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Perhaps the first Palisades trip was a three day affair but the second time round was more like a week in summer, and it was hot and so once or twice the councillors took us to a public swimming pool in town which I thought was Iowan, and it was my first swimming pool ever. Tasted of chlorine and was very blue. The mighty Mississippi was right across the road and train tracks from where we were camped, but cannot remember visiting the river even once where I would have noticed the direction of the flow which was always left to right of my image of Tom Sawer.
The pool was crowded with kids and moms and even dads and it had something I was unfamiliar with, a low diving board and a tall tower in which kids did these neat cannon balls, which was leaping off the high platform, curling into a ball, grabbing tightly the squelched up shins, and one turn-over splash head first ka poof ! A spout of blue sun glistened water would high-rise plume, usually to splash the girls. And these young bodies were all brown and sun-tanned.
Did I do the cannon ball ? I believe I did. At the lake where I lived we only had the bridge to jump off, but it was too shallow although I did once dive from a boat-house by running it's length, to a dive-out ten feet, and the rocky shore was six feet of that, so I had four feet of shallow water and skinned my undersides on the bottom. And pool swimming, a jack-knife off the diving board is all I could ever do.
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