The Day Summer Died

Okay, a little dramatic, but I felt a lot worse than that just a few days ago. Now I'm just resigned to it. After years (probably decades) of just barely hanging on from one summer to the next, our little Red Oaks swim club has finally succumbed and will not open this summer. This was a sweet, simple little club that opened in the '50s or the '60s at the latest, and hadn't been updated much since then. It was a long drive up a dirt road to a dirt and grass parking lot, and then you had to walk down a narrow path through the woods to the club -- not the way people do things these days. There were three pools -- one big one with a general swim area, lap lanes, and a big diving area that had a diving board until a couple of years ago when the economy collapsed and insurance companies tightened things up. There was a middle sized pool, smaller but often warmer. And there was the baby pool, a foot and a half deep with an island out in the middle and signs warning that "Diapers Must Be Worn!" I can't say the girls learned to swim here, because mostly that happened at the Albany Y in the winters, but we've been members since Rebekah was born and have spent the past several summers enjoying evenings at Red Oaks, splashing in the pools for a couple of hours, having a picnic supper, and generally enjoying the summer evenings in the out of doors without a worry. For less than the price of a summer's worth of pool chemicals, we had a lovely escape just 10 minutes down the road and at least 5 degrees cooler up in the hills.

We held Bekah's birthday parties there. We ordered pizza. I joined the girls after work on dozens of nights.We had watergun fights and played basketball. We got stung by wasps and threw waterballs and giggled a lot. The air was always filled with the cries of "Marco! Polo!" When the sun started to get low behind the tall trees, we'd switch to the lower pool and try to stretch the evening a little longer. Then we'd drive home with wet bottoms.

The place had been threatened by the value of its many acres for years, and of course in our modern America a swimming pool is within the credit limit of the most modest of homeowners, and we don't like to share, so the natural constituency for such a place is fairly small. But for those of us who aren't even slightly interested in putting in the space, money and work that a pool requires, this was paradise, and it was a place to go to, a destination, something to do on long summer evenings. Membership kept dropping, and last summer it was too rainy early on and they just didn't get enough members, and apparently that was it. Generations grew up with this simple little place, and I'm sad for my children that I can't give them someplace like that anymore. I've put up a couple of photos from several years back at my Fotolog, but it's hard to convey the place and I never took a lot of pictures there because it was just a place to be. But yes, that is a giant green concrete dinosaur. There was a pink castle that was perfect for watergun fights, too. All lost to us now. Honestly, I couldn't be sadder if someone had died. What will we do for summer now?