Just to clear the air, I didn’t write a blog specifically for today. I’m a little busy with end-of-semester preparations. But, fear not! Earlier this semester I had to write a prose piece with no dialogue about a location. What location could be better than the place that has been home to some of my happiest times? Aka The Pierre City Pool!
If you can get passed the cracked floors, decades of water damage, and numerous insect infestations, the Pierre City Pool is actually a pretty charming place. After all, it’s not every day that you come across a still functional sixty-year-old outdoor pool; especially when it is a pool located in the frozen tundra of South Dakota. But, there it sits in all its ancient glory. It has all the slightly unsettling feeling of a building gone to seed yet neither the pool patrons nor the pool itself seems aware of this.
Walking in the doors of the office to pay the obligatory $1 entrance fee, you are almost struck blind by the sheer brightness of the colors splashed across the wall. If you were in a giving mood, you could assume the walls were painted in this seizure-inducing manner to bring light into this concrete abomination of a building but it would be more accurate to say it was a desperate attempt to cover the fact that the original paint (probably lead based) was chipping off the walls. As if this were not enough, the building reeks of chlorine, industrial strength cleaners, and the more sinister smell of warm urine. To be fair, I’ve never been to a pool where there wasn’t this smell but the Pierre City Pool has a particularly persistent blend that seems to burrow into your nose and ferment there until everything you encounter for the next week becomes associated with the sour smell of old piss.
Retreating further into the dank recesses of the pool, you can never be sure what you’ll find. Various food items have fallen on the floor and dripped on and stepped on mercilessly until they resemble a generic yellow mush or—if allowed to sit for a few days—a greenish glob of furry, slimy mold covering what used to be overly processed food. Attracted to this concoction of contaminated cuisine is a steady stream of ants, which are apparently impervious to every insecticide, pesticide, or genocide on the market. In fact, they seem to derive an unnatural strength from them and steadily march their mutated masses to the gargantuan globs of green goop, carrying whatever they can back to their toxic nests to feed the next generation of super-ants.
The floors too are dangerous. Worn down from years of wet, bare feet running across them, they are shiny and slick. At least once a week some unsuspecting patron slides on the floor, smacks to the ground, and screams to high heaven on the way to the restroom. The restrooms are lit with long florescent lights that always seem to be on the brink of burning out. The flickering combined with the desperate hum of the lights as they try to carry on adds to the creepy ambience of the bathroom. With rusty stalls, leaky toilets, and something that must have once been a mirror but is now a dull, hardly reflective surface that reduces everyone looking at themselves into a cross between Joan Rivers and Andre the Giant, the bathrooms of the city pool are the kind of place that one avoids on principle—and for fear of catching some incurable disease.
Once outside the pool house to the actual pool, conditions do not improve much. The cement surrounding the pool has buckled and settled so many times over the years that it looks like an abstract structure made by a drunken artist without a level. With the huge dips, sharp lips, and inexplicable chunks missing in the concrete, it is a miracle if you make it to the actual water without ripping off a toe in a gruesome accident.
The pool itself is nothing more than a glorified hole in the ground. It’s covered in cement and a bright blue paint, which attempts to trick the patrons into thinking the water is clean and pure. In various places there are large cracks that have been half-heartedly repaired with either some sort of putty or industrial strength rubber cement. If you can overlook these rather large structural defaults and want to actually enjoy your afternoon at the pool, good luck. There isn’t a whole lot to do. While the pool was originally deep enough to justify diving boards, the few feet of cement poured in an attempt to fix the huge cracks in the bottom of the pool resulted in a maximum depth of six feet. Due to this embarrassingly shallow deep end and the large lip that sticks over into the pool, there are also no back dives, no flips, no pushing, and, essentially, no fun.
There is one slide in the prime depth of 3ft. Everyone falls into one of two categories; either you are too short and almost drown coming off the end or you are too tall and pound your feet, ass, or head on the bottom of the pool. The slide is from the old school of construction where safety was not a concern. There is an eight-foot vertical ladder leading to a 1½-foot by 1½-foot platform, which you must maneuver your ass onto if you want to go down. From there, the slide quickly plummets in an almost vertical drop before leveling off just in time to shoot you into the water.
Even with all of these faults, day after day, there is a line of little brats screaming their heads off with excitement. When the doors open, they rush in throwing their money on the counter and sprint out to the pool, discarding articles of clothing along the way. In this moment, the pool is no longer a dilapidated pock on the landscape but Pierre’s own version of Disney World; the happiest place on earth.
