I went to school from first grade through ninth in a tall building beside a river. Tugboats went up and down the river and one unforgettable afternoon my best friend Sue Sanders screamed and pointed and we ran to where she stood by the window. There before us, so large it seemed like it might get stuck between the banks of the river, was a submarine. It looked exactly like a submarine should look, silvery and shaped like an enormous fish, and on the deck, if I remember correctly, stood a band of sailors waving their hats at us, though surely we were invisible behind the window and surely sailors didn’t stand on submarine decks.
The river was our entertainment. Our school was the still point and the water brought us sights we’d never seen before. We felt like Marco Polo every day. How many barges could one tugboat push upstream? And where were the ferries headed? What moved the sailboats on a windless afternoon? Was that a washing machine headed downstream?
Our school was twelve stories high with a jungle gym on the roof and a place for the youngest students to run and play. On the ninth, tenth and eleventh floors were the gymnasiums where we played basketball, volleyball, dodge ball and even softball, learning how to use the four walls to our advantage. As well as gymnasiums, there were locker rooms, creepy old places with rusty shower heads, sagging shower curtains and walls painted a pea soup green. No one had used those locker rooms for decades, it seemed. They were like an amputated limb, no longer part of our life at school.
We played after-school sports indoors in the gymnasiums, or out on a pier hanging over the river (where many a red rubber ball went over the fence and downstream). To play, we never changed out of our uniforms (blue tunics, blue bloomers, white cotton shirts, knee socks). We were just as sweaty as every other school kid, but not once in the years between first grade and ninth did I ever hear the words “locker room.” We’d win or lose to our rival teams and go home unshowered, smelling like daisies, I’m sure.
This strange absence of washing rituals left me curious about locker rooms. Were they all fossils of an over-scrubbed past? Could I expect to find rusty shower heads and pea green paint in locker rooms everywhere? Were they dangerous? Unhygienic? Unsavory places of sexual exploits and scandal? Who set foot in them and why?
My journey began in the heart of this country and bounced from place to place. I had a single purpose. I was a pilgrim, not in search of the finger bones of a saint but the healing powers of knowledge. I was looking for locker rooms, looking into locker rooms, investigating them as a good reporter would. And over the years, what I’ve discovered is that locker rooms are where we transform ourselves from jittery over-caffeinated sedentary animals to equanimous mostly human beings. We do it by means of water and sweat rituals and, for some, the application of the mask we call makeup that allows us to create the face with which to face the world. We toss away our street clothes and adorn ourselves with bright bathing suits and muscle shirts shouting our intention. People arrive in a locker room like race horses at the gate, fidgety and tossing their manes. But they depart like angels, floating over the damp towels and puddles on the floor, sharing a kind word with the stranger who recently annoyed them in the weight room or snubbed them on the pool deck.
For the past 45 years I’ve kept a record of favorite locker rooms—locker rooms in unexpected places, in every season, locker rooms inhabited by friends and strangers, locker rooms left behind. We are in summer now, high season for swimming pools and the locker rooms that accompany them. Here are a few of my notes:
City Park Pool, Iowa City, Iowa. Summer, 1980. My first encounter with a roofless locker room. It rains and all our clothes get wet. We are here to swim and not too modest to walk home in our bathing suits, carrying our wet clothes on our head. Some put on the wet clothes over the wet bathing suit. On days when it doesn’t rain the concrete floor is too hot to walk on. The sound of flip flops fills the air.
Sunrise Park, Palm Springs Swim Center, Palm Springs, California. Winter, 2016. Another roofless. Desert winter swimming best in late afternoon. I am often the only female here and miss the jabber of women all juiced up to physically exert. Afterwards, the calm that comes with having done the miles. Like a rag wrung out.
Lebanon, New Hampshire, public pool. Summer, 2023. The pool is icy, the locker room filled with people taking long hot showers. Floor tiled, wet, slippery. Two women greeting each other after time away, one leaping over the centrally placed benches to give a hug. A woman leaning over the sink, putting on eyeliner, a dab of lipstick. “Oh, I like your sandals,” says someone. Someone else is asking if anyone has a spare towel.
Naked swim night, ladies only, Cambridge, Massachusetts, every third Wednesday evening. There can be no report on this one. I always meant to go but never did. Men have their night too, on a Thursday.
Wall Aquatic Center, NAU campus, Flagstaff, Arizona. Early March, 2020. No one knows it’s their last swim for more than a year. Their last stand under the hot shower. Their last conversation across the locker room. Their last peeling off of clothes and wriggling into bathing suits. Their last visit to the water itself, the massive pool, oceanic and chilly. Leaving the locker room I say to a friend, “See you tomorrow,” but it will be months of uncertainty between those words and the next.
