The Old Swimmin' Hole

Abstract

The Old Swimmin' Hole G.C. Compton The bees are in the locusts. The mud dobber builds on the pump house wall. Every year about this time I get an overwhelming urge to strip off naked, sling my britches across a willow limb and dive into the old Pine Hole. They were under bridges, beneath cliffs, in coves and bends in the creek. Some were formidably deep and mysterious, measured by the number of breast strokes it took to cross or how high the water came "over a tall man's head." Others were shallow streams dammed with rocks, tree limbs and old automobile tires. With names like the Splash Dam, Dock Bill, Number Seven and the Swirl Hole, they were the public swimming holes of the 50s and 60s and part of growing up in Pike County, Kentucky. How well I remember the Pine Hole at Jonancy! How it got its name has remained a mystery, for not a single pine grew near this horseshoe bend on Shelby Creek. Nor did grass or flowers adorn its sandy banks. The most pernicious weed was quickly trampled by a hundred bare feet hurrying to the big diving rock in the shade of a giant elm. In the spring and summer they came, boys of all ages—and sometimes girls—from Elwood, Dock Bill, Longfork and Virgie. We all came: Cobb Holbrook, who proudly carried six buckshots in his rear, victim of an aborted watermelon theft and one-eyed Benton Addington's Winchester; the enviable Elmo Music, a waterhead who didn't have to go to school and owned a Schwinn bike with chrome fenders; Roman Calhoun, who favored Howdy Doody and once drank a whole case of Carnation cream; and Puny Blankenship, who never bathed but had a coveted six and three-quarters inch tongue and webbed feet. There was also Wendell Johnson, born with a caul over his face, who could predict earthquakes and the best days to play hooky and go fishing; and Fat Osborne, a pugnacious lad whose dream of becoming a great soldier would end in a rice paddy in Vietnam. We came, tripping barefoot down the railroad track, shirtless with sunburned backs, skipping down the highway, crossing cornfield and bottom. We dived, swam, frolicked and showed off. We argued, fought and forgave. We regaled one another with stories of feats and infidelities, less often real than imagined. But there was one thing we 34 shared. We had all been warned by our mothers never ever to go near the Pine Hole. Therefore, we frequented its forbidden waters with great regularity and relish. My own mother continuously wagged her finger against the common society of the Pine Hole. She preached about my chances of drowning, cutting my feet on broken glass or splitting my skull on unseen objects in the water. She warned me about the toilets whose foul effluence fed the creek and said I was bound to catch typhoid fever, diphtheria, lockjaw or all three. As far as I know, Mother had never in her life witnessed a case of lockjaw, yet she was certain I would get the dread disease if I got cut in the Pine Hole. Once after slicing my knee on a rusty pipe, I ate a whole chocolate cake against the day my jaws would be sealed forever. Well aware of my tolerance for temptation, Mother made me promise that if I ever did go around the Pine Hole I would never try diving off "that old rock." Of course, I obeyed. Trespassing, accidentally, on this forbidden ground I stripped off naked, climbed the big elm tree instead, twenty feet up, and bailed off an overhanging limb. Lonzo Johnson, in obedience to his mother, shed his clothes and did the same. Lonzo had a solitary rotten tooth before he dived off the limb—but not afterwards. Following a poorly executed swan dive, he left the cavernous canine sticking in Edgil Roberts's head. It was an incident that left Edgil's mother in something of a quandary that day. She had to decide, under duress ofthe moment, whether to take herboy to Pikeville to see a doctor or enlist the...