State-Sponsored Swimming

In the summer of 1954, I turned six, caught my first fish, and fell out of a tree house. It was also the summer I learned to swim. The last of those milestones came as a result of a strange set of circumstances that still brings a smile to my face.

It all started on one particularly sweltering July afternoon. My cousin Bob, my brother Eddie, and I had dragged a red wagon piled high with empty feed sacks from the barn down to the nearby creek, which ran through the hay field and under the road through a huge metal culvert. This was a really huge culvert: eight feet in diameter. The shallow creek made a sharp left turn just after exiting the culvert, forming a long sand bar along the water’s edge on the apex of that bend. 

We boys had commandeered a broken-handled shovel from my uncle Clarence’s tool shed. We knew better than to use the good tools without permission, and Uncle Clarence was at work so we couldn’t ask. We three were laboring in the hot July sun filling the first of those feed sacks with sand. We planned to then drag them out into the creek, where we would stack them together to form a dam, thus creating a swimming hole in that little stream. 

But, just like the best-laid plans of mice and men, ours also went awry. After filling that first sack with gold-flecked mica creek sand and stitching it closed with bailing wire, we immediately discovered that we couldn’t budge the hundred-plus-pound sack of sand. 

Bob suggested removing a tad of sand in order to make the bag more manageable, which we did. Eddie removed a hefty shovel full, but our combined effort still couldn’t budge the sack. More and more sand was removed, until finally we were able to drag the thing a few feet across the bar to the water’s edge, but one could hardly refer to the now pitiful-looking piece of burlap as a sand bag. It looked more like a 50-pound bag of flour down to its last couple of pans of biscuit makings. 

Even a modest dam would take a thousand such sad sacks to do the job. This was just not working. It looked like the three of us had worked up a steamy summer sweat for naught.

There we stood, calf-deep in the water, cussing the heat, the sand, the sacks, the too-shallow-for-swimming creek, and the    broken shovel when we heard laughter. We passed a puzzled look among ourselves and then turned our gazes upwards, where we were met with a rather disturbing sight. 

There on the roadside, 12 or so feet above us, stood a man in a blue uniform, the butt of a twelve-gauge pump shotgun resting on his thigh. Lined up next to him, on the shoulder of the road, stood six men in white North Carolina State Prison uniforms holding sling blades and shovels. They were obviously a work gang in the process of cleaning out the Monte Vista Road ditches. As we three perspiring, sand-encrusted, open-mouthed boys watched in amazement, the guard spit a stream of tobacco juice into the weeds, dragged a shirt sleeve across his mouth, then turned to his charges, and yelped, “Y’all git on down there and build them boys a dam!”

Six grinning and sweaty convicts scrambled down that bank and went to work. Within half an hour they were standing waist deep in cool Western North Carolina creek water, stacking the last sand bag in place on the finest swimming hole dam in all creation. Of course we three took full credit for that bit of civil engineering every time a neighbor kid was invited down for a dip. 

October finally brought weather too cool for swimming and enough rain to decimate that wonderful structure, but I will always remember the summer of 1954 as one of the best of my young life. Even today, 61 years later, I still can’t cross that little creek without silently thanking the North Carolina penal system for a crystal-clear memory of three boys, six convicts, and one very cool prison guard.

About the author: Michael Reno Harrell is a singer, songwriter, and storyteller in Burke County, North Carolina.