Into the Blue

 

    Into the Blue by Craig Adams



I grew up on an island but it was a big island, you might say it was a Long Island. Growing up there you learn early that the place to be in the summer was at the shore, North or South, either one would do. As it was, my brother and I spent the majority of our formative years being raised by our single mother. Growing up in the City of Brotherly Love she never learned to drive and money was always tight so opportunities to get to the beach were few and far between. She also never learned to swim ergo for the first dozen or so years of my life, neither did I.



A wonderful thing happened in the summer of my 12th year. My mom bought me and my brother season passes to the Town of Babylon pool on Phelps Lane! I’m not sure how she came up with the money but it seemed too good to be true, a minor miracle. After all, most of our buddies came from families with two parents and seemingly had money to burn and of course, season passes to the town pool.



The town pool was about a mile and a half walk from our home. Most kids took their bikes but guess who didn’t know how to ride or even have a bike? Yep, that was me. I didn’t care so much about that because I had the keys to the kingdom! The Phelps Lane pool was actually two pools, a small rectangle kiddie pool and a pretty large T-shaped pool with a pair of diving boards in the deep section, which was the “stem” of the T. Each short side of the pool had three steps the length of the pool where non-swimmers and kids just a little too old for the “baby pool” would play. The pool got gradually deeper as you approached the intersection with the deep end and that’s where I would spend my time bobbing around trying to not look like a non-swimmer. Naturally, most of my pals could swim, in fact I can’t recall one who couldn’t besides me. When they weren’t wising off to the lifeguards you can bet, they were queuing up to jump/dive off the diving boards. Presumably to impress each other or the girls we were starting to notice!

                                           Image above from townofbabylon.com

Maybe it was boredom or maybe I wanted to be part of that action or a combination of those things but I soon found myself trying to float face down in the water by holding my breath (and the side of the pool) and trying to relax. It was such an odd and wholly new sensation that it became like a ritual for me every day I went. Soon that progressed to free floating and slowly I began to experiment with kicking my legs and paddling with my arms. I loved the feeling of moving through the water! I kept this up all that summer and by the next summer I was confident enough to join my friends at the diving boards. Of course, my “dives” were really just cannonballing and the like but it sure felt great to be out there!

As time went by and my friends and I started driving we would spend as much time as possible at the South Shore beaches, particularly Field 2 of Robert Moses State Park, which was and still is a part of the Fire Island National Seashore. So many incredible memories of those beach days but I’ll save that for another blog. I want to come back to the pool again.

This time, I’m in my late twenties, newly divorced with a beautiful, precocious 4-year-old daughter. I was living back in my childhood home, a mile and a half from the pool. As a dad I promised myself I would do my best to teach my kids all the stuff kids do like swim and ride bikes so they wouldn’t have to figure things out for themselves, like I did. That year, I bought season passes to the pool for me and my daughter and we started spending a few days each month hanging out there. She loved the water from the time she was an infant and was thrilled to show off her “dives” for me at the pool. She would stand on the top step of the shallow end and jump in, a tangle of limbs and floaties, into 3 feet of water! They were really all the same but nonetheless I had to guess which one, the Dolphin Dive, the Mermaid Dive, the Princess Dive, etc. She would do them over and over until I guessed correctly, only taking a break to get ice cream at the concession stand or to eat her Lunchables. The following summer it wasn’t long before she wanted to go in without floaties, after all, she was a big girl (age 5).


Well, I was a single dad and money was tight so swimming lessons were not going to happen so guess who learned to swim in the same pool as her dad, in pretty much the same way? It took a lot of patience and perseverance, A LOT- but she really tried, and before that summer was over, she was jumping into the deep end! The diving boards had long since been removed for reasons I don’t quite recall but you could still swim around outside the swim lanes and there was still plenty of room for an intrepid 5-year-old to show off to her dad and pretty much anyone else who cared to watch. 


Anyway, I started out this blog with the intention of talking about learning to SCUBA dive and some of the things we’ve seen and places we’ve been for diving but I guess that will also be for another blog post! I hope you enjoyed this little trip down the past as much as I did and the takeaway (which is going to be a recurring theme in these posts) no matter what your age or ability or background, it’s never too late to try to learn something new, so go for it!



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