I took my first swimming classes at the California, Missouri Country Club. My mother insisted that my sister and I learn how to swim as children. She had never learned to swim and had nightmarish memories of being thrown into the pond on the family farm by her two brothers. That pond was green and nasty, had snakes and a mucky, sticky bottom until it got too deep to touch. Even worse, she would sink below the surface and swallow gallons of water and feel her lungs filling up until her brothers dragged her out, coughing and gasping for air. After we started class, she took private lessons and finally mastered how to float and how to do the side stroke and the crawl.
Lessons at the country club took place in a chilly, overly chlorinated pool with a low and a high diving board at the deep end. We always had excuses as to why we should skip class but my mother didn’t listen to us. We arrived early on those summer mornings, before the pool opened, and had to take cold showers in the dressing area, then walk through a square metal box filled with murky, chlorinated water. By the time we reached the pool, we were freezing and clutching our little bodies with our arms. Getting in was the hard part, but once I learned to float on my back, I relaxed and grew more confident, even progressing to jumping off the high diving board.
In later summers, I took swimming classes at Girl Scout camps: Camp Pin Oak at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, then Camp Kiwani at a lake in Tennessee. At camp we wore red caps as beginners, blue for intermediate, and then white when we reached advanced.
The lake water was nasty, an opaque blue-green with layers of cold then warm water at different depths. The odor was distinctly fishy, with a little gasoline from boat traffic mixed in. Sometimes we swam through a layer of oil on the water’s surface.
We swam off a dock built on top of empty oil drums. Green mossy algae climbed up the sides of the oil drums. Getting back on the dock, we had to joist our bodies up with our scrawny girl arms, our bare legs kicking under the dock and grazing the nasty oil drums with our feet. There was one ladder but using that meant waiting, treading water, and spending more time than we wanted in the foul liquid.
Sooner or later, a cry would go up when we were out doing laps: “Snake! Snake in the water!” Snake meant a water moccasin, a poisonous slithering snake with a white mouth inside, also known as a cottonmouth.
Hearing the warning cry, we would put our heads down and do the crawl at top speed toward the dock, arms flailing, hoping to be the first so as to use the single ladder. Sometimes I chose the breast stroke; it was slower than the crawl but I could see the surface and keep an eye out for snakes.
I never saw a snake in the water, but I knew they were there. Just like a I knew that a family of rattlesnakes lived in the pile of rocks where we gathered near a water fountain built into the rocks. Just like I knew that copperheads lived under our cabins and haunted the paths to the latrine. Possibly they lived in the latrine itself and would crawl up from the filth at the bottom of the hole and bite my bare bottom while I was peeing or pooping. We had all heard stories about this happening to another camper, some other summer, although we didn’t know anyone personally that this had happened to, but the thought was ever-present during any trip to the latrine, especially at night.
Because of all the poisonous snakes in the neighborhood, our camp counselors admonished us to always wear shoes and socks. No flip flops, no sandals, no open-toed shoes of any kind. This was for protection against the fangs of any snakes that might try to bite us. I used to wonder what would happen if a snake’s fangs got caught in my sock, but luckily, I never had the occasion to find out.
At the end of each swimming class, we stood in a line on the dock, and the counselors dropped a single drop of rubbing alcohol into each ear. The liquid sputtered and slithered down the twisty ear canal, killing any microbes we might have picked up from the lake water and drying out the ear at the same time.
I jumped on one foot, then the other, with my head tilted in different directions, to get the alcohol to slide all the way down. I always felt a moment of relief from this ritual, as it marked surviving another swim class without getting bitten by a cottonmouth.
