Burning The Furniture

PANIC POND

Town Council named it the Panic Pond because right smack in the middle of building North Augusta’s municipal swimming pool in 1929, the stock market crashed and a kind of national madness took over for a while. People jumped out of Wall Street windows, ran on banks, wondered if God had forsaken them and they were generally in a state.

Meanwhile, the concrete guys were finishing up the lower side of the swimming pool, up near where the ice-cold creek fed in from out of the woods as October bled into November. Town Council thought that, given the circumstances, this big man-made swimming hole with the two bathhouses, sand beach, floating raft, two diving boards, high slide and the state-of-the-art filtering system should give some sort of nod to the national mood. Panic Pond.

I never thought much about the name when I was 10 or so, but it had a familiar ring. I spent every day of every summer for several years in the Panic Pond’s cold and suspect waters. I saw my first live breast there, nestled in the blonde girl’s teal bathing suit cup that was a size too large for it. I saw my first dead body, a little kid who drowned, pulled from the waters of Panic Pond as a stricken group of people gathered helplessly around, some of them crying out loud, others shouting. I ate frozen Zero bars and taught myself to swim on top of the water after teaching myself to dive and swim under water. I learned how it’s possible to make just enough money to do a thing you want to do in a short time and I learned that sometimes you have to suffer to get it done.

I grew up a good bit at the Panic Pond, some of the growing naturally, some of it forced, all of it part of the whole deal.

We were living over near North Augusta Elementary School, just behind the playground, that first summer I discovered the Pond. Mike Graybill had asked me over to his house to spend the night and I knew that was something I wanted to do because Mike’s parents let him drink coffee and for breakfast he made this great toast with real butter. At home, we only had biscuits and gravy and eggs and grits and bacon and like that. Mom didn’t let us drink coffee because she said it was bad for kids, made us nervous. But I’d had coffee before, sneaked it from the Nescafe jar, and it didn’t make me nervous. When you put enough cream and sugar in it, I’d found, it tasted pretty good and I liked the way it perked me up, as Mom described its effect.

Mike had told me to bring a bathing suit and I wasn’t sure I had one, but Mom bailed me out with an old one of my brother Sandy’s. It wasn’t much more than a pair of boxer shorts, maybe a little thicker with a net inside to hold my little weenie in place, as if that would be an issue, given that the aforementioned weenie was tiny to begin with and when cold water hit it, it shrank even more. This suit was red with white stripes and it was a little loose on me, but it would do. Later, when it fell to my knees every time I moved suddenly in the water, I wished it was tighter.

Mike didn’t tell me where we were going swimming and I didn’t ask. His family had a good bit more money than my family and they did things that we didn’t do, like going to the beach and going to the swimming pool. I guessed we’d find a pool somewhere, but it never occurred to me that Mike and I would walk two blocks to this giant pool owned by the city—of which Mr. Graybill was the North Augusta waterworks superintendent, a job I thought was big stuff. He was a dour little man with gray hair who was rarely around. His wife was pretty, tall—taller by a good bit than Mr. Graybill—and a good bit younger and she always seemed to have some place to be, too.

By about 8 o’clock Saturday morning of the first night I slept over, Mike and I were in the kitchen by ourselves making coffee and toast with butter and looking ahead to going swimming by ourselves. Mike asked me if I’d brought any money and I said no and he said we’d have to come up with