From the looks of the tables crowded with classic pool fare-burgers, quesadillas, “country-style” chicken fingers-as well as trays being whisked back and forth carrying cocktails with fun names like Caribbean Kiss and Summer Catch, the strategy seems to be a profitable one. If I want anything to eat or drink, I’ll need to buy it from the High Dive bar and grill. Stacks of white-and-pale-blue-striped towels for the taking-my love language-greet me at the entryway to the pool area, where an attendant searches my bag for food and beverage. I leave, thinking, “Isn’t that what the lazy river is for?” “We just want to chill for a bit,” they respond. Willa and her friend, on the other hand, immediately sprawl on the beds and sign into my Netflix account. I’m not going to waste another minute of this day indoors. Once in our pool-view room, I drop my bags and change into my swimsuit. The front-desk receptionist checks us in and gives us three plastic wristbands that let us access the sixth-floor Altitude Rooftop & Pool, which is open only to hotel guests, though day passes are available Monday through Thursday. But baseball, beer, and hot dogs will have to wait for a future visit.
Brown Convention Center and cross the skybridge to the one-thousand-room hotel, which is just a few blocks from Minute Maid Park, home of the Houston Astros. We leave our car in the massive parking garage shared by the neighboring George R. Rain falls the entirety of our two-and-a-half-hour drive from Austin, but as in any good technicolor American dream, just as we pull up to the Marriott Marquis, the clouds clear and the sun comes out. Maybe it’s because I spent my overseas childhood dreaming of coming to the U.S., with its Golden Arches and bright plastic wonders, but there’s something about a manufactured environment that is especially alluring to me. But I still love a swimming pool, from a stock tank at the Floresville ranch where my mother has lived since the nineties to a family resort such as Schlitterbahn, in New Braunfels-especially at a family resort.
When I moved to Texas twenty years ago, I found it in natural spaces, such as Blue Hole Regional Park, in Wimberley, and the river at Blanco State Park.
I’ve been chasing that blue, that feeling, ever since. Underwater, human sounds are muffled, your body is near-weightless, you feel invisible to the world above. There’s something about it-Tiffany blue, robin’s-egg blue, swimming pool blue-that quintessential color of summer that gives life a halcyon filter. The drinks came with cups of ice, a rarity for my mother and me, age five at the time, because we lived on a farm with no refrigerator outside the African city.Īnd that blue. I remember thatched umbrellas shading the lounge chairs and waiters in starched white uniforms serving Coca-Cola in condensation-pebbled glass bottles. It was at the historic Norfolk Hotel, in Nairobi, where the grounds were lush with palm trees and the ambrosial scent of frangipani mingled with chlorine. I fell in love with the first swimming pool I met. Read essays on Texas’s springs, rivers, lakes, coast, and pools, as well as shout-outs to kayak polo, “boomerang” paddle trips, and Austin’s Party Island. We’re celebrating 38 ways to get wet this summer.