Summertime, but the Swimmin’ Ain’t Easy

When the plane descends into Los Angeles and the pilot says prepare for landing, you fasten your tray table and straighten your seat to the upright position. But it isn’t until you look out the window and see the dozens of turquoise dots that are everybody’s backyard swimming pools that you know you are really home.

In Washington, it’s more likely to be some big stone monument that tips you off.

That doesn’t matter nine months of the year. But when summer comes and the temperature shoots up to 100 degrees and the humidity makes you feel like an eel, it’s as though the citizens of greater Washington--high officials and lowly civilians alike--suddenly realize that above all else they must go swimming. And with backyard pools relatively rare, they will do almost anything to get wet.

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Members of Congress, not surprisingly, have their own water hole, an underground swimming pool between the Rayburn and Longworth office buildings in the House gym.

“Why, just an hour ago I was in the pool,” Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) said Friday afternoon. His hair was still wet.

Wherever his job as a congressman takes him, Lewis tries to find a place to scuba dive. Once he went in the Red Sea.

Other members of Congress don’t find the office pool sufficient. Rep. Brian P. Bilbray, a San Diego Republican and lifelong surfer, lives five minutes from the beach back home but has to drive three hours to Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland, which is better known for wild ponies than wild waves.

“It’s frustrating,” said Bilbray’s chief of staff, John Woodard. “It’s not like you can go out and jump in the Potomac.”

It’s even more frustrating for the average Washingtonian. In Los Angeles, if you don’t know somebody with a pool, you can always drive to the beach. Here, as Bilbray has discovered, the beach is hours away, and the drive, which requires crossing two overtaxed bridges, often involves traffic jams that would make rush hour on the San Diego Freeway look almost pleasant.

It’s positively claustrophobic if you allow yourself to think about it too long, and without a pool, there is no escape. This combination of unfortunate circumstances has given rise to an entire pool culture.

Some public pools look like something out of a Cleopatra movie, with lavish dressing rooms and big puffy towels. One pool in Alexandria, Va., even makes artificial waves.

But those amenities come with a catch. The public pools in Arlington, Va., just across the Potomac River from downtown Washington, have waiting lists three years long. If you get on the list, they’ll let you pay $140 to use the pool, but not until mid-August, when all the more privileged members head for the shore.

“During the winter here, people go into hibernation and the beach cities are like ghost downs. Then when the summer hits, people just, like, explode,” said David Martinez, 24, who moved here from Hacienda Heights a year ago and is now a lifeguard at a Best Western in Alexandria.

At the Best Western and other local hotels, people pay substantial sums so the management will let them and the kids use the pool. Some shell out $25 apiece for six dips, and we’re not even talking a lap pool much of the time, just a measly little oval 8-footer.

Martinez came here a year ago and immediately got at least 30 lifeguard job offers, so intense is the demand.

“People don’t know how to swim as well out here,” he said kindly.

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This swimming thing has dogged poor Washington for nearly 200 years. The first White House swimmer was John Quincy Adams in the 1820s, who jumped into the Potomac buck naked every morning it wasn’t frozen, according to Dr. William Seale, a presidential historian.

More recently, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were said to have swum in the buff too, but in the White House indoor pool.

That pool was built in 1934 with the dimes of children from New York state who pitched in so Franklin D. Roosevelt could use it as therapy for his polio. A generation later, Richard Nixon had a floor put over it and built what is today the press room. The pool is still underneath, used for storage.

It seems odd that a president who hailed from California would have been the one to board up a perfectly useful pool. Then again, this is the same man who was known to have walked the beaches of San Clemente in his wingtips.

Lest we leave you with the impression that occupants of the White House have since suffered through the summer, it must be noted that Gerald R. Ford had a nice backyard pool built behind the West Wing almost as soon as Nixon waved goodbye from the helicopter.

That’s where the first family swims today.

Others are left to their own devices. Think about that next time you jump in the car and head for Zuma.