victorian houses, and on the brink of the farmlands and hills that once produced over fifty million dozen eggs year, and still
cradle the pool in their historically celebrated basket of glory. These hills on the West Side of Petaluma loom over the pool, forming a backdrop of pastels and a vivid canvas of majestic splendor, that absorbs the sun as it initiates its brisk decent behind large mounds dotted with old houses and conquered by precipitous streets.

-Dylan