As I pull up to Celes King III Pool, it's obvious I'm very out of place. It's an LA City Public Pool, located in the Cienega/Baldwin Hills area of South LA, and I am the only light-skinned, blond-haired person I've seen since I got off the 10 Freeway. I drive around the parking lot a couple times to get a sense of my surroundings. There's a public softball field to the left where a girls' softball team has just finished practice. A Hispanic family is leaving the public park next door and heading towards their car. The pool is located at the far right end of the parking lot, and as I park my car, two teenage African-American boys are exiting the pool.
I've lived around LA my whole life and went to high school in the San Fernando Valley, so I'm no stranger to diversity and I've never felt uncomfortable being outside "my area". But I have to admit, I sat for a minute or two considering whether or not to get out of my car.
It wasn't because I didn't feel safe; it was around 4:30 in the afternoon, and there was nothing about my surroundings that seemed unsafe. It was because I knew I was out of place, and everybody around me knew it too. I know this sounds judgmental and stereotypical, but I expected that the lifeguards would not be very welcoming to possibly the only white girl who'd set foot on that pool deck in a long time. Finally, still dressed in business professional attire from being at my internship all day, I walked across the parking lot towards the pool entrance, attracting some stares and confused looks.
When I walked in, the stares continued. There were a few kids playing in the shallow end and one older man who was lap swimming, but the pool was empty otherwise. There was a man in the office who appeared to be the pool manager, and one lifeguard on tower. Two girls, who I could tell were lifeguards by their jackets, stood off to the side talking together. I hesitated for a moment, and then walked over to them and introduced myself. One was a heavy-set African American girl named Kathleen and the other was a petite Hispanic girl named Alaina. I felt like my presence there needed some sort of explanantion, so I told them briefly about the assignment and about my past lifeguarding experience.
I started lifeguarding for the City of Santa Clarita when I was 16, so I knew I had some similar experience with them as far as being a lifeguard for public city pools, but other than that, I expected that our experiences would be worlds apart. And in some ways, they were. I asked them about how long they'd been at this pool. "I've been working here for 2 years, but Alaina and I have been coming here together since we were little kids, and this place hasn't changed at all since then, for like 20 years," Kathleen said. When I started working for the City of Santa Clarita, they had just built a brand new three-pool aquatic center, and three of the eight pools in Santa Clarita had been renovated by the time I stopped working there two summers ago. Hearing them share things like that made it startlingly clear to me how different our life experiences must have been, even when it comes to swimming at the local pool during the summer. I asked them what the worst thing was that they'd experienced here, and Alaina told me that a fellow lifeguard's car was once destroyed by a group of rowdy kids they'd kicked out of the pool. "You have to be firm with them but still cool, if you're too mean then your car may not be there when you leave to go home." This was shocking to me. I've had to deal with some crazy kids and some really difficult parents, but I've never had to worry that anyone would retaliate like that.
But as we continued to talk, I found that we had much more in common than any of us may have expected. They pointed out that the man in the office was their manager, John, and Alaina rolled her eyes. I shared stories about idiot bosses I'd had as pool managers, and they shared their frustrations with John. We began to swap stories of annoying kids that cause trouble, how crazy things can get when summer camps come to the pool, and the rescues we've done and injuries we've treated. I told them about the pranks we used to do to the other pools, like unrolling all their lane lines and putting goldfish and golfballs in their pool. They both laughed and told me that I'd given them some good ideas to use. I ended up talking with them for a good 45 minutes, sharing with each other the daily dramas of working at a pool and being a lifeguard.
Before I left, I asked the manager if I could snap a few photos of the facility, and he told me I could as long as I didn't get any of the lifeguards or patrons in the photo, for privacy and personnel reasons. I thanked Alaina and Kathleen before I left, and I walked out feeling like I'd genuinely made a connection with them, even though we came from totally different places, through something as simple as being a lifeguard.
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