Hidden Hollow Files: You want me to do what?

The Hidden Hollow Files is an attempt to recount the golden era (1991-1994) of Hidden Hollow Swim Club, a pool facility nestled in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

For previous Hidden Hollow Files, go here, here, here, here and here.

Here's a nice little fictional story about what could happen if someone fictionally did something and needed a fictional solution to fix it. Also FICTION!

Digger X and Digger Y (why sully actual names - even in a fictional story? The chosen aliases will become clearer as the story continues) sat in the office, on break from the lifeguard stand, annoyed they couldn’t hang out on the porch, a popular destination for guards on break. In actuality, the porch was not really a porch at all; it was technically the roof of an old spring house that sat on the pool grounds, that was used as a type of “way-station” for the chlorine needed for the pools. Every so often a truck would deliver a shipment of chlorine into two large storage containers buried beneath the parking lot. These containers connected to a few slightly more manageable barrels in the spring house. A pump then took the chlorine from those vats and dispersed it throughout the pools, working on a time release system.

Theoretically of course. The times this system ever worked could be counted on a finger. So the pool routinely had to employ another time release method, explained in slightly more detail here.

None of that had anything to do with why Digger X and Digger Y couldn’t enjoy their break on the porch though.



For whatever reason, the owners of the pool currently had a backhoe down at the swim club, digging the ground around the pipes that connected the large storage chlorine containers and the spring house. None of the guards really knew why, but they certainly did know not to poke or pry into the situation. At least not while the owners were down at the pool. The owners never liked seeing guards not working, and so the less contact between the two parties, the better for both.

Digger X and Digger Y simply loafed about, dreading the idea of going back out on the stand, under the hot sun. To them, even though it was the main reason they were hired, sitting on the stand and ensuring the safety of the patrons in the pools was boring, unfulfilling work. They enjoyed doing other jobs around the pool, no matter how bad, simply because it meant they didn’t have to sit in the sun all day doing nothing but be paid to be a voyeur. So whenever something needed to be done, from cleaning filters to moving picnic benches randomly around the pool, they eagerly volunteered. Some jobs weren’t great (removing the grease from the grill), some were fantastic (anything involving the flatbed trucks) but in the end, they all beat big brothering the pools and making sure kids didn't run.

And, as luck (or extreme unluck) would have it, one the most interesting jobs ever was about to fall into their lap.

Apparently, digging a backhoe near thin, plastic underground pipes sounded much easier than it actually was. Because, within only a few short minutes of beginning, a vicious, yellow liquid began to fill the recently dig hole, emanating a fierce, strong, pungent, unmistakable odor that everyone familiar with the swim club knew immediately.

Chlorine.

The backhoe, diving too deep, (or not deep enough? who the fuck knows...), hit one of the flimsy pipes, rupturing it. Chlorine immediately began to seep everywhere, drifting off into the environment to do its damage. And because the nature of this chlorine system relied on gravity to deliver the chlorine from container to container, the hole sat pretty much in the middle of a slope, and everyone watched as the chlorine trickled down, toward the pools and beyond (beyond being a small secluded pond nestled on the extreme south part of the property, obscured by trees and overgrowth, but teeming with creatures that one would traditionally find around and in ponds. The equation of chlorine plus pond shouldn’t be difficult to figure out). After a few quick, silly attempts to dig the pipe up with the backhoe, the driver cordoned off the area, (the smell growing stronger as the chlorine bubbled up, mixing with the fresh dug dirt) and a new "plan" was developed.

* * *

The swim club manager walked into the office and saw Digger X and Digger Y doing much of nothing.

“I need your help.”

Purposeful or not, this choice of words the manager used had a magical effect on the two. It immediately got their full attention. Of course, that phrase only piqued their interest, it was the next phrase that sealed the deal.

“And I need you guys to keep a secret.”

At this point, the two guards would have had no problem getting rid of a dead hooker. A secret job was simply too good to pass up. Not knowing what the next day had in store for them, they eagerly pledged their secrecy to the manager, and got the scoop.

Because it was rather late in the day already, attacking the problem would wait until the next day, when there were less people around. So, told to come back at seven in the morning, a full hour before the normal early shift made it down to the pool, the guards happily accepted their assignment. They were going to find a buried, broken chlorine pipe. What could be more fun?

The next morning the sun came up, revealing a beautiful day for two guards with no training, qualifications or safety equipment to deal with a hazmat spill and clean up this mess. Digger Y stopped by Digger X's house, picking him up for their clandestine mission. They made it down to the pool bright and early, and along with the manager stood over the caustic, deadly mud hole. The odor caused tears.

“Take as many breaks as you can, as far away as you need to. As soon as you find the pipe, let me know.” With that, the manager walked off, his figure blurred and wavy seen through the vapors.

Armed with shovels and t-shirts tied over their faces, Digger X and Digger Y dug in.

To imagine the slow process of digging that day, imagine trying to scoop sloppy water out of a small child’s bucket. Now imagine trying to do that stoned out of your mind.

It was slow going.

Slippery traction... the heat of the day... a steady constant murder of brain cells... all these factors contributed to the slow, methodical digging. But none of them matched two incidents that at the end of the day, defined the dig to an imperfect “T.”


Incident 1 or, Hey you where are you going with that gun in your hand?

About 2 hours into the digging, a car pulled up and parked in the lot. Digger X and Digger Y both glanced up and saw a uniformed figure slowly step out of the car and casually glance around. Resembling a park ranger of some sort, the person began to walk toward the two. Coming closer, Digger X and Digger Y now saw that this person was female, and had holstered firearm by her side, ruling out park ranger and mall security.

The chlorine continued to fill the air surrounding all of them with its odor.

Standing on the outside of the fence, (or what was left of the fence that had been torn down in the back hoe’s wrath) she inquired as to what the two diggers were doing. They could now clearly see the EPA patch sewn on the dull green, short-sleeved shirt she professionally wore.

Told to keep a secret, the two realized the inanity of making up a cover story, given the current situation. Here, an EPA agent, apparently tipped off to an environmental disaster in the community came around to investigate. The situation was no longer simply a pool matter; in one brief instant it became a federal matter. What were the charges for lying to a government agent? Could Digger X and Digger Y get in trouble for lying? Could they get in trouble for not whistleblowing? These were the thoughts that ran through both their heads as they faced an armed, government agent.

“Digging.”

The response was short, to the point and above everything else, the truth.

Leaving without a word but a slight smirk on her face, she continued down the road, toward the pond. About fifteen minutes later, a ranch hand (as lackey just seems like such a negative connotation here) that sat close with the owners of the pool ambled down the road and addressed the two diggers. That he was the one immediately responsible for the chlorine leak the day before may or may not have had anything to do with his presence there presently. He slowly walked down the hill, his gullible confidence preceding each step. Both Digger X and Digger Y saw their dirty, tired, hallucinating selves reflected in his rainbow flavored Oakley Razors.

“You guys happen to see someone walk down this way?”

Digger X said nothing and simply pointed down toward the pond. Digger Y left him with a parting warning.

“Dude, be careful, she has a gun.”

He continued down the road, waving his hand above his head as a loose goodbye and followed the same path the EPA agent took minutes before. Whether he intended to seduce or kill her neither Digger knew, and would never get the answer because of the second incident.


Incident #2 or, You sir, just got an eyeful.

Digging continued, amidst the speculation of what might be happening down near the pond. Digger X and Digger Y reenacted the violent and sexual scenarios their minds (and possibly fumes) concocted, all the while still searching for the broken pipe in the slop. Through roots and stones and shale and mud they cut with their sharp shovel blades, paying more attention to the possible ecological disaster at hand, and less attention to the task at hand.

Until the explosion of chlorine.

Actually it wasn’t necessarily an explosion, though that’s what it felt like in the eye of Digger X. Digger Y in a common moment of not thinking about what the fuck he was doing, jammed his shovel down repeatedly against a tough, gnarled root, in an attempt to slice through it to get more leverage. The action of this rhythmic, repeated chopping sent muddy chlorine spattering through the air landing everywhere, and ultimately into the face of Digger X.

Ever been swimming in a pool for so long that your eyes get red and blotchy and irritated enough that you realize it’s time to stop swimming for a bit, and you look up and see a faded, hazy rainbow fuzz halo around all the lights?

It felt nothing like that.

Digger X shrieked. The shriek had to reach the office at least, as the manager came running, to find Digger X writing on the ground holding his face in obvious pain. Digger Y stood by guiltily. Without a second thought (or perhaps the second thought was of criminal charges and lawsuits), the manager scooped Digger X up and carried him off to the swim club’s office.

Being Whitney Houston to the manager’s Kevin Costner wasn’t one of Digger X’s prouder moments in life, but there was little he could do. While it’s probably true the one eyed guy is king in the land of the blind, Digger X didn't want to find out. The manager threw him down in the back room on the ratty, unclean prison cot illegal Mexicans sometimes used to sleep when down at the pool as a deterrent for kids trying to sneak in late at night to go swimming.

(Had Las Vegas been asked to create a line for people to gamble on whether or not the swim club had first aid for this particular emergency situation, many oddsmakers probably would have refused, suggesting (and rightly so) it would be next to impossible to make the number high enough to cover all the action people would have put on "not" to have the book break even and collect their profit on the juice (the 10% everyone who bets is forced to pay.))

In an '85 Villanova upset, the manager not only quickly found the first aid kit in the back room, but immediately put his hands on a bottle of eye wash. Furthermore, the found a (presumably) clean eye cup, also in the first aid kit. Grabbing the bottle, he filled the cup and held it up to Digger X's now bloated, reddened eye. Digger X could feel nothing other than the intense burning in his whole face. Apparently deciding this method wasn't working quick enough, the manager discarded the eye cup and began to liberally squirt the eye wash directly into the eye. With laser like precision, the hard stream of fluid splashed against the eyeball.

After the steady 30 seconds of eye flushing, Digger X tried and succeeded in opening the eye in question for a second or two. It took another ten minutes or so of wiping, tearing, and rubbing before it could be consistently held open for more than a minute. Through red, puffy and all around sickly looking, it miraculously seemed that was the worst of the damage, and better yet, nothing seemed permanent. As the day wore on, the eye made improvements and any evidence of a foreign substance dissolved by shift's end.

Though that was not the end of the dance Digger X shared with the harsh mistress of chlorine that day.

Feeling good enough to for whatever reason continue working, Digger X returned to the hole with Digger Y, and in a fortuitous stroke saw they had uncovered the pipe. Their work done, they returned to their normal pool responsibilities since by now it was close to opening for the day. Digger X felt no real adverse effects of the eye incident, other than a few streaks of tears throughout the day. Workers materialized later that day to presumably fix the pipe, but even that was done Men in Black style (the actual Men in black; not the crappy Will Smith movie that destroyed the creepy lore of men in black) and no one really said anything more about the incident. Digger X and Digger Y were even left to speculate what happened to the EPA agent and worker that was sent down to "sidetrack" her. The worked showed up days later, seemingly no worse for wear, going about normal business. Though both Digger X and Y wanted nothing more than to ask him what happened, they also didn't want to involuntarily become accomplices to a crime after the fact, so they begrudgingly let it go, content enough to fill in the blanks of this event with wild stories involving pistol duels and elaborate conspiracy theories.

5 o'clock ambled by, signifying the end of the Diggers' shift. A long day came to an end. Digger X, who now realized he had no ride home, figured he would simply walk home. Cutting through some woods and backyards, the trip wouldn't take more than 20 minutes.

The walk went by uneventful, and Digger X found himself opening his back door and walking in. The next thing he remembers is opening his eyes to see the blinking cliche of his VCR's clock in the living room of his house. Laying flat on the carpeted floor, twenty minutes had passed since he opened the back door - twenty minutes he tried but could not recollect. Shaking the cobwebs and uncertainty out of his head, and trying hard to not let panic gasp him, Digger X turned the tv on to lose himself in a Cheers episode.

Fortunately, that was the last, lingering effect of the chlorine dig (up to this point at least). on everyone. Because of the stealthy nature of the dig, few guards even knew about it even happening. The scar in the earth where the hole had been faded from the involved peoples' psyche shortly thereafter, and few, if any known repercussions trickled down to the common guardfolk. Other than the story Digger X and Digger Y had now to revel the younger guards with, no evidence even remained of the incident. And while the story was a classic that had people laughing routinely, people eventually turned their attention to the next great pool catastrophe.

After all, they happened about once a week.

The Hidden Hollow Files

The Hidden Hollow Files is an attempt to recount the golden era (1991-1994) of Hidden Hollow Swim Club, a pool facility nestled in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

For previous Hidden Hollow Files, go here, here and here.

Filter Cleaning

If the average person were asked to list the most dangerous jobs they could think of, lifeguarding probably falls near the bottom. After all, who thinks sitting out in the sun all day is wrought with peril? Aside from possibly falling off a lifeguard stand or the occasional bout of heatstroke (and you’d have to be really stupid to suffer that, since the nature of your job sits you in close proximity to a large body of water) there aren’t too many occupational hazards one could come up with.

And that’s why lifeguarding at Hidden Hollow was so different…

Danger lurked in many of the nooks and crannies at the swim club, making the job that much more interesting for teenagers who think they’re invincible. You either embraced the fact that you could die in a variety of different ways and went about your business, or you took a job picking strawberries in the fields with men that may or may not have seen the business end of a whip working plantations down in the south. Danger certainly kept you on your toes, and there were many a guard who couldn’t handle it.

Which is why it’s so strange that of all the things that happened to us at the pool, the closest I ever came to death (and it wasn’t mine) had nothing to do with faulty machinery, and everything to do with the evil that lives in the heart of man. To explain how it all went down however, takes a little background into how the pool operated, and how we worked that system to its fullest advantage…

Being a lifeguard at Hidden Hollow didn’t mean sitting in the sun all day and ogling bikini-clad nannies and moms who had treadmills in their basements. Off the stand, guards were expected to handle a variety of tasks that kept the pool operational. And as anyone who has worked behind the scenes of a public facility will tell you, one will find the underbelly of humanity doing those tasks. Apparently, the general public is a group that feels entitled – entitled to treat any place that isn’t theirs as a sewer. An involuntary witness to a variety of disgust and shame, Hidden Hollow could harden one like no other summer job could. As the movie 8mm told us, “There are some things you can’t unsee.”

Running the pool meant more than a sticking a few hoses in the pool to make sure they were chemically safe for people to enjoy. There were bathrooms to clean, trash to dispose of, trees to prune, picnic benches to move (don’t ask); basically a lot of general upkeep that people don’t think about and a lot of cleaning and disposal of things that people don’t want to think about. And since these jobs were less than glamorous, few people openly volunteered for them. Most guards happily slathered themselves up with baby oil and made a day of bronzing themselves out in the summer sun, paying lazy attention to the pools while getting paid. The boredom of a lifeguard stand seemed like a good option when faced with mucking out a bathroom.

Unfortunately, I could never truly enjoy the sun like my leather-skinned bound coworkers. Never mind that being a redhead forced me to see the sun as God’s assassin. Sitting alone for 8 hours a day twirling a whistle between my fingers just didn’t keep my brain occupied. And there were only so many 2-foot handball games I could umpire before the kids stomped out of the pool in protest of one of my calls. (2-foot handball games were great, don’t get me wrong. Being that the pool was octagonal in shape, it made for a perfect field. Throw a nerfball into the mix, and anywhere from 2 to possibly 20 (I’ve seen it) kids can have fun playing a crude game of baseball.) Seriously though, I can still feel the drips of sweat trickle down my back as I sat in those fiberglass chairs during high noon, trying to visually patrol a 50-meter long pool packed with summer vacation kids who made the extras from Escape from New York look like nuns. After awhile, my little remaining sanity begged me to look for alternatives.

Enter filter cleaning.

Hidden Hollow was made up of 3 large pools. One filter kept the 2 original pools of the swim club “cleanish;” later when a third pool was added, the owners realized the original system couldn’t handle everything so they built a second filter specifically for the new pool. Each filter sat within fifteen feet of one another, covered with huge heavy steel plates, to insure no hyperactive three year olds running through the grounds would plummet to their deaths. Too heavy for one person, they had to be removed one by one to get into the guts of the filters.

Without getting too technical (because I’m pretty sure no one knows the true technical side of it) pool water went into the filters, with all the leaves, dirt, food, trash, fecal matter, dead insects, plastic toys, sexual paraphernalia, rodents, etc. that landed or fell into a pool throughout a normal day, and after a rinse cycle of sorts through chemical-doused plates, would come back out, all clean and ready to face the day.

Of course, all that debris stayed in the filter, creating a delicious, gooey soup. And that soup couldn’t be left to stew for too long, so the filters had to be cleaned out about once a week. A simple definition of cleaning of the filters meant two people had to shut them down, completely drain them, get down in the muck and scoop out the clutter and diatomaceous earth (I think it was put in to kill bacteria, and organisms before they could amass and destroy humanity) with dustpans, hose everything off, give the walls a scrub, and then refill and turn them back on.

And yet it was so much more than that.

Don’t get me wrong. We weren’t baking cakes down there. Cleaning filters had its degrees of suckiness. Aside from everything I previously mentioned (chemicals, mutant bacteria, filth) there was also the fiberglass issue. The older of the two filters was beyond the state of needing to be replaced. That it continued to work during my tenure should be turned into a Discovery Channel series. Decomposing metal dotted the rusty landscape. Occasionally someone from the orchard whose expertise was in fruit production management would come down and patch areas with strips of fiberglass cloth. I am not a pool technician so I wouldn’t know the first place to buy this stuff, but I can’t imagine any reputable dealer carried it. When wet it had a paste-like malleable form, and could be easily placed in the nooks and crannies of the filter until it dried into a miniature mountain range or razor-edged crags, ready to take off any of my toes if I looked at it with a questionable disposition. But the hazards of cleaning filters paid off in one major way – it kept us off the lifeguard stand.

My friend Mark and myself turned filter cleaning into an art form. Where many guards saw a job they least wanted to do, we saw opportunity. We cleaned the filters so often it became our unofficial job. We created the filter-cleaning schedule, and let managers know when it needed to be done. In fact, we put so much enjoyment into it, other guards slowly developed a weird sort of envy. I guess you could call it a sort of reverse Tom Sawyer phenomena. Seeing how much enjoyment we took in something made it the “in” thing to do. Envy though turned into a lightly veiled hatred when they began to realize how much time it took us. In all honesty, cleaning filters needed about an hour’s time for two people; I think at the peak of our filter run we clocked 5 hours. But we didn’t mind the acid-filled stares we got from some of the guards. Management knew our value down in the trenches, and as long as we had their buy-in, none of the guards were going to be able to do a thing. We were a tick on the soft underbelly of an overfed/under exercised dog; we were dug in, and nothing short of suffocating us with Vaseline would make us give up that gig.

That’s not to say the head guard never gave it the old college try.

Resentment slowly grew among some people at the pool every time they saw Mark and I pulling off the metal plates of the filters. Resentment that Mark and I not only gleefully ignored, but even occasionally, pointed out, with pithy comments yelled across the pool. Things like, “Ha ha, we’re about to take 5 hours to clean the filters,” and “Sucks to be you sitting on the stand all day while we goof off.” Playful jabs designed to lighten the mood.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, they had a slightly opposite effect. People got mad, people complained. As I said before, our managers realized the filters had to be cleaned, and if nothing else, we did our jobs and kept them running. The time spent down there was a minor inconvenience they could look past.

Our head guard, Mowenz, had a different opinion of our work ethic.

He saw our deliberate pace as nothing less than insubordination of his authority. And, full disclosure, it pretty much was. Yet, everything we did pretty much was an insubordination of his authority, and our argument to him was, we at least were getting something done at the pool. Our arguments did no good. But since management was on our side, there was little Mowenz could do officially. It was our mistake not to foresee that would lead him through unofficial channels…

The newer filter had no Malaysian Gate fiberglass quick fixes we had to worry about. It pumped and cleaned at a quick pace, as it only had to handle one pool. But being more efficient didn’t mean it was easier to clean. In fact, of the two, this was the tougher job.

Roughly 12 feet by 20 feet, its trickiest dimension was its depth, which dropped to 12 feet below the ground. Acting like a bomb shelter, the plates were also considerably larger, and took up much more space. Cleaning them took nothing more than a hitting them with a hose from above ground. The hard part was taking care of the old muck. With the filter drained, it fell to the concrete floor, 12 feet below, beneath the filter plates. That meant one had to climb down, and then crawl underneath the plates, all the while scooping muck back toward the accessible ladder and into a bucket, that was then carried out. The major issue was that the clearance between floor and filter plates was about 18 inches – not a lot of breathing room. It meant crawling around a 240 square foot area on your stomach in filth, as water dripped on you from the plates above. Slow going and not the least bit appealing, even we dreaded heading down into this manmade pit to scoop muck out.

Yet it still had to get done, and we weren’t about to let some younger version of ourselves jump at the chance to out “us” us by taking a horrible job and turning around into an opportunity, so we routinely volunteered to clean this filter as well.

And that’s where we found ourselves one hot summer day… down in this pit, the steel plates off, the filters drained. Everything had been hosed off and we were taking turns scooping the pool’s gruel and bucketing it out. Like GI tunnel rats we belly-crawled through unmentionables, to reach into every corner with our dustpans.

Mark was underground. I watched him descend as I carried my bucket of slop to…well let’s not get into where things like this got disposed. It’s a boring part of the story and I’m not 100% sure the statute of limitations is up. Walking away I saw Mowenz approach the filters. Nothing out of the ordinary, as head guard he had to know how everything was going. Confident Mark would give him some bullshit excuse about why it was taking us hours to finish, I trudged on.

Coming back on the scene, I witnessed (a good, legal term apropos to the situation) something a little unusual. Mowenz, with a sly smirk, was climbing out of the “guts” which housed all the pumps, wheels and pipes that controlled the pool’s water flow. It sat right next to the filters, and that’s where we turned off the water so that filters would drain. I also heard the filters mechanically grind back on. I didn’t see Mark anywhere.

Curious, I quickened my pace to see what was going on. More annoyed than anything, I figured Mowenz didn’t buy any of our excuses and was forcing us to “wrap it up.”

I got back to the filters. Still no sign of Mark. Mowenz still had a grin on his face.

“Where’s Mark?”

No response. Just a grin. A grin with a purpose. A grin with a mean streak. I didn’t need an answer. That grin told me everything I needed to know.

Mowenz, in some sort of psychopathic glee, had turned the water on while Mark was still down below, underneath the plates.

Before I could make any kind of decision (dive in? try to turn the water off? Run and pretend I wasn’t there? Work on my testimony?) Mark appeared, stumbling up the ladder and out. Luckily (for everyone, I stress), the filter didn’t fill rapidly enough to trap him and he scurried out before drowning. How he avoided the numerous metal bars and hanging pieces in his haste I will never know; all it would have taken was one blow to the head to slow him down and create a potential crime scene.

Mark tumbled into the grass, and the three of us just stood there in a weird, amateur Mexican standoff; Mowenz with the grin still painted on his face, Mark simultaneously trying desperately to catch his breath and piece together what just happened; and me, in a state of amazed confusion, wondering if I should make a citizens’ arrest.

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next. I don’t think Mowenz realized what his actions could have caused. I don’t think Mark realized how close he came to dying. An uneasy calm settled over the scene.

And that’s the way it would stay…an uneasy calm.

I certainly replayed the events not only in my head, but also to any guard that would listen. This wasn’t something you necessarily shrugged off and went back to work. But that’s exactly what happened. To his credit, or (whatever you want to describe it as), Mark semi—casually laughed everything off. Whether it was meant to be just a silly prank or some sort of darker message, I’ll never know. It certainly didn’t speed up our filter cleaning, but it did force us to keep a close eye on Mowenz whereabouts whenever we went about our task.

To this day the whole thing hasn’t truly sunk in to my collective. I’m still not clear on the consequences had Mark never made it out of that filter. While I almost died numerous times at the pool and witnessed countless more near deaths, this was action was different. Not that our teenaged minds figured that out at the time. By the next day the event had become part of our vernacular, and I’m sure a few of the guards were disappointed by the non-tragic outcome. And for me, I was just happy nothing changed. We continued to slack off during filter cleaning, guards still resented us, and Mowenz was still Mowenz. I wouldn’t have it any other way.