Pooling resources

By Neil Armstrong

Pools have always been symbols of wealth. Nikolai Khrushchev, on a bicoastal U.N. table-thumping visit to the U.S. in 1959, was intentionally flown over California. Its suburbs, pock marked with blue ovals like partially tiled floors, were evidence of America’s unsurpassability in the game. Long before that, Aquae Sulis, the city now called Bath and named for its hot spring pools, was a popular getaway from metropolitan bustle for England’s Roman elite.

Today the largest resort pool in the world cost its Chilean owners over a billion dollars. You can boat across its saltwater. Even a cheap pool has a material allure. The kid with the largest paddling pool on the street enjoys his peers’ assumptions of comparative privilege. Wherever there’s money, there’s a pool. And, by extension, wherever there was a pool there was money.

A recurring dystopic trope in J.G. Ballard’s fiction is the image of the drained and abandoned swimming pool. Like an elevator found on the street, the empty pool is purposeless and disorientating. Its lifeless silence suggests dispossessed prosperity. Its opposite, the busy home and hotel pool, is evidence of a rich consumer presence. And a municipal pool is evidence of a rich municipality.

Ten years ago, the South Korean coastal city of Masan had two swimming pools. They were three hundred meters apart. On Saturday afternoons, it felt like the city’s half-million population was squeezed into both. The pools are part of the soccer and baseball stadium complex situated in Masan’s northern reaches. South Masan, which is also called New Masan, had none. Though commentators at the time preferred to focus on income per capita expressed in dollars, pool facilities in Masan in the year 2000 were a metaphor for the country’s still developing status.

Today, North Masan has another pool. It is Olympic-sized and the centerpiece of a sports complex so modern that it has an outdoor elevator to its subterranean car park. The only drawback is its cramped changing rooms. Men, at least, find themselves arching forward to avoid unwelcome moments of ``skinship.” Otherwise, the complex is spacious, welcoming, gym and reading room equipped, inexpensive, plush, and membership worthy.

It is a municipal facility with exclusive trappings. And it is popular. If everyone took off their swimming cap an aerial view would offer no sight of water at all. Serious swimmers who wish to butterfly stroke in possession of the whole lane may prefer to go private. Elsewhere in the city, such an exclusive pool is part of an old established club. The pool is shallow and short and the yearly membership deposit would buy a family car. Such places are an untrustworthy criterion for development.

It is all but impossible for Korea, with its rangy topography, to accommodate pools in Californian quantities. So it would always be unfair to benchmark the country’s development status by counting up the number of privately owned pools. To procure sufficient space, apartment buildings would have to be built in fifty story blocks of single room width. The cityscape would soon resemble a sequence of gigantic Jenga towers. But a country’s municipal swimming pools can be seen as a micro indication of its progress toward an advanced socioeconomic condition.

A high-slung notice recently adorned the busiest traffic intersection in South Masan. An all new sports complex, advertised as a swimming pool, is to be constructed on land that everyone agreed would be ideal for something municipal. Signed by our local government’s administering party of the day, exclamation marks stamped the sign as a boast. The authorities are holding out the promise of a swimming pool to tell us that we are becoming richer because of them.

They need this. Two years ago Masan disappeared as an independent city. It was integrated into the new tri-city Changwon conurbation. As the people of Masan prepared to subsume their identity into that of a neighboring city, no politician dared suggest that three cheatingly accrued swimming pools would act as consolation. Nevertheless, the South Masan pool will provide leisurely respite in an enlarged metropolis.

So as a name, I would suggest Aquae Sulis. And let’s hope that, save for cleaning purposes, it is never drained.

The writer is a lecturer at Kyungnam University. He can be reached at aex_nba@yahoo.co.uk.