My Swimming Pond

Oh, how I love to swim! Since I was a tiny child I have dreamed of having my own pool, but so far it has just been a dream.

“I have an idea,” I told Moe one summer morning, as we worked side by side out in mom's yard, spreading manure on the new lawn Moe had planted around her fruit trees. “I want to make a swimming pond up at our land, and make it look like the swimming hole up at the creek.”

Moe laughed. “How much will it cost?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know how I'm going to do it yet, but I'm going to figure it out.”

Moe didn't believe me, but I really was determined.

Silver Creek gave me the idea. It flowed out of the White Mountains, down through the tiny community of Shumway, then through Taylor, and Snowflake, right at the bottom of the hill behind mother's house, where we lived. Each morning I took a walk along it's banks, drinking in the smells and colors and sounds of the creek. While not really much like Haigler creek, from my childhood, it was similar enough to evoke memories of happy days at the cabin, and a deep longing for my past. Couldn't I find a way to replicate the creek up at our place?

I dreamed and planned and thought about how to do this. If I dug a hole at the back of our five acres, then created a creek bed from the well to the pond for the water to run in, wouldn't that work? But how could I keep it from getting stagnant, or mossy?

Maybe I could find some ideas on line?

“How can I make a swimming hole like in a creek?” I typed into Google. Wow! There were all kinds of suggestions, the most promising being how to create a natural swimming pond in my back yard. It was so cool! There were plans and pictures of swimming ponds all over Europe, and they were beautiful! I could do that!

So I began. I took a shovel and wheel barrow up to our place one morning when I went out to feed the horses while Moe was down in the valley, irrigating for his dad. Back at the far end of our place I drew a big oval in the sand, the shape I thought I'd like my pond to be, and I started to dig.

Those first few shovel fulls of dirt were easy. There were at least eight inches of soft sand covering our acres, and I filled my wheel barrow with no difficulty at all. Pushing it behind the 'pond', I dumped it. This was where I would make my bluff, overlooking the swimming hole, from where the kids could jump into the water.

It only took me a couple of days to dig a ten foot wide, ten foot long, eight inch deep oval, with a small hill of dumping behind it. The first few days my arms were a little sore, but not bad. I wore gloves so I wouldn't get blisters, but pretty soon I started to see calluses. Still, it wasn't bad.

When Moe came home I showed him my work, and he just shook his head.

“She's crazy,” I suppose he though, but he didn't say it.

I worried about leaving mom while I worked, but she insisted that she didn't mind being alone. Anyway, I would have been out walking during the mornings if I hadn't been up digging, so I rationalized that it was about the same. So, every morning I could, I drove the fifteen minutes up to our place, parked my car next to a cedar tree to so it would be in the shade, put on my gloves, turned over my wheelbarrow and pushed it over to my hole, and started to dig. It was so much fun!