Swimming Strokes, Beaches, Swimming Holes and a Pig

Swimming in St. Louis and Sunny Florida:

Summer in St. Louis could be hot and humid and finding ways to cool off were not always easy. My mother, a person completely enamored by all things and all people of Hollywood, had fallen in love with a former Olympic Gold Medal swimmer-turned-movie-star by the name of Esther Williams. Esther's movies always featured at least one or two grand swimming scenes where she showed off her perfect strokes and emerged from the water like some sea nymph in a swimming cap adorned with lovely rubber flowers and a strap smartly secured beneath her chin, make-up in tact, and a smile that flashed perfectly white, straight teeth. Having been a child of the Great Depression and growing up poor in the city, Mom surely left the theater believing this to be the most beautiful thing she had ever seen and so once I was old enough (about six) to participate in a children's class while she swam in the adult classes, she joined the YWCA and we went together once a week in the evening after Dad got home from work when she could use the car. At that time, the Y was split - one for men, the YMCA, and one for women - probably to ensure there was no inappropriate mixing of the sexes while in the water or something ridiculous like that. Mom mastered all the strokes from the crawl to the side stroke, but she excelled at the breast stroke. A powerful and graceful swimmer, she enjoyed showing off her skills. Something tells me that while she swam, she envisioned herself an Esther Williams swimming, the camera rolling, and sometimes a camera did roll - Dad's. I am not sure where my father learned to swim, but he too was a great swimmer. On our first vacation to Clearwater Beach, Florida, I stood at the edge of the waves to watch them swim together out to the sand bar where they then stood up and waved at me, laughing at my surprise that they could stand up so far out in the ocean! The two of them swimming side-by-side along the sand bar was a site to behold and watching them always made me feel proud. They were so young - at the time in their late twenties - and so handsome together. Mom always wore a swim cap with lovely rubber flowers and a strap smartly secured beneath her chin. Just like Esther Williams.

Although I was never to be as strong a swimmer as my mother, I took to the water. I was about eight years old when we took our first vacation to Florida. We did not have enough money to stay in a hotel or motel, so we piled in with our aunts and uncles who lived in the Tamp Bay area. My Aunt Esther and Uncle Bob Moresi were the parents of my favorite playmate cousin Bobby Joe who was three years old than I. My Uncle Bob and Aunt Eleanor Pointer were the parents of my other cousin Mike who was also three years older, but he was more mischievous and scared me a bit. Regardless, these were the days when fewer people frequented the Clearwater public beaches and the sand stretched as far as the eye could see with Mom-and-Pop motels scattered here and there. On the weekends, we loaded the cars with grills, towels, cheap rubber rafts, and coolers filled with food and headed to the beach early in the morning where we spent the entire day. Dad and my uncles made sure the cooler of beer was nearby as they set up grills to cook steaks, while Mom and my aunts spread out blankets for sunbathing and supervised the kids. I know that there was hard liquor too, but I was too young and having too much fun to notice. At that time, apparently no one else cared either. Empty beaches made for lax rules. I think spending time on the beach with a few beers and my uncles might have been some of my dad's happiest days.

While my uncles worked during the week, Mom and Dad planned sight-seeing excursions. We visited places such as St. Augustine, the Ringling home in Sarasota, and Cypress Gardens - Mom's favorite place. Cypress Gardens opened in 1936, hosted over 8,000 varieties of plants on the grounds where women strolled dressed as Southern Belles in large, hooped skirts and oversized bonnets. Mom loved the water-ski show best and not only was the idea of Plantation, slave-owning Southern Belles accepted, no one thought a thing about the giant Confederate flag the skiers waved high over their heads while they zipped across the water. Come to think of it, not a black soul was seen at Cypress Gardens when I was a child. Nor, at the beach, in the restaurants, or at any of the other sights for that matter. I suppose black people in Florida had better things to do with their time, like hide from the police and work for white people. The 1950s had many blessings, but this was not one of them.

One of the best parts of our excursions was eating lunch out, which always took place at a Burger King, a chain of burger fast food restaurants started in Jacksonsville, Florida in 1953. A Burger King stand could always be found on the side of the road and here, our little family could sit outdoors in the heat under an umbrella at a concrete table with comfy concrete benches, all decorated with colorful bits of ceramic embedded hodgepodge into them, to consume a hamburger, fries, and a milk shake, thinking it was the best fun ever. All for about 50 cents a meal.

The Pig and the Causeway:

The 23 mile long Clearwater Memorial Causeway that spans between Tampa and the Clearwater beaches provided its own small beaches, and the 9.9 miles of Courtney Campbell Causeway that opened in 1934 and connects Eastern Clearwater and Tampa's Rocky Point was a place of interest for my parents and extended family to organize a nighttime pig roast on a stretch of the causeway sands. Why here? Well, because at that time there were no bike paths, grass, or fancy landscaped beach areas. Just sand, some palm trees, and a few picnic tables. I'm not sure whose idea it was to stick an entire pig on a spit and roast it, but everyone must have agreed that it sounded like a jolly time and that the darkness on the causeway would provide the activity some sequestration, something the more pristine and populated Clearwater Beaches could not provide. Apparently, no one worried the large fire it would take to roast a fifty pound pig would attract any attention. Even then, I'm not sure it was legal but the pig roast was on and at least a dozen adults and twice as many kids met around noon on a small patch of sand along the causeway in the middle of Tampa Bay to party. After a full afternoon of swimming, fishing, and drinking, every adult was three sheets to the wind and the kids were thoroughly coated in sand and fried by the sun like little baked chicken legs. Between the squeals of kids running wild, raucous laughter, banter, and joke telling around the fire among the adults while the pig sizzled and popped, the evening began to resemble a new version of Lord of the Flies, only in this telling, it was the adults who appeared to have removed themselves from civilization. I recall their faces burnished in the firelight and their voices low when recounting something the children shouldn't overhear followed by sinister laughter. Removed from the roles I was familiar with, they no longer looked like my loving aunties and uncles, the people that had always made me feel safe. In the darkness, I began to feel frightened and wanted to go back to the motel. I needed a bath and wanted to crawl into the safety of my bed. I looked out into the bay and saw nothing: everything beyond the fire and even what could be discerned by the light of the moon was a void. The bay made water sounds but without the sun baking down on it, those sounds became ominous, harboring the unknown like the monsters under my bed and behind my bedroom closet door. Rather than run into my parents bedroom to seek reassurance, here I had to seek out my mother or father as they mixed in with the other adults, many of whom showed up after dark and I didn't know. Just as I decided to find my parents and beg them to leave, someone shouted that the pig smelled like "shit". Bellows of laughter ensued. "Who was supposed to dress this pig?" someone yelled, pinching his nostrils together. Then cries of: "It stinks." "Oh my God, it's disgusting!" More laughter, then a scream: "RUN!"

When a pig cooks long enough and gets hot enough, it becomes a sack of hot fat. Keeping the mouth pried open, via ye olde apple, allows the heat to travel through the pig, cooking its insides as well as allowing an escape for any excess heat. However, our pig was dressed by an amateur and obviously no one at the pig roast knew anything about roasting a pig to begin with so the mouth remained closed, the pig had not been properly gutted, and the fat dripping into the coals below created a fierce and tidy flame that shot up into the pig and set it on fire. That sack of hot fat exploded like a chemical combustion. Missiles of pig meat flew through the night air, chunks of fat looking like Agent Orange splattered in the sand, and when the pig's head burst, I heard bombs that resounded like Tschaikovsky's 1812 Overture crescendo. Children cried for their mothers, men shouted orders and yelled, women screamed and cursed the men who shouted orders and yelled. Running, parents threw their children over their shoulders and under their arms, men grabbed their coolers, women gathered up towels and food paraphernalia. Everyone headed for their cars, doors slamming, trunks banging, engines revving, and tires crunching across the sand and shells up onto the pavement of the causeway. I looked out the back window of the car to watch the pig's remains left behind to burn out in the sand and silently thanked it for exploding so that I could go back to the safety of our motel room. Poor pig. I was a bit angry at my parents. I even wondered if my whole family might be nuts. Who gets drunk and roasts a pig in the middle of the night on a causeway in the middle of Tampa Bay? Why would anyone want to do that in the first place? Why not just roast some wieners? And mostly, why bring around a couple of dozen kids along to witness the entire fiasco? Perhaps that night I realized adults are not always as wise and disciplined as I was led to believe. Strangely enough, however, when all was said and done, my parents behaved as if nothing had ever happened and the next morning I was reprimanded for not brushing my hair properly before going outside. For going outside to jump in the swimming pool, for Pete's sake. Who IS Pete, anyway?

Clearwater Beach:

For years, we went to Florida every summer and after Dad made a little more money, instead of staying with relatives, we were able to rent a cottage on Clearwater Beach. The cottage that sat directly on the beautiful white sand facing the clear water of a pristine beach not yet polluted with high-rise hotels and condos had no air-conditioning, no television, and no phone. Each of the half dozen or so cottages, however, did have a screened-in porch with "sleepers" - small day beds that provided the most delightful night's sleep where the sound of the lapping waves came not from a sleep machine but from the expanse of the Gulf of Mexico just yards away. My parents adored Mrs. Dukas, the lovely, older Greek woman who owned the cottages and the beach sand they sat on. At age ten, anyone over 25 looked old to me - even my parents who at that time had reached the ripe old age of 31- so I have no idea how old Mrs. Dukas was but I never saw a Mr. Dukas and she appeared to run the business by herself. From this, I assume she was a widow. Although our accommodations were far from fancy, the freedom that came with them had no price and the privacy and lack of restrictions would be difficult to replicate today. We three kids - my brother, sister, and I - could crash out the cabin's screen door directly onto the sand and run down to the water where we played all day until our little arms were beet red, our hair was bleached white, and our swimsuits were filled with salt and sand. We did this without seeing nary another soul. My brother and I were allowed to walk down the road that led from our motel to a little beach shack that sold cold sodas, beach paraphernalia, and my brother's favorite coconut heads, which were coconuts painted to look like a face with shells for eyes and feathers glued at the top as a headdress. For two dollars, we could purchase a coconut head, sodas, and some chips or cookies. And we did this by ourselves without supervision. Two little kids: eight and five, having the time of their lives feeling free and independent. A far cry from the arranged "playdates" of today. On the weekends, our aunts, uncles, and cousins showed up (along with their grills, bathing suits, towels, and cheap inflatable rafts) and my dad and my uncles would grab their fishing poles and throw out their lines along the crest of the waves to catch whitefish, but I mostly recall the laughter and joking among them. Happy times. A couple of years later, my parents opted to stay at the newly built Lagoon Motel complete with swimming pool because the cottages were so infested with sand fleas sleeping became impossible. A few more motels, and a high rise here and there, were build and within a couple of years the cottages and Mrs. Dukas disappeared, but not before she offered Dad some five acres of her beach property for ten thousand dollars. Dad declined, not because he didn't want the beach property but because he didn't have ten thousand dollars to pay for it. Within a decade, that same beach property was worth a million dollars and it was one regret Dad often bemoaned out loud.

Today, Clearwater Beach is so choked with hotels and condos the beach I remember is nearly gone, as is the little snack shack and Mrs. Dukas's cottages. Amazingly, the Lagoon Motel was still there when my husband and I visited in 2006. But I was disappointed that the sea breeze was blocked by high-rise buildings, that a large swatch of beach had disappeared because hotels had been built so close to the water's edge, that the streets and sidewalks were congested with people and cars, and that the quiet evenings where the waves could be heard lapping against the sand was drowned out by loud music playing at the outdoor bars along the beach front. The red tide washed so many dead fish onto the shore that the odor kept us from sitting on the beach. The water was no longer clear, but murky. My memories and the new growth of the area did not mix well. My husband and I never returned. When I think of Clearwater, I think of it as it was when I was a child. Then again, the Tocobaga tribe that lived there until the 16th century would probably have wanted to remember the area before the Spanish came, bringing disease and violence. The Tocobaga became extinct within 100 years and now, much of everything else in Clearwater is gone as well. Maybe we reminisce because we search for the beauty we have destroyed. Maybe one day, we will disappear as well.

Coconut Heads