In one of my favorite episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the gang is experiencing a heat wave in Philly and sets out to find a pool. Long story short, Mac and Charlie end up trapped in the bottom of an abandoned pool while Dee and Dennis get kicked out of a country club and end up at the public pool with Frank, who has bartered a bite of his hot dog in exchange for borrowing a stranger's towel.
Everyone is wearing sneakers in the water because there are shards of glass on the bottom of the pool. Frank throws a greased watermelon into the pool for everyone to play with. They all end up crashing the country club at the end anyway. The whole episode is chaos, as usual, but it could only have been written by people who know the ecstasy of jumping into a cold pool on a hot day.
I've been to the pool more this summer than probably any other. I left my job in April, so I've had a lot of free time, but also no income, and the pool is an ideal affordable activity. If you scheme the system correctly, a pool pass is $15 per person for the whole summer. I can't afford to travel, but the pool is always there. On any given day, I may feel defeated from chiseling away in the job-hunting mines, but at least I can go to the pool.
I loved the pool growing up, and then I didn't go to the pool at all for a long time, and then I started going as an adult and remembered there is nothing better than the pool. So blue and, on a good day, so clear. If I were a musician I would write a song about the feeling when your skin hits the cold water after suffocating in the heat.
Even though I took swimming lessons as a kid, I was never a good swimmer, but I still loved the pool. I knew a lot of people who were on some sort of swim team or were super into the identity of the local pool they belonged to. I never had any of that; I didn't want to be in a community of competitive swimmers and I didn't even want to swim as exercise, I just liked the feeling of being in the water.
Best snacks to eat at the pool: watermelon, cucumbers with lime and salt, potato chips, pretzels, deli sandwich, blueberries, Spindrift, San Pellegrino soda, Nerds Gummy Clusters, Coca-Cola, hot dogs, Goldfish
I felt weird going to the pool as a teenager and young adult because that's the number one time to feel insane about your body. I was underweight and very skinny growing up, which meant people felt they had leeway to comment on my body (but interestingly, never compliment). Our culture is so vicious towards the flesh of others, so I think most people feel at least a little uncomfortable in a bathing suit. (Unless you're on Love Island and have to wear a bathing suit for 12 hours every day.)
The pool is a place that can make you more aware of your body than you've ever been, but with a public pool, you can at least take solace in the fact that every type of body that could exist is there, and it’s not governed by wealth or the beauty standards that come along with a gym that costs $200 a month. Every genre of person ends up at the public pool when it's hot enough.
Of course the downside of the public pool is that anyone can go there. In a small city like Pittsburgh, that is risky business. I run into friends at the pool, sure, but I also see people I had two classes with in college, former coworkers I don't like, a friend's ex, etc. You don't know the chill I got when I found out that a former therapist went to the same pool as I did. And running into these people while sopping wet in what is basically underwear? This is one of several reasons a hat and sunglasses are essential at the pool.
Best things to read at the pool: Agatha Christie books, romance novels, salacious celebrity memoirs, magazines (because they can get sunscreen and pool juice on them), James Patterson books (boys), books from a little free library, paperbacks, long New Yorker articles
All pools are different, so I suppose I should tell you my pool of choice, the Highland Park public pool. I live in Highland Park, so it's the closest pool to me, but it's also the largest pool in the city, and has an abundance of flat grass to settle on. It's set in the basin of Highland Park, which means it has a backdrop of trees and hills. It sits next to Carnegie Lake — which is really a man-made pond — where people fish and ducks congregate. It's across the street from the dog park. The pool doesn't sell food but people set up stands outside of it to sell hot dogs, nachos, ice cream, and lemonade. On its best days, it's the most idyllic place you could be on a July afternoon.
Best activities to do at the pool, other than swimming: Doing handstands, being the judge in a handstand contest, doing flips and spins, reading, eating snacks, being stoned, playing cards, gossiping, eavesdropping, lying flat on the ground
I suppose I should also tell you that sometimes, the area around the pond is overrun with migrating geese, which also means it's overrun with goose poop. The pool is located close enough to a Pittsburgh Police shooting range that you can regularly hear gunshots ringing through the park (I can hear them from my house, too). Sometimes they close the deep end of the pool because it's so murky that the lifeguards can't see the bottom (they don't explain what makes it murky). A few years ago there was gunfire outside the pool during a fight (no one was injured). This year they instituted a new rule a few weeks into the pool's opening that anyone under 16 has to be accompanied by an adult. When I went to the pool on its opening day this year, two teenagers got into a physical fight.
Highland Park Pool first opened on Aug. 4, 1931, and on its inaugural day of swimming, several white swimmers beat several Black swimmers trying to enter the pool, and as David S. Rotenstein wrote in a recent history of the pool's racist violence, "Though the city didn’t openly bar Black swimmers from public pools, it did little to prevent others from blocking them." According to Rotenstein, the same type of racial violence occurred repeatedly at the pool that year. The pool wasn't legally desegregated until the 1950s.
I didn't know the history of the Highland Park Pool until I read Rotenstein's article a few months ago, though I did know about the general history of pool racism, which you can read a good history of in this piece by Jennifer D. Roberts that refers to it as "blue space racism." Most swimmers at the Highland Park Pool probably don't know its history either, certainly not the white ones. It's difficult to find places of recreation in this country that weren't also once the spot of some horror. National Parks only came to be because of violent evictions of Indigenous people. I don't know the best way to square the past with the present in this kind of scenario, but it certainly isn't to pretend it never happened.
I always say that my goal in life is not to own a house with a pool but to know someone with a pool. It’s the ultimate fantasy, going to a pool where there are no splashing children and a clean bathroom and inflatables are allowed. It feels like a far-off dream for an alternate timeline with a different economy. I have a few friends that own houses, but with set ups more elaborate than a kiddie pool. My sister’s best friend has a pool, but that’s in Los Angeles where pools are a dime a dozen.
All summer I’ve been stalked by ads for Swimply, a service that is like Airbnb but just for pools. It’s a good idea in theory because many people with pools probably let them sit idle all year. In practice, I have so many questions. Are the homeowners there when you use the pool and if so are they just watching you flop around like a dolphin from their bedroom window? Do you walk through their house sopping wet to use the bathroom?
Maybe I’ll never get to a place where I have a close friend or modest acquaintance with a pool where I could lay on a novelty floaty. I’m in a period of my life where I feel a bit directionless: one or both members of my household has been unemployed since October, my savings are shrinking, and I sporadically browse Craigslist to see if I can find a cheaper apartment. Maybe I’m destined to be at the public pool for my whole life, but when I think about everything I love about the public pool, that’s just fine with me.
I take it this is an outdoor pool? In Britain they're nearly all indoors. The climate isn't conducive to outdoor swimming, though there is a growing movement of people who want to assert the right to swim in outdoor locations, like the right to walk in the uncultivated parts of the countryside. You'd like one aspect of British indoor pools: they have sessions on most days for Adult Lane Swimming for people who want to improve their swimming technique and speed, and no children are allowed for that 60-120 minute session.