Within Close Range: Pool Days

As soon as wildflowers peeked through the damp, leafy forest floor, windows were flung wide open to welcome in the lake breezes and the moist smells of spring, including the thawing corral, heavy with muck flung everywhere by muddy, high-spirited ponies. 

I couldn’t wait to walk barefoot across the new lawn emerging from the still cold ground, coating my toes in mud and grass.

Spreading spring through the house.

Annually driving Mom to distraction.

Shedding winter layers, the half-mile walk from the bus stop to the back door became leisurely, but energized by the land’s reawakening, the leaves of the trees unfurling and neighborhood dogs re-emerging, reminding me that the lazy days of summer were just out of reach.

When dad got out the backyard hose and played the evil ogre, who squirted little children when they tried to cross his lawn. 

But try we did, again and again.

Until the evil ogre tired and headed to the cool of the pool.

And we happily followed.

Finding pure joy in the playful moments with Dad.

He’d dive into the pool, slightly askew, and find his first target, who giggling and excited braced themselves for the certain lift that would come from below and hoist them high; each waiting their turn to be Dad’s focus, knowing full well that the opportunity was fleeting before he was off, usually to golf, while we stayed behind for hours on end, water-logged and pruny, but supremely happy playing Jump or Dive and seeing who could make the biggest cannonball splash.

Jim always triumphant.

The closest Jim and I would ever be physically matched was in the pool. Buoyant and fearless, I’d challenge him at Kung Fu fighting, complete with sound effects and slow-motion kicks until, bored by the balance, Jim would grab me and dunk me until I surrendered.

Mia and I had our own competitions which would begin innocently enough - one of us boasting how many laps we’d done. We’d look into each other’s bloodshot eyes for signs of a challenge and off we’d go, stroke after stroke, lap after lap.

Ten, twenty, thirty laps, keeping an even pace, with no sign of the other slowing.

Forty, fifty, sixty laps. Slower, but still determined.

Who would be the first to surrender?

Seventy, eighty, ninety laps.

We’d hear Mom call us in for dinner, but even our grumbling stomachs could not dissuade either of us to stop.

One hundred laps.

Mom would call out again.

“Okay,” Mia would say, “we’ll BOTH stop at 110.”

But then I’d turn and head out for one more.

Of course, Mia would follow.

One-ten, one-twenty, one-thirty.

Mark would soon be standing poolside with his hands at his, tiny hips, having been sent from the house.

Dinner is getting cold and Dad is getting mad.

Ever fearful of being scolded, I’d turn to Mia and make her promise this would be our last lap.

She’d agree, so I’d climb from the pool and grab my towel, expecting her to follow, until I saw that glint in her eye as she sunk back into the shallow end and pushed off the wall for one, final victory lap.

Heather, our Labrador Retriever, always joined us poolside, relentless in her quest for someone to throw a ball in for her to retrieve. Even after she tired out all possible playmates, she figured out a way to carry on. Dropping the ball into the water, Heather would patiently wait for it to float to the center of the pool, then leap in after it. 

She took the term “water dog” to a whole new level. Especially when we first witnessed her retrieve a punctured tennis ball that had sunk to the bottom of the deep-end. Nose first, she executed a perfect corkscrew dive eight feet to the bottom.

And did so innumerable times over many summers before the years stole her strength.

The pool was a place of gathering and discovery, where barely clad teens found excuses to get close.

Flesh to flesh in playful moments.

Unleashing new sensations.

New awareness.

Especially for Dad, who once sent me to my room to change when the bathing suit Chris brought me from the islands drew too much attention from Jim’s friends and I became acutely aware (and even more self-conscious) that I could have such an effect.

During my teens, I’d often arrive home late summer nights, with the house quiet and parents sleeping, strip down to nothing and dive into the dark of the deep-end, where naked, unabashed, unheard and unseen, I’d scream.

Hard.

For as long as my breath would hold.

I’d scream out my discontent and crippling self-doubt.

I’d scream out the sadness.

I’d scream until it hurt.

Then I’d float and look to the sky and the barely discernible stars with my highly dysfunctional eyes.

I’d breathe, long and slow, listening to the sound of my breath and the occasional call of a neighboring owl hidden somewhere within the dark silhouettes of the tall trees surrounding me.

And eventually, I'd find enough peace to count my own lucky stars and head to bed with the smell of chlorine wafting me into watery dreams.

Within Close Range: At the Edge of the Bluff

It was an early spring day in the heartland.

Anemic, damp and miserable.

Clumps of stubborn snow and ice, grey and grimy, still dotted the lawns and sidewalks.

Faces looked pale and anxious for change.

After the usual Sunday sermon of incense and absolution, followed by stacks of buttermilk pancakes and syrupy sausages, we knew something was up when Dad drove past the walled entrance of King's Cove, our subdivision, further and further from home.

Past unfamiliar towns and unfamiliar faces. 

Boredom was just beginning to poke at anticipation when a sight to our right stopped the impending bedlam. Just past a dense stretch of forest, stood several grand, white farm buildings down a long, linear road; enchanting and inviting, tidy and bright - even on this gloomy day.

My heart beat faster as we neared.

And sunk when we passed.

Before I had a chance to exhale my displeasure - long and loud for all the car to hear - a glorious mural of colorful birds ever taking flight on the north side of a barn, came into sight in my rear window view.

Little could I have known that this storybook setting, known as Crab Tree Farm, would become our Polaris for home (though, sadly, the mural would not) for the next two decades, because just past the farm, up on the right, in the dark of the woods, at the edge of the bluff, was where we were headed that day and for much our childhoods.

"Shoreacres Country Club," the sign read, "Members Only. Est. 1916."

Mom and Dad kept silent, ignoring the uninviting sign, as we headed down a long, winding road, flanked by a small, trickling creek, past long stretches of green. Everything was covered in a fine, frigid mist, including another set of elegant, white buildings belonging to the famously snobbish club (who would eventually and wholeheartedly reject Dad), silent and still on this gloomy Sunday afternoon.

As we passed a faded, old water tower, headless in the fog, Dad finally began to divulge our destination - a new home. The inside of the car went instantly silent. I turned to Mia, who looked as bewildered as I felt, then sunk further into the rear bucket seat.

From here, I could see nothing but the thick, dark clouds above. There was no sound but gravel crunching noisily beneath the wheels of the station wagon, now weighted with disappointment, as it twisted down a long driveway and stopped.

I raised my eyes to the first inch of window to see the house.

Grey and sullen.

Like the day.

And our moods. 

Mom and Dad turned to the back of the car with smiles from ear to ear, only to confront the grim faces of four of their children (Mark being a too young to care) who couldn't fathom what there was to be smiling about.

"We'll just take a look," Dad said. "If you don't like it, we won't move."

Knowing full well that was double-talk for: "You WILL like it. “ and “We ARE moving.”, we were soon filing from the car - like prisoners into an exercise yard - onto the stone patio of a house that wasn't egg yolk yellow like ours and had no visible signs of neighbors, a school, OR the Good Humor Man... anywhere. 

Without keys to enter, Dad and Mom looked into the windows and started talking about all the possibilities they saw. 

I saw nothing but despair.

That is, until Dad coaxed us to the long stretch of windows that looked through the front hallway, into the living room, through its windows and beyond. What lay beyond the stark, white, empty rooms was an expanse of lawn the likes of which we had never seen. 

And water, for as far as the eye could see.

Five figures, all ranging in size, fled to the rear of the house and the edge of the bluff, where the vast lake rolled onto the beach - what would be our beach - eighty feet below. At the edge, was an old tire swing on which each of us took turns watching the water below and trees above disappear and return, disappear and return. 

This swing and I would later be immortalized on Super 8 film when one autumn afternoon, in mid-swing, my hands faltered and I fell backwards leaving my trendy, purple, elastic waistband pants swinging solo. It was an event which would be rewound, slo-mo'ed, rewound, fast forwarded and rewound again and again for decades.

We serpentined down the overgrown path to the beach and skipped the first of thousands of flat, smooth stones across the cold, dark water of Lake Michigan, marveling at the silhouette of the Chicago skyline jutting out 40 miles to the south and the harbor dotted with boats just a mile to the north. 

We wandered around the wooded acres, getting a little more excited each time we peeked through another window, especially those of the outbuildings which lay steps from the bluff’s edge and out of earshot from the main house which stood to the south, down a narrow path, through a small patch of woods.

Built in 1959, the house which we were about to call our home was located on seven acres of woods at the edge of Lake Michigan, seven miles north of the village of Lake Bluff and a few miles south of Great Lakes Naval Training Base and Harbor. The land included the main house (a New England-style country home), a small, two-bedroom cottage and an office/lab and greenhouse, where the original owner of the house, Dr. John Nash Ott, did much of his groundbreaking research. 

A former banker turned photographer, cinematographer and inventor, Dr. Ott’s achievements include the development of full spectrum lighting, light therapy and time-lapse photography. Ott was also a pioneer in the newly developing field of photobiology and had the first color TV program to be broadcast from Chicago, called: "How Does Your Garden Grow?"

In the years ahead, my siblings and I would do our own groundbreaking research in Dr. Ott’s buildings. Not only were they breeding grounds for mischief and unsupervised merriment, first cigarettes and first beers, but secret rendezvous and safe havens for young loves and fainthearted runaways. More than once I packed my technicolored suitcase and ran to the greenhouse office seeking solitude and distance from those who failed to understand me; only to find that a short time later, bored and lonely, I longed for home just a few hundred yards away.

The office and greenhouse (emptied of lab instruments) were verdant vessels of the imagination, with floor to ceiling cabinets where surprise attacks continually surprised; where a wall length desk (lined with electrical outlets), beneath wall length windows overlooking the great lake, became our cockpit, our control center, our helm. 

In the sunken greenhouse attached to the south end of the office, deranged, young doctors and their faithful minions were often seen running from staircase to staircase, table to table, laughing maniacally at the dark side of mortality; and where, with great gusto, mad scientists threw the elaborate array of switches that lit the plexiglass building like a giant firefly, and opened and closed metal shutters (designed by the banker-turned-inventor to control sunlight); turning day to night and eyes to starry skies, where imaginations rocketed.

There was a curious entrance on the southern end of the greenhouse where visitors passed through a large metal door into an antechamber. Here, in this big metal box, with big, metal doors and a large vent (at least half the height of a child and four times as wide), Dr. Ott once meticulously controlled all light, as well as temperatures entering or exiting the greenhouse by blowing hot or cold air into the small chamber.

Countless times over the years, we’d enter the aluminum vestibule, close both doors… and wait. 

At the call of "Ready!?" and the flick of a switch on the other side of the greenhouse, a great blast of air belched from that enormous vent in the dark, tiny, metal space and suddenly, we were in our very own wind tunnel/torture chamber/time machine.

The years when Mom had the greenhouse up and running during the winter led to an even more remarkable world of discovery. Where green became something you could see, smell and touch.

Stepping down into its steamy realm was like stepping into a distant jungle.

Moist.

Pungent.

Earthy.

With winter visible through the windows, I’d sit on the cement stairs, arms hanging over the round, metal railing, galoshes dangling (along with most of my socks), watching Mom dig her hands into a soily concoction.

Strange, sweet smells.

Bone meal and blood meal.

Manure and lime. 

It was exotic and inviting and oozing with life nurtured with the same care Mom watched over her flock; passionate and determined all should flourish. Cultivating her wards with a very unique mix of love and cynicism, melancholy, curiosity and eccentricity.

The cottage, which stood just north of the greenhouse, would serve many different purposes over the years: first, as a rental, where a young couple, just married, tested the marital waters and then as temporary lodgings for Dad, where he could keep a watchful eye over his unruly offspring until his own turbulent waters calmed once more.

It was always my dream to occupy that space, as Chris and Jim had when they got older, to play house in this tiny cottage at the very edge of the bluff where the tiny tub was too small even for tiny me (at the time) and the kitchen was like a doll’s with its miniature appliances. But by the time Chris and Jim were off on their own, there were already signs of financial troubles when Dad divided our land and sold the cottage - and my tiny dream - to a stranger.

But many changes would be made over the years. One of the first would be the addition of a swimming pool which gave Mom nightmares. Never having learned how to swim as a child, she’d wake at night frightened to tears by the thought of any one of her young children drowning as she stood helpless and hopeless. I never knew until many years had passed that Mom would wade into the pool everyday that first summer and teach herself how to dog paddle, for which we mercilessly teased her. Her head never dipping below the surface, but her heart determined to stay afloat. 

A barn would also be built in front of the greenhouse to house some playthings of both the equine and turbine kind. It was here that I first understood the meaning of responsibility for another life and here, where I cursed our ponies, Chief and Billy Gold, on those cold, winter mornings when I was forced to muck their stalls before school and where mice and I regularly frightened the daylights out of each other at the bottom of the grain barrel.

The ponies and contraptions eventually gave way to automobiles and teenage independence and the barn came down to make room for an addition which would turn the old garage into a new family room and the two-stall barn into a four car garage. 

The tire swing at the edge of the bluff was lost to erosion, as was the greenhouse in the final years, as new houses encroached upon our woods and old friends scattered toward new lives. 

The one thing, however, which would never change, was and remains the love I have for our home at the edge of the bluff.