No Lifeguard On Duty: The Empty Pools Aesthetic

I’ve often delved, here and elsewhere—perhaps in an attempt to arrive at some personal understanding, revelation, or, even someday, catharsis—into the nebulous topic of melancholy. For better or for worse, it’s an indelible part of my psyche.

When I was a young child, I didn’t know that this “thing” was melancholy. But my intuition told me that, most likely, none of my paste-eating first-grade classmates looked at swimming pools in summer, filled with laughing, splashing kids, and shuddered silently at the thought of what they’d look like empty and ice-covered in winter, with the sky darkening and the wind howling around them. When they went to a carnival or a fair, they probably weren’t thinking about the carnies packing up the rides onto trailers and going home to some ramshackle flat in some moth-eaten town where they’d while away the months until next summer.

Well, maybe my friends didn’t go quite that far, but, through the years, I’ve realized that I’m not alone in my inability—or unwillingness, or both—to pop a happy pill and pretend that life’s just a bowl of cherries. Instead, I try to savor life—the light and the shadows. And I've found that many people--even the happy-go-lucky sorts--feel that way, too.

As I wrote for Crawdaddy in an essay on nostalgie de la boue, I’ve always had a fascination with—and simultaneous aversion to—images, art, music, and literature that consider the shadows--and often find value and even beauty in the shadows--without actually tipping the scales into the macabre or blatant darkness. For instance, while I love the nuances of Hawthorne and Poe, your standard-fare haunted-house and bloodsucking-vampires fare just don’t do it for me. Similarly, while rich, melancholy melodic and lyrical subtleties in a song like “Rockin’ Chair” stir my soul and make me feel more alive, Goth and death metal leave me cold and strike me as posturing.

Some time after my baby died in 2002, I decided to see a grief counselor. He offered me a little insight, but I had to fight my own battle (or, as my Mother always advised me, to "keep my own counsel."). We did, however, click on a personal level and have remained friends. One day, during the course of regular conversation, we got to talking about art and life and I mentioned to him that even as a kid, I'd found certain imagery—empty swimming pools, water swirling down storm drains, ghost towns, the smell of old books—at once interesting and spooky. I thought it was some soul-baring, outlandish revelation.

He didn’t blink an eye. “It’s very common,” he told me. “It has to do with loss. Childhood loss and fear of loss.” Because I had experienced early traumatic loss, he said, I’d developed a beyond-my-years understanding of the finite and the transitory. Seeing those pools filled and imagining them empty was a child’s way of processing the meaning of loss, the fact that nothing stays the same. Writing it now, it seems like a no-brainer—but then again, I’ve always had to take the circuitous, back-woods route to discover the obvious.

Turns out many, many, many other people have the same fascinations-cum-aversions. Some of these people are artists, writers, musicians, and photographers. Over the years, I’ve done a lot of research and exploration, and have found scores of books and websites dedicated to things like ghost towns, urban decay, and other nostalgie de la boue topics.

Recently I came across a critically acclaimed series of photographs entitled, eerily, No Lifeguard On Duty, by well-known photographer J. Bennett Fitts. The photos are of, of all things, abandoned swimming pools across America. I was amazed at both the glowing media coverage and the "me too!" web comments his work has received. They're creepy, but they touch a nerve. Maybe it's like artistic rubbernecking; on one level, it's repulsive, but you just can't look away.

Check out his pictures at www.jbennettfitts.com and see if you, too, get that sort of sinking feeling in your stomach-- followed by a sense of relief that, in fact, you're not there, you're here--safe--and that they're just photographs.