Everybody In The Poooooollllll!

It’s not easy to take an activity that can be as enjoyable as swimming and turn it into something to be avoided at all costs, but, the folks in charge of our junior high gym classes managed the feat. Looking back on it now, I can only laugh at the series of procedures that made all of us dread the beginning of our several weeks of swimming during gym class and look forward to the end of same almost like a little kid looking forward to Christmas.

Now, the rest of this is for those of you who didn’t experience this with me to enjoy and for those of you who did to look back on and laugh…because we said we do that someday. (And, for some of us, it may still be too soon.)

OK, the first thing those of you who aren’t familiar have to know is that access from our junior high’s main building to the gym consisted of a single door that led right past the pool. Being responsible adults (and, the rest of this will make you question that, but, still…), the school’s administration kept that door locked, as it did not want a bunch of adolescents parading past a pool with no adults present. This meant that the only way to access the gym was to go outside via a second-floor door. You then walked most of the way to the gym under a portico before a brief, uncovered walk to the doors.

Once you got inside, you went downstairs to the locker rooms. And, if you had swimming, this is where your little foray into surrealism began. As you walked down the hallway to the locker rooms, you stopped at a half door, behind which sat the woman who doled out the suits. Behind her were a huge washing machine and a massive dryer with what looked like hundreds of blue suits spinning around inside it. You stopped at the door and asked her for a suit. And, she then asked you what size you needed. I still have no idea why. You could feel free to say whatever you wanted, because it wasn’t going to matter. Instead, she gave you the suit she thought you needed. Now, sometimes, she was close enough. But, most of the time, you either had the circulation to the lower half of your body cut off for the entire period or spent it trying not to moon the rest of the class. And, again, this was just the beginning.

From there, you walked into the locker room carrying your destined-to-be ill-fitting suit and immediately changed into it. Now. Whether it was ninety degrees outside or five degrees outside, the temperature in the dank, dark, concrete locker room was constant. Frigid. And, there you sat, at your locker in just the suit, miserable, until Mr. Newell, the swimming teacher, stuck his head in the door and yelled a single word, which echoed off the concrete walls down the locker bays. “SHOWERRRRSSSSS!”

At this point, we all piled into the showers to wash ourselves before getting into the pool. And, the water that came out of those showers also had a constant temperature. Liquid ice. But, you had to get thoroughly wet or Mr. Newell would send you back for a second soaking. So, we stood under the shower heads as pellets of, I mean streams of freezing water added to our discomfort. Then, things got worse.

Obviously, we showered as quickly as we could, because the experience was anything but pleasant. Then, we went into the towel room and stood, shivering, water dripping from us, waiting, rather impatiently, for Mr. Newell to reappear. Back then, I guess I assumed he was timing the shower period to make sure we had time enough to get clean without taking too much time away from what he wanted us to accomplish in the pool. These days, I suspect he was waiting until jusssstttttt before hypothermia set in. Either way, eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, he returned and shouted, “Let’s go!”

And, thus began another part of our Siberian sojourn. Now, we were to walk down the freezing concrete hallway into the pool room. And, just as you were entering, the final insult arrived. There was a blower just inside the door and, of course, the air it was blowing was always cold, which felt quite refreshing on our wet, shivering nearly-naked bodies covered only by suits that were either falling off or cutting us in half.

Now, this might be a good time to tell you that the water in the pool was “heated” to the same temperature as the water in the showers. That being said, what we wanted most in the world at that point, other than, you know, a thick blanket and either a hot beverage or a bottle of whiskey, was to dive into that pool. Yes, we knew it would be cold and we’d suffer, but, only for a while. Because, once we were in the water a few minutes, our bodies would adjust and we’d be (those of us who didn’t have suits three sizes too small, anyway) comfortable for the first time since just after our meetings with “the evil suit lady”. But, of course, that wasn’t going to happen.

Instead, Mr. Newell always ordered us to sit on the swim benches for a lecture about something or other having something vaguely to do with swimming, water, the ocean, the migratory habits of manatees or whatever we might be doing that day. (I’m sure that, despite my snark, these lectures were actually on point, but, with my ear canals frozen shut and my frost-addled brain thinking up creative ways to get out of doing any more swimming {a good friend had “swimmer’s ear” and sat up in the bleachers warm and smarmy enjoying our misery twice a week…why didn’t I think of that one?}, he could have been talking about Keynesian economics for all I knew.) So, we sat, listening, shivering, waiting. And. Finally.

“OK, everybody in the pooooooollllllll!” And, you never saw a group of adolescent boys move faster. As a group we leaped into the air and hit the water with one big splash. Mr. Newell, a veteran of this group cannonball, always stood well back so as not to get wet. Rumors flew about Mr. Newell and water, because, Mr. Newell never, ever got wet. Instead, he stood, high and dry with a whistle shouting instructions, refereeing games of water polo, and generally trying to prevent us from drowning one another. Said rumors involved other kids in other classes who’d deliberately gotten Mr. Newell wet and had gotten detention or a suspension or had, worse, failed gym and now needed to take gym four days a week instead of two. Other rumors indicated that Mr. Newell actually couldn’t swim at all and was afraid of the water and this is why he had such an extreme reaction when those other kids in other classes had gotten him wet.

But, truth or rumor, we weren’t worried about getting him wet. We wanted to get whatever we were going to do that day going, get moving, start to warm up. And, soon, that’s what began to happen. And, just like that, after a few more minutes, we were actually having fun. And, right about that time the whistle blew. “All right! Everybody out of the pooooooooollllll!!!”

To say that we were a bit slower getting out of the pool than we had been getting into it would be akin to saying that Franco Harris was a bit better runner than Greg Hawthorne. But, eventually, with a little prodding from Mr. Newell(“Come on! Come on! Get going!”), we got out, now dripping and freezing again and began a retreat that seemed to us to be similar to the one Napoleon had begun out of Moscow. Across the blower with its cold air, padding back down the glacial hallway into the frigid locker room and back to our locker bays to take off our suits (if they hadn’t fallen off on the way down the hall) and wait again, this time, not for the rumble of Mr. Newell’s voice, but for another rumble, that of the wheeled garbage can.

Each class, some unfortunate was tasked with wheeling the garbage can around to collect the suits (Today’s me would have suggested to Mr. Newell that we permanently give the job to Mr. Swimmer’s Ear.), and unfortunate he was. Because, by this time, our humor level was as low as our respective core body temperatures (read: dangerously low). We were standing, shivering again, waiting for this clown to push the barrel to our locker bay. And, when he got there a BLIZZARD of wet suits flew in the general direction of the barrel. After he was done dodging and ducking, he picked up the ones that hadn’t landed inside it and stomped off grumbling, while we padded off to the showers for a second dose of liquid ice, after which we got back to our lockers as quickly as possible to towel off, get our clothes back on, and…now might be the time to remind you that we had to go outside to get back into the school. So, out we went, often in the freezing cold and always with wet hair, for the return to the main building and our remaining classes, one step closer to the end of swimming and the return to regular gym. And, of course, a few steps closer to a nice case of multilobar pneumonia.