Now comes news that the Park District of Oak Park is going to pay $38,000 to demolish the fiendish diving tower at Rehm Pool which was my nemesis during some very formative years.
Constructed in the mid-1960s, when the world was young, the Rehm Park pool was built both to take some pressure off the always crowded pool at Ridgeland Common and to offer up a legitimate name to the patch of green weeds behind the fire house at East and Garfield. Previously, at least at our house, it had been known as South Park — no, not that South Park — and was a pretty good place for a pick-up game of baseball.
The parks are working fast to get the diving tower down before swim season. They claim it is because the “steps are rusting from the inside” which sounds just the way this old, confidence-thieving behemoth would want to go out — secretly rusting.
One of my swimming colleagues — as in a colleague who swims, not a colleague I swim confidently alongside of, trading small insider swimming jokes because, honestly, I can barely tread water. Anyhow, that guy who works here and swims, said I needed to insert into our news story that this was a 10-meter diving contraption. Like that was a big deal, like I had to be reminded of just how tall it was, however big a meter is.
What I know to be true is that when I was 9, it was really tall. And I really wanted to climb those not-rusted stairs, not to level one, not to level two, but to level three, the whole damned 10 meters. And then I wanted to dive, as in fly effortlessly and untethered through the air, and cut the water with my imperfect 9-year-old body.
That, of course, never happened.
I did one time make it up to level one, which, if my math is right, was a full 3.3 meters above the blue chlorine. That’s several meters. More than a couple. And to avoid the shame of passing people I might have known by making my way down those stairs, I did actually depart the safety of that really way too high first perch and sort of cannonballed, like I was planning it all along, into the deep.
Time did stand still as I descended further into that diving pool; as Donald Trump would later note of the Great Lakes, it was really wet and quite deep. What had been the giddy sounds of children playing, what had been air that I could actually take into my lungs to sustain my life, was replaced by some sort of slow motion blur of retreating sound, a slight headache and massive fear that the park district had built a 100-foot deep diving pool.
I did finally surface, dead center in the pool, thinking desolately that it would be good if I knew how to swim to the shore, or the lip, or whatever one calls the containing wall of a public pool. Yet here I am all these decades later. I survived without lifeguard involvement, though I might recall my brother John’s voice calling, “This way, Dan. Swim this way.” No, he couldn’t swim either.
After that I retreated to the always squished main pool where you could not drown because you could not move. I was back in my element. With my non-swimming, no air conditioning at home fellow Catholic and public school friends and acquaintances.
No, I won’t be sad to see the wrecking ball come — or maybe I could help dynamite it. Either way somewhere tonight in south Oak Park there is a youngster who will survive this summer, self-esteem intact, once the 10-meter tower tumbles.
