The past couple of blogs have been a bit heavier in content. Let’s take a look at a somewhat lighter topic today! OK. It’s true confession time! How many of you will actually admit to having gone skinny dipping? You do know what that is, right? It is swimming butt-naked, usually with the connotation of doing it secretly. Now I guess we have all done things that our parents didn’t know about. This was one of my little adventures.
Camp Kiwanis YMCA
Somewhere in my mid-teens, my best friend June and I decided to give skinny dipping a try. Now we were both strong swimmers and often participated in summer swim meets and classes. She lived about a mile or two from me, and we often spent the night at one another’s house. She lived in a somewhat more upscale neighborhood than I did with tall shade trees in the back yard and lush, green St. Augustine grass where you could actually walk barefoot outside. I think I have mentioned before that our yard was a mix of weeds, a bit of Bermuda grass, and lots and lots of goats-head stickers just waiting to puncture anyone stupid enough to go barefoot in the yard.
Camp Kiwanis Grounds
June and I were inseparable buddies from the fourth grade all the way through high school, What one of us didn’t think of, the other usually did. I don’t recall whose idea it was initially, but we decided that we would sneak out of her house in the middle of the night and go swimming. Her house was about a mile from Bachman Lake in Dallas. One of our favorite activities was to hike all the way around the lake. There was a YMCA camp next to the lake, called Camp Kiwanis. Built in the twenties, it served decades of young kids and teens until it was finally closed and torn down in the nineties. We used to go to summer camp there. Activities included games, crafts, canoeing, and my favorite, swimming. We even had occasional swim meets with our peers and other Y groups and camps.
So, it was only natural that when we decided to go swimming au naturel, we should pick the familiar pool at Bachman Lake for our escapade. I don’t recall the exact time, but somewhere about 2:00 AM or so, we donned our clothes and sneakers, and out we went. To get over to the lake, we had to cross Northwest Highway, a busy four lane highway even in those days. Luckily for us, it was very quiet with no traffic in either direction at that hour of the night. Across the highway we went and then strolled along the grass and under the trees to the Y Camp and pool. There were no street lights or any kind of security guards on duty. Once again, lucky for us!
Once there, we quickly scaled the tall fence around the pool. We discarded our clothes and quickly slipped into the dark, still water. The total feeling of freedom with the cool water flowing along your body was a delight. We swam leisurely back and forth the length of the pool multiple times, enjoying the darkness and the water. When we had our fill of swimming, we dressed again. We hadn’t bothered to bring any towels, so we just scrambled back into our clothes still dripping and retraced our steps back home again—over the fence again, along the dark quiet lake shore, across the highway, and back to bed.
Site of the old pool
I suppose if her parents had happened to look in on us, they might have wondered why our hair and the pillows were wet! We didn’t do it again, just the one time. Those were no doubt safer days with less to worry about! As the adult looking back several decades later, I am somewhat surprised at myself that we actually did it!
Interesting side note to this story—as I was looking on the internet trying to see if the camp still existed, I actually ran into a Camp Kiwanis Alumni Facebook page with some old photos of that old camp. Like my old elementary school that I wrote about a couple of months ago, it too is long gone. The photographs that I have attached show the big old, white camp building, some of the tree-shaded grounds, and the outline of the now filled-in old pool where June and I did our infamous skinny dipping!
Ah! The wonders of Google! Isn’t it interesting that google has actually evolved into a verb in today’s lexicon!!
©The Eclectic Grandma, 2017
