Wicked Leaks

Behind the farmhouse in which we live is a swimming pool that leaks like a sieve. If the thought of a large, in-ground swimming pool out the back of a modest farmhouse miles from anywhere seems incongruous, the fact that it leaks probably is not. Old by the standards of backyard pools, this one was installed in the early ‘eighties—a rare financial flourish for my wife’s famously parsimonious farming family, that resulted from what my mother-in-law describes as “the last decent soybean harvest we ever had.” So in what I assume is the pool design equivalent of feathered hair and big shoulder pads, this pool is huge, kidney-shaped, electric blue, and would have looked right at home in that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off scene where, after destroying his father’s Ferrari, Cameron topples off the diving board and sinks to the bottom. This pool leaks so much that more than once, after an afternoon spent trying and failing to find out where all the water is going, I might have considered ending it all by throwing myself into the deep end—if only I could be sure there would be enough water in there to get the job done. 

It’s not surprising that this pool leaks. Looming over it are the limbs of an ancient live oak that pre-dates the house (built in 1900) by decades, or maybe centuries. The root system of a large live oak extends at least as far as the canopy does, so it’s a safe bet that the roots of this one are fairly wrapped around underside of our pool. I have no idea whether live oak roots are capable of burrowing through concrete, but I can hardly blame the tree for guzzling whatever heavily chlorinated water is sloshing around down there. I’ve tried the obvious things: stuffing visible cracks and seams with putty; crawling through the grass on hands and knees looking for wet areas; swimming about with a face mask, squirting food dye out of a turkey baster and trying to see where it disappears. Being a D.I.Y. kind of guy (also known as a cheapskate), calling in professionals was a last resort, but eventually I gave up and called an outfit named American Leak Detection, which seemed nice and clear. The fellow who came out spent fifteen desultory minutes confirming where the pool was not leaking from (i.e. the pipes), said he was all out of ideas, and went away. This cost five hundred bucks, leading me to conclude that, armed with my turkey baster and a new tube of underwater putty, I was pretty much on my own.

Locating submarine leaks is hard, especially when said pool doesn’t lose water at the same rate all the time. There will be weeks (like when the American Leak Detection man shows up) when the damn thing doesn’t lose any water at all. Then for no apparent reason it’ll go down four inches in a day. So I spend a lot of time topping it up with a garden hose, which makes the water conservationist in me crazy. What’s more, pouring tap water into a pool changes the chemical composition of the water constantly, the upshot of which is a pool that is not only half empty, but also goes suddenly and stubbornly green. Add a steady shower of live oak leaves, Spanish moss, and squirrel poo from the overhead tree as well as the frogs and turtles that mistake it for an unusually symmetrical waterhole then die in the chemical soup that you’ve created trying to keep the water blue; and you have a backyard aquatic feature that could double as a set for Swamp People. In semi-seriousness I’ve wondered about just giving up and turning it into a catfish pond but worry that this would only attract apex predators, until we’re spending our summer nights beating off alligators with a telescoping skimmer net.

But having said all that, I am if nothing else an optimist. And with the first, balmy breezes of spring whispering of the long, hot months to come, the mental image of having a sparkling swimming pool to flop into after a hard day in the publishing trenches is enough to keep my leak location quest alive. Summer just wouldn’t be the same without it.

—James Fox-Smith

james@countryroadsmag.com

This article originally appeared in our March 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.