The green pool protects the memories

When I was little, all the families used to go swimming at a place we called the dam. We’d park outside the gate and hike in, barefoot or in flipflops, wearing our towels and inner tubes over our heads, carrying our bologna sandwiches.

The dam was actually a deep green pool at the bottom of a spillway below Kent Lake, with rushes around the edges. It had been easily 25 years since I was there, though it’s in Marin, only 40 minutes north of my apartment in San Francisco. It’s always odd to me that the scenes of my childhood remain so close, when the years between me and them stretch further every year. It’s odd to think that I can, whenever I like, go back and stand in my own childhood.

I found myself heading north across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin on every conceivable pretext this summer. I was coming out of a little romantic tailspin, and something in me wanted to go home. The feeling got so strong that one day I decided to take my kids all the way out to the dam, see whether it was even still there.

We drove out Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to the end of the San Geronimo Valley, where the road dives into the cool redwoods of Samuel Taylor Park. The valley, four little towns stretched along the highway, looks just the way it did when I was little. Even the Forest Knolls Lodge is still there, dark and dim, looking as if my mother might arrive at any moment to drag my father out. Only the cars barreling past on their way to the coast have changed, from Studebakers and Ramblers to Beamers and Hondas.

We left the car on the highway. You can’t park outside the gate anymore — there’s a sign forbidding it. As we walked in, I felt as tall as the trees, overgrown. I was 38, walking down a road I had never walked as an adult. Patrick caught a lizard in the bushes, and I knew exactly how it would feel trapped in my palm, its dry head butting frantically against my fingers. I couldn’t pick up a lizard now. I’d be scared of being bitten. Then we turned the last bend in the road. There it was. A new, bigger spillway climbed the hill next to the one I remembered, and the pond seemed larger. The rocky beach was gone, and though it was Saturday, there wasn’t a soul around. Green signs said “No Swimming.”

Otherwise, it was exactly the same. It had waited for me. I never realized before how beautiful it was, green and still, enclosed by the hills around it, a pool of quietness half a mile from the busy road. The kids didn’t want to swim anyway — they said the water looked “moldy.” They took off to explore. Left to myself, I sat on a rock and saw again the families spread out on the rocks, my mother chatting with the other women, rubbing Coppertone on her tanned skin and shielding her eyes to watch us swim. She looked as if she’d stay there forever, never taking her eyes off us.

On our way back to the city, I stopped at the grocery store on the highway in Lagunitas, the town I grew up in. As I stood in the doorway listening to the kids arguing somewhere behind me, I felt more at peace than I had in months.

Off to the right a wooden bridge led to our old house. Across the road was the spot where Kathy Peterson disappeared into a big puddle, Peechee folder and all, and had to be hauled up by the hood of her jacket.

It was wonderful, after all, to be a grown-up, to have the sun shining down, money in my pocket and the kids in back of me. And it was wonderful to have this, too, this green valley, waiting for me whenever I needed to go home.

I never realized before how beautiful the pool was, green and still, enclosed by the hills around it.