The other week, I was at the beach with my sister and a few old friends reminiscing about the good old days of our childhoods when we lived in exotic places like South Dakota and all you needed for a good time was a box of water and a tree.
I had actually forgotten about the box of water; my memories revolve more around the torn-off top half of an industrial sized plastic water tank that Dad found on the side of the road after a tornado, brought home, and filled up with water for us. The tank was maybe 6 feet in diameter and about 3 feet deep, and we had a grand old time in that thing. We even invented the Water Tank Olympics, and broke world records for the amount of summersaults and log rolls an adolescent could do in three feet of water. But before there was the water tank, there was the Rubbermaid tub.
In order to understand our fascination with water, you must remember that my siblings and I spent the first decade or so of our childhoods living in Manitoba, which spent several centuries being one huge lake and has now become many small lakes divided by little patches of dry land*. We were used to being able to drive 20 minutes to the nearest beach for a swim, and, if we didn't like that one, driving another 10 minutes to the next one, and if that one was too crowded, going 45 minutes to the next lake, and, if we didn't like that lake, driving another 10 minutes to the next lake, and so on and so fourth, and, of course, if lakes were too much for you, you could always go back home and jump in one of the numerous public pools that dotted the city, or, if that wasn't wild enough for you, there were always the fountains (which Mom resolutely kept us out of, to my general dismay), and if even that failed you, you could wait until it rained and go play in the flooded gutters. Manitoba was a watery paradise and we were completely oblivious to how plentiful that water was. Then we moved to the desert.
As a rather unworldly 10-year-old, it had never occurred to me that there could be a place with so few bodies of water as there were in South Dakota. The town we lived in did not have a public pool or a beach. We had to drive to a different state to find a pool, and the nearest ‘lake’ was a set of rapids about 2 hours away that my 23-year-old self thinks would be fun to play in but my squeamish 10-year-old self was terrified of due to the sharp rocks and the scary fish living in the pool below and the fact that the first time we went there someone killed a rattlesnake, cut off its head with a broken beer bottle, and spent an awfully long time standing all too close to me** squeezing the blood out of the place where the head used to be***. That put a slight damper on things.
Basically, there was nowhere to go swimming in Pine Ridge, and it got hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk over there, and these things combined made the three of us go a little wild. So mom brought out one of the 12-gallon storage boxes we had used to move to the desert, set it outside, and filled it with water.
The Rubbermaid container was just about large enough for one of us to sit in. If I stuck my legs out over the sides, I could even put my head under the water for a little bit. Without a better alternative, my siblings and I spent hours and hours of the summer in our bathing suits, taking turns sitting in a Rubbermaid container filled with water. It was just like being at the beach; we even managed to get really wicked sun-burns that way, on the day that Mom set the “pool” up under the shady protection of a tree and we moved it into the direct sunlight because the ground under the tree was “too tilty”, and came back in three hours later with day-glo pink skin, to our mother’s horror.
Now, we are back in the land of a thousand lakes. We get sunburns the normal way, by lying on beaches of white sand for far too long. We go swimming the normal way too, in bodies of water large enough to submerge your entire body at once. And while I bask in the sun watching the pelicans fly overhead with the sound of waves in the back-ground, I think back 13 years and try to picture my 10-year-old self having the time of her life with her head under water and her legs sticking out of a 12-gallon green plastic box like some sort of ostrich who hasn’t got it quite right, and I wax nostalgic for the simple things in life that I can no longer fit into anyway.
*slight exaggeration #1.
**As in, close enough that the carnage was still visible to me
***not an exaggeration at all, actually.
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