This was supposed to be a love letter. An exaltation. A fanfare for the public pool. I’d call upon the muses, pray they sing of the high dive and the snack bar. The smell of sunblock and laundered towel and chlorinated water evaporating on hot macadam. Of the gutter and the lap lane; the wet sandal’s “thock,” and the belly flop’s “smack.”
And this was to be a recitation of its virtues on Independence Day, no less. With neither irony nor pollyanna in mind but rather, to go armed with the sobering knowledge of the country’s fraught past and its perilous moment and still partake of the Republic’s finest achievements: encased meats, cheap suds, and the public pool.
Pools make people more legible. People’s needs and desires become harder to repress. There’s the child, so excited by the prospect of a swim, that she cannot help but run across the pool deck, lifeguard’s whistle be damned. And the teenager who, on surfacing from a plunge, cannot suppress that vain little flick of his head. The parents desperate for a place where their adolescent children can while away a few hours. And the lizard need, across ages, just to get some sun. It’s all there, right on the surface, at the pool.
So given all that, there was something…unnerving happening at the pool that day. Or, more precisely, happening on the pool’s stereo. There’s no PA system at the Samford Pool. Instead, they have one of those rolly suitcase amps hooked up to someone’s phone. The pool’s small enough — 25 by 50 yards, roughly — that a single rolly suitcase amp can reach the far end of the grounds, no problem. And songs on the stereo that day, the nation’s 246th birthday, well, they certainly had a sense of moment to them.
While I rolled out my towel, Lee Brice was singing about driving a dead brother’s truck. “I roll every window down / And I burn up every back road in this town / I find a field, I tear it up til all the pain's a cloud of dust / Yes, sometimes, I drive your truck.” A bit maudlin for the occasion but it sounds like the brother died in service. So, condolences. Tree of liberty, etc., etc.
But before I’d finished putting on sunblock, Blake Shelton was singing about how whistling Dixie would get you heaven-bound and promising that “I don't care what my headstone reads / Or what kind of pinewood box I end up in / When it's my time, lay me six feet deep / In God's country.” Which, I mean, c’mon dude. Inane but also just a bummer.
Okay, but here was Miranda Lambert to lighten the mood, maybe? Not so: “Whether you're late for church / Or you're stuck in jail / Hey, word's gonna get around / Everybody dies famous in a small town.”
Pretty bleak. Isn’t today supposed to be a happy day? Or if you let the algorithm play long enough does it always land in a death wish? I looked around, a little confused, hoping to catch the eye of someone similarly put off. Slow day at the pool, though. Slow enough that the off-duty lifeguards had set up a basketball hoop and were shooting jumpers off the diving board. They seemed unfazed by the tunes. Inoculated, maybe. I hope not.
Maybe you’re hearing this and thinking to yourself, “Oh please. Spare me the pointy-headed writer being annoying about country music.” But I love country music. And not just those Terry Allen and Gene Clark re-issues, either. I’ve tried to play music for almost twenty years now and the closest I’ve ever come to entertaining anyone was with a rendition of Toby Keith’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” at karaoke night in an SEC college town. But this alienated, atomized, only-finding-meaning-in-consumer-goods-and-death country? I mean, to quote Greil Marcus: “What is this shit?”
But the songs kept playing.
Now, you’re going to think I invented this next song but you’d be flattering my imagination. Every verse of this song is from the perspective of a dead soldier from a different war. But that’s not all. Then — I kid you not — there’s a coda with this whole chorus of the undead singing, “Set our spirits free (set us free) / Let us lay down our guns / Sweet mother Mary, we're so tired / But we can't come home ‘til the last shot's fired.”
At this point, I would have gladly listened to “Proud to be an American.” On repeat. I would have even considered letting Lee Greenwood give me a lobotomy. I mean, we live in a society, don’t we? Might we hope for better? What irrepressible thing was the pool revealing today on the rolly suitcase speaker? That we might only hope for death.
No, but wait. Here was Zac Brown. Zac Brown, with a voice like James Taylor. He might show us a way to reclaim some civic pride even at this late hour of our democracy. Zac, you show us the way, won’t you? And, lo, Zac replied: “Salute the ones who died / The ones who give their lives / so we don’t have to sacrifice / All the things we love / like our chicken fried.”
I went to the pool to indulge in some Americana. Maybe I was naive to expect anything less.
Still, this soundtrack to a small town death wish felt like a betrayal. Not just of country music — which, at this best, celebrates and ironizes rural life with a kind of pathos and wit not at all in evidence that day — but, more to the point, a betrayal of the Samford Pool. Which is to say it felt like a betrayal of public life. Of even the possibility of public life. The Samford Pool is run by the city and it sits right behind the public junior high school. Which really makes it the hub of public life in Auburn (such as it is). It’s the most integrated place, by class and race, in this southern town. It’s cheap to get in. It’s well maintained. Its only shortcoming, really, is a lack of shade. At its best, it embodies the democratic enterprise — the idea that we might be more than consumers and candidates for the reaper, but citizens, too. That we might collectively endeavor to improve our lives by, in this case, providing a place for children to run on the pool deck, for teenagers to flick their heads, and for us all to get some sun.
And part of the premise of this swimming project is to go out beyond my door and find something vitalizing. So on the Fourth, I wanted to get my Walt Whitman on, and find that vitality in the public sphere. I wanted to find a meaning that came somewhere other than the specter of death.
Matthew Sitman touches on this idea in a recent essay calling for renewed civic culture. Sitman looks to the New Deal for instruction: “Franklin Roosevelt and his administration understood that despair could be countered and democracy fortified by a kind of social infrastructure…They built theaters and public pools and commissioned murals to beautify public spaces…They were also public goods that brought people together, and were ways of making communities easier to feel a part of and entertainment and culture enjoyable for more than the rich.”
And, on the flip side, we might read the closing of so many public pools in response to the gains of the civil rights movement as a tacit understanding by conservatives of the democratic power of the space.
So, all to say, I had harbored a small hope that, even in this eleventh hour, the muses might sing of something other than the inevitability of our demise.
But if only I would wrest my attention away from the music, they were doing exactly that, all around. Singing of gainers off the diving board, of shoulder tans turning the corner into sunburns, of my own daughter holding tight to a pool noodle and flailing her legs in something beginning to approximate a flutter kick. More people had arrived, the deck chairs filled, a hive hum of the group fortifying the air against the rolly suitcase amp.
A counter-melody to the algorithm, singing that for whatever its worth, for as long as there remains a collective will and the water to fill it, there is the public pool. Sing o muse.
Before we left that day, I needed a tonic, something to jar me from the malaise on the stereo. I decided to go off the high dive, something I hadn’t yet done this summer. The climb up seemed higher than I’d remembered. My stomach fluttered. So without delay, I ran off the board and into the air. And much sooner than I’d expected the water had risen up to meet me.
