The Swimming Pool

Normally I like to walk to the pool. It's less than two miles through the woods, mostly, and I like seeing the sky snared by tree branches overhead while feeling hard pavement under my feet. But the weather these past two weeks of September has been rainy, and though now the clouds have parted and the day has turned sunny and bright, at nine o'clock this morning, through the fog, I couldn't see the blue bridge outside my window, and the weather report said showers, so I drove.

I like swimming in the rain. I also prefer to swim in the morning, when it's cool and quiet. I get up at six or seven, spend a few hours at the computer, and then, when my brain starts to get blurry, I put my body to work. Even in August, at the height of the season, usually no one is at the pool before noon.

It's not that I don't like people; I do. But for me swimming has always been a private experience. When I swim, it's as if the water and I are having a private conversation, or engaging in that other type of intercourse, something not to be shared with spectators.

I park my car on the edge of the small paved road that leads to an enclave of well-to-do homes named for the stream that courses mainly underground* between them. Once upon a time the pool belonged to one of these homes, the biggest of them, a Hudson River gothic with carved stone gargoyles guarding its mansard roof. Twenty years ago the aging couple who owned it decided the upkeep was too much, so they cut a deal with the community, who formed a private pool club, which now accepts outsiders.

There are no posted hours. A combination lock lets me in whenever I choose. I can swim at six in the morning, or at midnight. With my gear in a bag slung over my shoulder, I give the hasp a jerk, let the chain fall and let myself in.

It's an old-fashioned cement pool: no glittering blue ceramic tiles, no fancy mosaics or aqua bottom, just rough concrete poured sometime during Prohibition, with two holes and a streak of rust where there used to be a diving board. Though cordoned off by a chain-link fence topped with spools of barbed wire, you can barely see the fence, the ivy has grown so thick, as have the hedges and trees, including the mulberry tree swinging high overhead, a tree whose small hairy fruits plop in the water from June through July with a patter like rain: berries that, bleached by the chlorinated water, turn white as grubs. The earthworms that come out at night to drink the chlorinated water turn the same sickly white after they die and drown; they look like tapeworms at the bottom of the pool. I've seen all types of dead things in that water, from mice trapped in the filter baskets to a drowned raccoon floating with its mask facedown over the deep end. I don't mind. Dead things are part of life. I skim them out with the long-handled strainer and toss their corpses in the garbage pail. One must learn to live with the dead.

But I like anything natural that has to do with the water, that tries to turn the pool into a pond. Where I grew up, in Connecticut, I always swam in lakes and ponds. I swam with fish and snakes and snapping turtles; with algae, weeds, and silt; with the waste products of woodland creatures, of deer, birds, skunks, possum, ducks, and geese. Not once did I ever think of germs. I took it for granted that I was as foreign to the water as anything—more, that nothing dirtier than me had swum in it. And maybe it was this attitude that spared me, but I never got an ear or an eye or a throat infection. Never.

Once, a family of mallards took up residence in our pool, a...