AN EMPTY POOL FULL OF SALT WATER

Summer brings out the nostalgia in me. When you’re still in school and on a hormone high, summer holds out the promise of passion, romance and adventure. What it ended up for me was swimming in Huntingdon’s downtown swimming pool with my pals. There was no real passion or romance, but it was an adventure.

Now that’s all gone for me, my friends and apparently the kids of Huntingdon too. I’ve passed the downtown pool many times this summer on my way to my mothers and nobody’s ever there. Once I saw two boys sitting near the missing diving board, but that’s it. All that beautiful cool cow-stained (from the bovines upstream relieving themselves) water wasted.

In the old days (the first time I heard that phrase was from Gabby Hayes, looking 100, in an old Roy Rogers’s western) the pool was packed with kids diving, splashing, cannon balling, pushing, shoving and dunking each other. The spit of a sandy beach spread before you like a carpet of beach towels and sun worshippers shoulder to shoulder, nose to nose, bumper to bumper and some nose to bumper.

There was a concession stand where the specialty was frozen candy bars, hard and chewy as chocolate covered rocks. There were potato chips to make you thirsty, pop to quench that thirst, then more chips in a round robin spasm of salt and sugar in the sun on the sand. The boys’ and girls’ dressing rooms book ended the concession stand. After a full day’s swim, you struggled to strip off your swim suit that stuck to the sand that stuck to your skin like wallpaper to a wall.

Ah, the good old days of sunburns and ear infections, that I got almost every summer. Once I had to wear a girl’s bathing cap, as my earplugs weren’t keeping out the cow patties circling downstream. Oh, the humiliation! The girls giggled at me and the guys asked me out laughingly. Then there was the time I got caught in the pull of the waterfall at the dam end of the pool. I held on, dangling in the rushing water, beside the diving board as kids ran and laughed above me. Nobody seemed to see me, so I just let loose, then everyone noticed me with shouts as I fell thru the falls onto the rocky creek bed below the pool .

Those were the days! Painful times harden you as a child and prepare you for the disappointments of adulthood like supermodels will never look at you with the same interest and lust that you look at them, unless you’re rich and famous.

I suspect the downtown pool crowd has gone way upstream to the huge Raystown Dam to swim. Growing up in Huntingdon, the promise of the expanded Raystown Dam was to make us a resort like Atlantic City. Downtown Huntingdon would become the boardwalk of the dam with thousands of tourists strolling and shopping there.
It never happened and it may have dried up my beloved downtown pool population.

The same kind of promise popped up in Atlantic City about legalized gambling when I spent several summers there between semesters in college. They thought that gambling would transform Atlantic City into the Paris of the Jersey shore, the French Riviera of the east coast. With the distance between Paris and the French Riviera, this would have been geographically impossible to have them both in the same place, but what did they know?

Before the concrete casinos shot up, the boardwalk was a whirly gig of pizza places, ice cream parlors, souvenir stores full of saltwater taffy and tee shirts, grills bubbling and spitting with hot dogs, hamburgers and Italian sausages , fortune tellers, movie theaters and auction houses selling tacky paintings to the highest bidders. Hawkers, like Ed McMahon, demonstrated amazing peeling and paring gizmos on innocent potatoes and apples that shredded before your very eyes while seagulls sailed overhead laughing at you.

Then Donald Trump and his casino cronies came and everything except the food, salt water taffy and souvenir shops, succumbed to these goliaths of gambling that took your money quicker than a million muggers. Now there are no more movie theaters in all of Atlantic City. Movies would take two hours or so away from the gamblers, so they’re all gone. The seagulls still laugh at you from on high, but now it’s because of all the money you’ve lost.

The beaches in mid-summer look more like a cold day in September because everyone’s inside the casinos, instead of frolicking in the ocean or sunbathing like in the old days. A block behind the new boardwalk swelters the old Atlantic City deteriorating, dirty and dangerous. The casinos transformed the boardwalk into a loser’s paradise where gamblers auction their future to the next spin of the slots, the next tumble of the dice or the next slap of the cards, but the rest of Atlantic City’s stayed the same since the 60’s

The thudding fall of the promises of the new improved Raystown Dam and A.C.’s casino gambling echoes in my ears like the mundane ping of my slot machine as it taketh, but rarely giveth back. Maybe if I tried the pretty poker machines in the next aisle.