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Updated: September 16, 2025
When I go down to the slip behind Fulton Market they sell fish at Fulton Market; just follow your nose and you can't miss it and see the rows of little white monkeys doing nothing but diving, I realize that the Old Swimming-hole with all its beauties, its green leafiness, its clean, long grass to lie upon while drying in the sun, or to pull out and bite off the tender, chrome-yellow ends, was but a provincial, country-fake affair.
For a short distance the Passaic and the canal run side by side, but presently they part company, and mile after mile the canal seems to have the world to itself, once in a great while finding human companionship in a shingled cottage half hidden among willows, a sleepy brick-field run on principles as ancient as itself, shy little girls picking flowers on its banks, or saucy boys disporting themselves in the old swimming-hole; and
The process of educating public opinion in their favor was slow, for it is difficult to make men see that the children of a modern city have different needs from the country or village children of a generation ago. Men remember their own boyhood, and scoff at the idea of organized and supervised play in a made playground. Women have no memories of the old swimming-hole.
We used to think the Old Swimming-hole was a bully place, but I know better now. The sycamore leaned well out over the water, and there was a trapeze on the branch that grew parallel with the shore, but the water near it was never deep enough to dive into. And that is another occasion of humiliation. I can't dive worth a cent.
However, mere fidelity to fact brings me into the swim in the figurative sense, as well as in the literal and the sad consciousness of fellowship with men who 'tub' themselves on paper is added to the humiliation of the disclosure itself. In a word, just as I lost my vigour in the swimming-hole, I lose my individuality in the confession. But I don't lose my discrimination, nor my veracity.
That Individual was usually taken most acutely with his ailment on a warm May morning, one of those mornings when the lawless youths of the village decided to play hooky in the afternoon and test the temperature of the swimming-hole.
It is too suggestive, too like the skeleton at the banquet, too blunt a reminder that maybe what the undertow growls is not all a bluff. Another drawback to the ocean as a swimming-hole is that the distances are all wrong. If you want to go to the other side of the "crick" you must take a steamboat.
Milt made tea, ignoring them, while Bill entertained the Gilsons and Saxtons with Rabelaisian stories of threshing-time when shirts prickly with chaff and gritty with dust stuck to sweat-dripping backs; of the "funny thing" of Milt and Bill being hired to move a garbage-pile and "swiping" their employer's "mushmelons"; of knotting shirts at the swimming-hole so that the bawling youngsters had to "chaw beef"; of drinking beer in the livery-stable at Melrose; of dropping the water-pitcher from a St.
Jake said there was the greatest swimming-hole at Pawpaw Bottom you ever saw, and they had a log in the water there that you could have lots of fun with. Frank ran into the house to ask his mother if he might go, and he hardly knew what to do when she asked him if there was wood enough yet to get dinner and supper.
Many kind mothers fondly wish and frequently attempt to enforce their wish that children should learn how to swim without going into the water. Children see the folly of this and, in order not to disturb the calm and peace of the household, slip away to a neighboring creek or swimming-hole, for which they ever after retain the most cherished memories.
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