What I Learned From the Inflatable Pool
illustration by Brad Jones for Outer Voice
We live in a modest condominium in what I guess you might call the Ruralburbs — too far out to be the suburbs, not enough action to be a town. An anonymous region created by sprawl and overinflated housing prices.
We’re in the woods, but we’re close to Thai food.
Much of my interior life is narrated by an angry, guilty, looping monologue shaped by my latchkey, Reagan-era childhood and the fraught, often frightening relationship I had with my mother. This voice attacks my current bourgeois life, my white working-class privilege, my pretentious aesthetic and my propensity to complain when I have so, so very much. In many ways, my every action and reaction is sculpted by my relationship with that monologue.
It’s summer, and the pool is closed due to COVID-19 concerns. And that’s a good thing. Our city (like yours, I’d wager), has largely kicked public health to the curb in favor of “the economy.” I saw a recent meme of dinosaurs looking up at a plummeting meteor while a T-Rex cried out, “But the economy!” Replace the T-Rex with the Tennessee governor or Kid Rock or, I dunno… the President, and it’s all the same.
Back to our little living space in the woods. No pool. Summer. Teenager in the house. My wife and I have been landscaping our fenced back patio/garden area, partially to keep sane as we are both underemployed. On a particularly sweltering day of extended digging, we had an epiphany. Why not get an inflatable pool?
We can cool off, enjoy the fresh air and the sound of birds, the gentle swishing of the trees as they bend in the breeze. Our daughter is at the age where she is perfectly happy in her room, away from her parents, the sun and, frankly, the shower. She’s a budding artist, and has built herself a cozy, cluttered mammalian den where she somehow focuses simultaneously for endless hours on her laptop, iPad and phone. This will get her out of the house! Warm up her cavefish pallor! We can have conversations, drink mocktails, listen to Sergio Mendes. Genius! Let’s celebrate.
A couple of weeks and $80 later, we’re out back with the air mattress pump, giddy with potential. We’d spent the morning spreading mulch and prettying up the back, and it was time to fill the pool.
This took a while. The pool is 10 feet long and seven feet wide. Our back area grades down, away from the house and toward the woods and stream behind us.
Just as the pool was roughly halfway full, I noticed the drain plug. Which is located on the uphill side of the pool. Ok. I don’t know how much 524 gallons weighs, but I do know I’m not moving the pool at this point.
Next, we unveiled the pool to our daughter who, being 14, was underwhelmed. Would she like to try it out? Maybe later. She was “in the middle of something.”
Well, my wife and I would try it out. We squeezed into our swimsuits and stepped in.
It was freezing. Ice bath freezing. Summer hose water freezing. Polar bear plunge freezing.
We stood there long enough for our feet to go numb, then decided to wait until the sun had warmed it up a bit.
The afternoon passed. Then a day. Then another day. Then a few more. We have yet to return to the sweet aquatic embrace of our little pool.
Remember when I said I live in the woods? The pool has already begun its return to nature. Leaves, twigs, dead insects, live insects, bird droppings. Apparently we need to order chlorine tablets?
Another benefit of living under a gorgeous canopy of hardwoods and evergreens is that most of the day is in the shade. Which means that things stay cool… and damp. You know who loves those conditions and standing water? Mosquitoes.
Now one half of my back garden is a tidy zen space with black river stones, bamboo and bonsai. The other half is trailer park chic.
So, what have I learned?
Don’t buy an inflatable pool? No. I like it, and we’ll doubtless spend some good time in it (especially after my wife reads this piece).
But, here’s what I do know.
Pause and Plan
As artists, we value the process over the plan, and rightly so. But, whether we’re writing a novel, painting a mural, recording an album or planning a film shoot, there’s still a plan in there somewhere. Certain steps must be accomplished in a certain order. Then the process really flourishes.
I’m not an inherently methodological creature. I thrive on impulse, and on the hurry to get a task done so that I can enjoy its fruits. Although my creative work looks on the outside to be driven by method and ritual, its inner workings still require chaos, combustion and wild nerves to push a piece to its first fruition.
That’s great with the first draft of a poem or a song, for an initial concept or sketch.
It’s less useful when laying tile, filing taxes or placing a container for 524 gallons of water (that weighs about 4,735 pounds, by the way. I looked it up.).
In my exuberance to get that pool filled and to fulfill my lanai fantasies, I didn’t stop to say to myself, “There’s a three inch difference in grade from here to here. Maybe the drain plug should be at the low end.”
I don’t look forward to figuring out how to drain that thing.
I still value the compass over the map, as the Outer Voice values proclaim. But maybe first I should make sure I’m not walking over a cliff.
I Can’t Control My Environment
As much as we like to imagine the pristine work environment — the white box, the hermetic studio, the garret apartment — no artist in the real world has it. Our lives and the reality of making a living and being an artist see to that. Life is messy and intrusive and weird and beautiful.
I live in the forest. I like living in the forest. For eight years of living under the scouring sun of the San Fernando Valley, I dreamed of living in the forest.
The forest has trees, hence being the forest. It has bugs. It has birds and squirrels and turkeys and raccoons and chipmunks and cats.
Of course the pool is full of nature stuff.
I can’t stop the forest from being the forest, and I wouldn’t want to. I can work with it. I mean, I have a tarp after all.
Just as when I cleared a space for our resident chipmunk to get to his hole under our river rock garden, just as I rake around the toad couple in our front garden, I can work with my environment.
As my writing shifts with the times and the climate (literal and figurative) of our world, my cultivated environment changes shape to accommodate the bigger environment that holds it.
I Can’t Control the Outcome, Just the Framework
It doesn’t matter how much I plan to inspire you with this article, how much we want this song to break someone’s heart, this play to create justice or this painting to stop people in their tracks. We can’t make anybody feel anything. All we can do is our best. We can’t make people have the experience we desire, we can only build the framework for that experience.
My daughter was un-wowed by the pool. Well, she’s 14. She has, like, a zillion online friends to talk to on Discord right now? And anyway who wants to sit in a kiddie pool with their parents? Like, in a swarm of mosquitoes?
Flexibility. Comfort with ambiguity. It’s one of the keys to being happy as an artist and, apparently, as a parent. It didn’t work out the way I planned. So what? All I need is a bug zapper and a collander to scoop up some schmutz, and I’ll have some version of a backyard oasis. Family attendance is optional. I’d rather have a happy teen talking to friends than a sulky one in the pool. Knowing her and my luck, a bird would poop on her.
So, granted the HOA doesn’t complain and make us remove it, or our resident chipmunk doesn’t develop a taste for vinyl, the pool stays. How will I drain it? That’s future Clay’s problem.
For now, we have a thing. And that thing’s wonky and imperfect, just like us. And we’ll make the best of it. Because that’s what we do.
