10,000 gallons of misery

If you have a thing for reaching shoulder-deep into a slough of decaying leaves and insect larva, you should definitely get yourself an above-ground pool. You could also go on the show Fear Factor, but then you’d have to get plastic surgery, prance around in a swimsuit, and eat unholy animal parts, too. Given the experience I’ve had getting the pool open this year, though, eating the terminal section of a pig’s alimentary canal doesn’t sound so bad anymore.

My wife Kara and I inherited our pool from our house’s previous owners. In a striking coincidence, they sold their house to us the summer after they built the pool under several tall maple trees. We should have sensed something was awry when we saw them high-fiving in the parking lot after we closed on the house. This is how bad pools happen to good people. They get passed around, like pink eye.

Neither Kara nor I had ever owned a pool before. Our first year here, the pool was a bog until August, when our friend Dan came to our house while we were on our honeymoon and fixed it up for us. We have no idea what shadowy art Dan used to turn the water from brown to blue, but we promptly closed the pool for the winter in late August, hoping to trap some of his magic in there for this year.

Last week, Kara and I decided that it was warm enough to take the lid off of Pandora’s Pool for the summer. The first step to opening a pool is to put lots of money into your checking account. You’ll need this to cover your purchases of chlorine and Prozac.

Then, you simply remove the tarp that is covering your pool. The only problem is that seven hundred pounds of decaying, dank leaves have been rotting on it since October. Because you can’t heft the tarp over the sidewall of the pool with all that weight on it, you will need a bucket and a strong stomach. The smell of those leaves could, as I recently heard someone turn the phrase, “knock a buzzard off a manure truck.”

You have to reach your whole body into the tarp, scoop out the putrid water and rotting leaves, attempt not to inhale any of the swarming mosquitoes, heave the bucket over the top of the pool wall and dump its contents into the neighbors’ flower garden. You must repeat this process until the tarp is light enough to heave over the wall and onto the ground, where it will stay until the fall.

I need to interject a brief story here: several months ago, a plumber who was doing some work in our basement told us about going on a house call with a buddy of his. His buddy was a septic tank pumper, also known as a “honeydipper.” The plumber and the honeydipper had to go do some work on an overflowing septic tank on a hot summer day. When the two men took the lid off the tank, the plumber had to step back from the powerful fumes. The honeydipper just stood there, inhaled deeply through his nose, smiled, and said, “Mmmmm. Smells like money.”

That story cost me $1,000, so I hope you enjoyed it.

When I came back into the house after removing the tarp, exhausted and plastered with rotting leaves, Kara employed a colorful simile to describe the way I smelled, but money isn’t what she told me I smelled like. You might expect having a pool to turn you into a Baywatch lifeguard, but in my experience, you come out much more like the Swamp Thing.

Anyway, if you’re bored this summer, feel free to come over to our house. Unless Dan gets here before you, we can go catch tadpoles in the pool.