#3: Samford Pool

This was supposed to be a love letter. An exaltation. A fanfare for the public pool. I’d call upon the muses, pray they sing of the high dive and the snack bar. The smell of sunblock and laundered towel and chlorinated water evaporating on hot macadam. Of the gutter and the lap lane; the wet sandal’s “thock,” and the belly flop’s “smack.”

And this was to be a recitation of its virtues on Independence Day, no less. With neither irony nor pollyanna in mind but rather, to go armed with the sobering knowledge of the country’s fraught past and its perilous moment and still partake of the Republic’s finest achievements: encased meats, cheap suds, and the public pool.

Pools make people more legible. People’s needs and desires become harder to repress. There’s the child, so excited by the prospect of a swim, that she cannot help but run across the pool deck, lifeguard’s whistle be damned. And the teenager who, on surfacing from a plunge, cannot suppress that vain little flick of his head. The parents desperate for a place where their adolescent children can while away a few hours. And the lizard need, across ages, just to get some sun. It’s all there, right on the surface, at the pool.

So given all that, there was something…unnerving happening at the pool that day. Or, more precisely, happening on the pool’s stereo. There’s no PA system at the Samford Pool. Instead, they have one of those rolly suitcase amps hooked up to someone’s phone. The pool’s small enough — 25 by 50 yards, roughly — that a single rolly suitcase amp can reach the far end of the grounds, no problem. And songs on the stereo that day, the nation’s 246th birthday, well, they certainly had a sense of moment to them.

While I rolled out my towel, Lee Brice was singing about driving a dead brother’s truck. “I roll every window down / And I burn up every back road in this town / I find a field, I tear it up til all the pain's a cloud of dust / Yes, sometimes, I drive your truck.” A bit maudlin for the occasion but it sounds like the brother died in service. So, condolences. Tree of liberty, etc., etc.

But before I’d finished putting on sunblock, Blake Shelton was singing about how whistling Dixie would get you heaven-bound and promising that “I don't care what my headstone reads / Or what kind of pinewood box I end up in / When it's my time, lay me six feet deep / In God's country.” Which, I mean, c’mon dude. Inane but also just a bummer.

Okay, but here was Miranda Lambert to lighten the mood, maybe? Not so: “Whether you're late for church / Or you're stuck in jail / Hey, word's gonna get around / Everybody dies famous in a small town.”

Pretty bleak. Isn’t today supposed to be a happy day? Or if you let the algorithm play long enough does it always land in a death wish? I looked around, a little confused, hoping to catch the eye of someone similarly put off. Slow day at the pool, though. Slow enough that the off-duty lifeguards had set up a basketball hoop and were shooting jumpers off the diving board. They seemed unfazed by the tunes. Inoculated, maybe. I hope not.

Maybe you’re hearing this and thinking to yourself, “Oh please. Spare me the pointy-headed writer being annoying about country music.” But I love country music. And not just those Terry Allen and Gene Clark re-issues, either. I’ve tried to play music for almost twenty years now and the closest I’ve ever come to entertaining anyone was with a rendition of Toby Keith’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” at karaoke night in an SEC college town. But this alienated, atomized, only-finding-meaning-in-consumer-goods-and-death country? I mean, to quote Greil Marcus: “What is this s**t?”

But the songs kept playing.

Now, you’re going to think I invented this next song but you’d be flattering my imagination. Every verse of this song is from the perspective of a dead so