On Monday, around lunchtime, the reporter left the Harrisburg Hilton and started walking towards the Hall Manor pool.
He had no idea how long it would take to walk there. The farthest he’d gone south on foot from city hall was to a fire at Paxton and Cameron. On the map, which he poached via the Hilton’s Wi-Fi, it looked pretty far.
He passed the historical society and the shuttered Paxton fire station. At the I-83 off-ramp, he headed left over the railroad tracks, which for the moment carried no trains.
He was surprised at how accommodating the route was to pedestrians. Everything in sight seemed designed for cars: used car lots, a gas station, the wide-laned roads. It was a car’s, car’s, car’s world, as some Paul Simon-James Brown hybrid might have sung.
And yet the paint was bright on the crosswalks, and drivers respected the walk signal. At 13th, where the overpass crosses the highway, a dump truck with a sputtering diesel engine stopped dead on the ramp, yielding the right of way.
Why was he walking to the Hall Manor pool? Because the new mayor was going to get wet there. Who doesn’t want to see the new mayor get wet?
The pool had been closed for several years. It was leaking. Earlier that summer, though, the mayor scraped together money from a federal grant program for repairs. The pool was supposed to open in August, and the city put out feelers for contractors, but nobody bid. The opening was delayed.
The reporter was not good at predicting these things. In July, he wrote a story about how the pool would soon be open. To help tell the story, he went to the other city pool, east of the Broad Street Market. He drifted through the empty bathhouse, bought a sno-cone, and stood around the perimeter, creeping people out.
The reporter crossed over the highway and was very suddenly on unfamiliar ground. To his right was a grid of barracks-like apartments, connected by pale tributaries of sidewalk. Clotheslines were strung up between them. In the middle distance, a woman swept her stoop. To his left was a school.
He headed up Hanover Street into Hall Manor proper. More barracks, more hanging clothes. He walked up a vein of gold dirt, worn down by people cutting over the grass to save time. The grass was strewn with hundreds of empty potato chip bags, glittering like candy.
At last, he arrived at the pool, where news crews were setting up cameras. He wasn’t sure how, but he planned to record video on his phone, take photos and take notes in his notebook. He hoped he had enough attention left over to actually experience what was going on.
Soon the mayor arrived, in gym shorts and a T-shirt. The T-shirt, not really surprising, was still a relief. A shirtless mayor could be traumatizing.
The mayor and a member of his cabinet, similarly attired, chatted warmly with the gathered officials and members of the media. Two buckets were filled with water, then with ice, and left to chill. Everyone gave speeches, about the buckets and about the pool. Then the council president climbed a ladder.
“Eenie, meenie, miney, moe,” the council president said. She dumped one bucket on the cabinet member, whose note to himself seemed to be, A man shows no emotion. Then she dumped a bucket on the mayor, whose note was, It’s OK to scream.
They jumped in the pool. They toweled off. The mood was festive. The pool would reopen officially next year.
The reporter wanted to go back by a different route. He headed north to Sycamore, finding himself all at once in a lovely, tree-lined neighborhood. He came upon a corner bar, neon beer signs in the window of a brick-colored, split-block façade.
He went inside. Three ladies at the bar, nursing Miller High Lifes, looked him over. He took a stool and ordered a lager. One of the ladies suggested he was FBI.
He was not FBI, he said. He was a reporter. He was up here for the event at the pool. Where the mayor was getting wet—
They were not concerned about the wetness of the mayor. They were concerned about the pool. Kids had drowned in that pool, they insisted. The fence was too low.
“Drain that motherfucker. Drain it,” one of the ladies said.
The bartender did not think the city should drain it. He thought it should put barbed wire on the fences and a tarp over the water, or else it would freeze in the winter and kids would sneak in and break through the ice and drown.
The woman nearest the reporter, who wore a leather jacket and glasses, said she used to put a pool out in front of her Hall Manor apartment, even though it wasn’t allowed. “You’d think I had the Hall Manor pool,” she said. “Kids would come from all around.”
On the wall of the bar was a list of barred people. PINEAPPLE JUICE FOR MIX DRINKS ONLY, a sign underneath the list said.
The bartender began to reconsider his position. Perhaps a tarp would not be so good, he reasoned. Kids could walk out on it, get tangled up, and drown. “Yep, a tarp is more of a problem,” he concluded. “But that’s just one man’s opinion.”
What was the reporter trying to achieve here, crouched with his preposterous notebook in the middle of the afternoon in a corner bar? He thought about it and couldn’t come up with an answer. He settled up, stepped out into the sunshine, and headed down the hill.
