WASHINGTON Shhh. Listen. A half-mile clamber up a steep trail of smooth boulders, a trickle of crystal-clear water spills over a wide, flat rock into a silent pool. The unbroken surface reflects a grove of arching pine trees swaying in a gentle late-summer breeze. The smell is distinctive. Fresh. With a hint of mud.
Welcome to the Mountain Run swimming hole. It's the kind of place Tom Hillegass has spent more than a decade looking for. He wades in. The water is cold enough to take his breath and numb his legs and deep enough to disappear into.
Perfect. Or at least, according to his scale, an 8.5 out of 10. "It's like being embraced by nature," he says. "Or about as close to an embrace as you can get."
Hillegass, a retired Department of Transportation civil engineer who for 12 years has run the Web site swimmingholes.org out of his Alexandria, Va., home, is about as close to being an expert on swimming holes in America as one can get. And with the swimming hole a fixture in the nation's mythical identity since at least the times of Mark Twain, that's saying a lot.
The first thing Hillegass wants people to know in this age of square concrete pools with chlorinated water and plastic splash parks with whistle-wielding lifeguards at every turn is that swimming holes still exist. There are not as many as before because cities and suburbs have swallowed up rural areas, and developers and landowners have fenced off beloved haunts. And the ones left are often so far from cities that people don't visit them like they did in more innocent times, when Twain lazed the summer away with every other kid his age at Bear Creek in Hannibal, Mo. But they're there, waiting to be found again.
There are the more-isolated swimming spots favored by hikers and outdoor types, such as Mountain Run, which can be found amid a confusing tangle of country lanes and gravel fire roads near Harrisonburg, Va. There are fathomless quarries with Tarzan vines and zip lines.
"Let go, Morgan!" friends screamed at white-bikini-clad Morgan Collins, 14, last weekend as she clung to the rope at Milford Mill quarry outside Baltimore and swung perilously close to the jagged rock wall. Eyes wide, she released the rope at the last minute and hung in the air for a beat before flopping and screaming into the greenish water.
There are clothing-optional swimming holes. Gay- and lesbian-leaning holes. Family-friendly holes with rock ledges and the iconic rope swing that Hillegass always feels obliged to try. And holes where, as in Twain's time, nearly everyone in town can be found on a hot Saturday afternoon.
The Blue Hole of Bergton, in the Shenandoah Valley near the West Virginia line, is that kind of swimming hole. At least in late June and early July, when the water's running high. But on a Saturday in late August, after a long dry summer, the creek had slowed to a trickle, and only April Chacon, 23, her boyfriend and her three daughters were splashing in the water. Wayne Hall, 24, had just returned home after being away for a few years, and this was the first place he wanted to come.
"I think I can jump," Hall said, eyeing the cliffs and unusually shallow swimming hole, where the girls were dog paddling. "I used to jump when it was only five feet deep."
"Yeah, because you're crazy," Chacon snorted.
The two remember spending summer weekends at Blue Hole as high school students in nearby Broadway, Va., population 2,192. Chacon, and everyone else she knew, came there instead of the pool. "I think of the water as cleaner," she said, standing on the river-rock beach. "I guess it's just kind of what you've growed up on."
Finding swimming holes these days takes work. Until Hillegass, their locations were just part of local lore, often closely guarded secrets available only to insiders. The location of other swimming holes, such as a spot off Violet's Lock on the Potomac River, traveled by word of mouth through the kayak and canoeing communities.
"Urban people don't know where these rural places are," Hillegass said. "In some cases, that's better."
Even with Hillegass' careful Global Positioning System-enhanced directions, it can take a long time to get to one. And the swimming has always carried a hint of danger. Hillegass warns on his Web site: "PLEASE NEVER, EVER: Dive headfirst (paralysis, death) ... Swim in upper pools of a waterfall (you wash over falls) ... Don't put your hands or feet into places you can't see (snake dangers.)" He notes drownings, bouts of poison ivy and reports of an amoeba found at the bottom of stagnant pool in Florida that can be lethal when it gets in the nasal passages.
It was these kinds of dangers that helped end the gauzy heyday of the swimming hole. Twain saw two playmates drown at Bear Creek and was twice dragged to shore nearly lifeless. Despite the likes of presidents Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover extolling the virtues of growing up at swimming holes, the murky, buggy places were soon replaced wholesale by swimming pools.
Chlorinated pools became popular on a large scale after the modern Olympic Games began in 1896. At the turn of the century, city fathers saw pools as a way to get street urchins out of rivers, swimming holes and creeks, keep them from view and get them clean. By the 1930s, pools became status symbols and marks of good parenting. A New York Times article of the period described the transformation of a popular pond into a community pool. "The parents of the children who swim there today show none of their ancestors' indifference to the typhoid bacillus. ... Concrete replaces the sides of clay and mud, and chemical treatment renders the water as harmless as that the city dweller turns into his tub."
Modern sanitation standards, the Times wrote, put most swimming holes out of business.
But the rocks, waterfalls and pools at Savage Mill, near Laurel, Md., can still draw the whole community.
Elisabeth Navarrete is 13. Since moving from El Salvador to Maryland last year to live with her father, she has come here for solace. She lives in a crowded apartment across the street. And though everyone from the surrounding apartment buildings congregates at the swimming hole, she can always find a place to think about the mother she misses in her home country, the beaches, the parks, the freedom she had to go where she wanted. By the swimming hole, she says, she can breathe.
On one end of the beach, a man dips a frying pan into the river and saunters back to a driftwood fire to cook fish he had caught. Tinny salsa music from a Spanish-language station comes from his radio. Upstream, a family takes turns in a hammock strung between trees. Young boys head to pounding waterfalls as the sky turns pink.
Elisabeth didn't bring a suit or towel. She didn't plan to swim. And she frowns at the plastic bag and empty beer bottle floating on the water. But her one friend, from Puerto Rico, isn't answering her cellphone. She can't remember the name of the middle school she started that morning, and she didn't like it much anyway. Today, she feels her world is "cerrado," closed.
She rolls up the sleeves of her purple T-shirt. She kicks off her silver flip-flops. She takes a breath.
And dives in.
EndStory//
