Diving Into the Mystic Waters of Memory

"Yeah, because you're crazy," Chacon snorted.

The two remember spending summer weekends at Blue Hole as high school students in nearby Broadway, Va., population 2,192. Chacon, and everyone else she knew, came there instead of the pool. "I think of the water as cleaner," she said, standing on the river-rock beach. "I guess it's just kind of what you've growed up on."

Finding swimming holes these days takes work. Until Hillegass, their locations were just part of local lore, often closely guarded secrets available only to insiders. The location of other swimming holes, such as a spot off Violet's Lock on the Potomac River, traveled by word of mouth through the kayak and canoeing communities. "Urban people don't know where these rural places are," Hillegass said. "In some cases, that's better."

Even with Hillegass's careful Global Positioning System-enhanced directions, it can take a long time to get to one. And the swimming has always carried a hint of danger. Hillegass warns on his Web site: "PLEASE NEVER, EVER Dive headfirst (paralysis, death) . . . Swim in upper pools of a waterfall (you wash over falls) . . . Don't put your hands or feet into places you can't see (snake dangers.)" He notes drownings, bouts of poison ivy and reports of an amoeba found at the bottom of stagnant pool in Florida that can be lethal when it gets in the nasal passages.

It was just this kind of danger that helped put an end to the gauzy heyday of the swimming hole. Twain saw two playmates drown at Bear Creek and was twice dragged to shore nearly lifeless. Despite the likes of presidents Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover extolling the virtues of growing up at swimming holes, the murky buggy places were soon replaced wholesale by swimming pools.

Chlorinated pools became popular on a large scale after the modern Olympic Games began in 1896. At the turn of the century, city fathers saw pools as a way to get street urchins out of rivers, swimming holes and creeks, keep them from view and get them clean. By the 1930s, pools became status symbols and marks of good parenting. A New York Times article of the period described the transformation of a popular pond into a community pool. "The parents of the children who swim there today show none of their ancestors' indifference to the typhoid bacillus. . . . Concrete replaces the sides of clay and mud, and chemical treatment renders the water as harmless as that the city dweller turns into his tub."

Modern sanitation standards, the Times wrote, put most swimming holes out of business.

But the rocks, waterfalls and pools at Savage Mill can still draw the whole community, even on a Monday evening after work. Elisabeth Navarrete is 13. Since moving from El Salvador to Maryland last year to live with her father -- her parents are separated -- she has come to the spot for solace. She lives in a crowded apartment across the street. And though everyone from the surrounding apartment buildings congregates at the swimming hole, she can always find a place to think -- about the mother she misses in her home country, the beaches, the parks, the freedom she had to go where she wanted. By the swimming hole, she says, she can breathe.

On one end of the beach, a man dips a frying pan into the river and saunters back to a driftwood fire to cook fish he had caught. Tinny salsa music from a Spanish-language station comes from his radio. At the other end, a mother and father dive into the water and call to their two little ones: "Dale! Dale! Dale!" Come in! Come in! Come in! Upstream, a family takes turns in a hammock strung between trees. Young boys, ripping off their jeans and swimming in their boxers, head to pounding waterfalls as the sky turns pink.

Navarrete, in overall shorts, didn't bring a suit or towel. She didn't plan to swim. And she frowns at the plastic bag and empty beer bottle floating on the water. But her one friend, from Puerto Rico, isn't answering her cellphone. She can't remember the name of the middle school she started that morning, and she didn't like it much anyway. Today, she feels her world is "cerrado," closed.

She rolls up the sleeves of her purple T-shirt. She kicks off her silver flip-flops. She takes a breath.

And dives in.