The Deep

 As a child, I was not afraid of heights - I was afraid of depths.  My mother would sacrifice her summer mornings, as her winter mornings, summer days, winter days, spring days, autumn mornings, and the like, in endless hours of waiting in a pea-green Pontiac Catalina (preceded by a NASA-blue Dodge), while her children pursued one of any of the activities for which they were destined to be sub-par.  Tennis.  Football.  Baseball.  Dancing (not me, my sister), and of course... swimming.

In Oak Ridge, TN, lurks the silent, invisible force; the Municipal Pool.  Spring-fed.  Of legend, constructed by the same men who built the atom bomb.  But not, like the atom-bomb, to burn and destroy, but to freeze and destroy.

So many cold-mornings in July.  What was more terrifying?  The icy cold of the water?  The innumerable spiders and other unidentifiable insects floating on the surface of the water?  Or the frigid, unrecoverable depths of... the Deep End.

I remember standing in the shade of the south end of the pool - the Deep End side, where for some unknowable reason, the architects of that torture device had chosen to shade the coldest part of the pool.  There we stood.  Unreasoning creatures.  Listening, shivering, listening to instructions on the various strokes we were to take.  While below.  Cold.  Deep blue.  Glistening.  The bottom.  The bottom that you could never reach, for the pressure in your ears would become too much.  But the bottom that beckoned to you.  called to you.

The Siren.

I heard the siren again on a Norwegian cruise, sailing from Miami to the Bahamas.  As I walked the deck at night, while my wife played blackjack on the casino deck, and my dress shoes clicked and clacked.  I stared over the rail, saw the waves lightened by the ship, and so quickly turning to blackened nothingness outside the feeble lights.  How the ocean called to me.  How the depths called to me.  Terror and seduction.

So tonight, as I walked by the little pool in my backyard, in 46 degrees (F), with my Labrador by my side, I gazed into the preternatural light of the pool's LED's, lighting the vacuum robot that skims the bottom of the pool in an eldritch green.  Though only 8 feet, and not even a fathom, there were those depths.  Always calling, calling, calling.