The Dead Dog in the Pool Story
by
Stephen J. Gohmann

I grew up in Chicago.  When I was twenty-eight, I traded in the sirens and city bustle for the quieter, slower rhythms of the suburbs.

That little biographical bon mot is meant to lull you into believing what follows isn’t the work of a complete madman.

I hope it worked.

Spring in the Chicago area often swings between weather extremes. The first hints of warmth come sometime between the months of January and May.  It’s quite unpredictable. It was early April, 1986, when an unexpected heatwave rolled in, throwing the Midwest’s seasonal playbook out the window.

I grew up in a three-flat apartment building with a backyard so small, you could mow it with a pair of scissors.  I wanted more for the Family my wife and I were planning, and moving to the suburbs with a large backyard and a swimming pool was a dream we shared. We achieved that goal and although fate allowed us only one child, we had a wonderful son and the three of us shared a strong and loving family bond.

Our home was a comfortable raised ranch on a cul-de-sac with neighbors with whom we shared what were the happiest years of my life. Most of us were in the same age group – those 30 something years filled with little children, laughter, loud music and even some left-over adult hi-jinks we engaged in from time to time with our friends.

On that unusually warm April morning, I decided it was time to strip off the pool cover and begin the ritual of getting it summer-ready

Our pool was a large above ground oval 25 feet in length with aluminum sides.  It ranged from four feet deep in the shallow end to six feet deep at the other and I built a large wooden deck along one side.  We had many great times hosting family and friend pool parties.  I swam unending laps in it and afternoons were filled with the giggles of my Son and his friends playing Marco Polo and Dodge Ball. Those are great memories.

One thing I had to learn was how to properly maintain the pool.  This included daily rituals of ensuring the water had the proper PH levels, skimming the water to remove surface debris, adding chlorine, and vacuuming the bottom of the pool to remove algae.  These maintenance activities were essential during the warm months of summer when the pool was in regular use. I didn’t mind doing them and did them religiously.  After all, they were part of what we committed to when we installed the pool, and inviting friends & family over to swim in muck and perhaps develop pool sores (what are those?) or something from contaminated pool water was bad form to say the least.

There were, however, two other maintenance tasks which I more or less dreaded and in order to set the stage for the story which follows I believe you need an in depth understanding of these.  You may disagree, of course, but here goes.

These tasks were ‘Closing the Pool’ at the end of the swimming season and ‘Opening the Pool’ in Spring. Of the two, Closing the Pool was a big pain in the ass coupled with the fact that when completed, unlike Opening the Pool there weren’t even fun times to look forward to.  It was just a wet, messy job.

And since it did involve a lot of time and a considerable amount of work, it was something I tended to procrastinate a lot about as Summer turned to Fall and there were fewer opportunities to swim or just bask in the sun pouring down brewskies.

Closing the Pool started with a final vacuuming which if done properly, removed the last of the decomposing leaves and other debris lying at the bottom. It started with attaching a hard plastic vacuum head to a pole which was in turn connected to the pool filter via a flexible hose. The contraption suctioned out the crap at the bottom of the pool, sending it to the filter.  It wasn’t hard to do but it was time consuming circling around the pool many times and frequently emptying the filter filled with scooped up scum.  This was a wet, tiresome job.

Contextual Alert:  Remember the hose thing.  It has a big play when I eventually get to telling the story!

Then there was partial draining of the pool to reduce the water level to avoid damage due to freezing. A separate long hose was attached to the filter and run from it to the front of the house where the water was pumped out into the street. Not hard to do but time consuming – and wet.

And then there was the handling of the seemingly uncontrollable pool cover itself – a giant piece of some kind of woven plastic that had to be unfurled and yanked to cover the length of the pool and which ripped approximately every other year and had to be replaced.  This job was relatively hard to do and required a lot of pulling, circling of the perimeter of the pool multiple times, and in days of high wind fighting the equivalent of what men in the Age of Sail must have battled with in Rounding the Horn as the cover, like the mainsail of a 60 gun Man of War, billowed out uncontrollably. (Hmm…that was a great metaphoric analogy. Right?) It was also wet.

And then, and then, there was the filling of many empty gallon milk containers with water and stringing them to hang from wire wrap sewn through the edges of the cover to weigh it down as the fierce storms of Winter raged. Wet again.

And then, and then, and then, there was the inflating of a rubberized float thing that had to be placed in the water under the cover.  I forget why that damn thing was needed.  I think it had something to do with helping to make sure the cover, with its hanging heavy milk jugs and wire wrap remained taut. But I found almost every year there was a need to get a replacement float thing because it seldom lasted more than one season without falling apart. It wasn’t a particularly wet job; more like a wet irritation.

As the Fall arrived, the leaves began to fall heavily and sweatshirts and sweaters replaced shorts and tank tops, I tended to look at Closing the Pool with something like a wish that I could “Let this cup pass from me”, to use a Gethsemane-esque Biblical reference. But I couldn’t not do the work, and putting the job off carried with it the risk that I was letting what might be the last days of warm weather go by with the result that I’d be doing all of the wet closing things in cool, if not downright cold weather.

And some years when I waited too long and really cold weather arrived, I took shortcuts.

(Now that I’ve described the Closing the Pool process in gory detail I find myself slightly less inclined to look back on those previously mentioned idyllic memories of pool ownership.  But for the most part I’ve stored the less than fond memories away somewhere in Deep Brain Storage).

And on the year in question, when I awoke on that beautiful April morning, I’d taken some shortcuts while ‘Closing the Pool’ the previous Fall in what, by the time I got around to it, felt like sub-Arctic weather.

These were the shortcuts taken that year:

a) I decided there really wasn’t all that much muck in the bottom of the pool and what was there I could vacuum out when doing the ‘Open the Pool’ thing in the Spring.  After all, I didn’t really need to see the bottom of the pool to put it away for the Winter.

b) I hadn’t stored away enough empty gallon milk jugs to weigh down the cover and decided to rely on the tension created by tightening the wire wrap a little more to keep it from blowing.  I must have been counting on it being a windless Winter or something.

c) Finding that once again the float thing needed replacement and would take yet another trip to the pool store, I decided I could for once bypass that step in the process. After all, it was going to be a windless Winter and if weighted milk jugs were unnecessary, what would a missing float thing matter?

The stage has now been set to prepare you for the absurd sequence of events that happened during the ‘Open the Pool’ event following the ‘Shortcuts of the Fall.’

I hope I haven’t put you to sleep with all the details but trust me, not only have you gained a wealth of knowledge about above ground swimming pool maintenance which might come in handy someday, but there are some really valuable life lessons to be learned about not taking short cuts in life. For that reason, you might want to share this story with young children you may have.

Disaster

On that glorious morning I got dressed, had breakfast and headed outside to check things out. As I stepped out onto the patio, I looked at the pool and noticed something odd.

The cover had slipped off the shallow end of the pool. I could see it was pushed back and crumpled, lying above the water about a third of the way down the length of the pool.  This didn’t greatly concern me as I was thinking the wind must have lifted the ‘unweighted un-taut cover due to the missing weighted milk jugs and float thing’, and brought it up over the side of the pool and into the water.

As I got closer I noticed the water seemed to be shimmering with something I couldn’t quite recognize. Suddenly it hit me.  IT WAS ANIMAL HAIR!!!

Now, for most of my life, I’ve been an optimist.   I tend to lean toward best-case scenarios when making choices and evaluating potential outcomes. This tendency kicked in as I considered why on earth animal fur would be floating on the surface of my pool.

As my eyes went from the near side of the pool to the point where the edges of the pushed back cover lay in the water, I noticed there was really quite a bit of hair, and I wondered what could have happened?  In a burst of unbridled best case scenario hopium I thought to myself “An animal, most likely a raccoon, must have jumped onto the cover, pushing it back as it SWAM across the water before it finally was able to jump onto the cover and scamper across and out of the pool.”

Talk about starry eyed optimism.  Ecce homo!  But that was what I chose to believe at that point and I proceeded to walk around the pool, lifting the sides of the cover and bunching it up to remove it.  Once removed, I spread the cover onto the grass to dry and looked back at the water.

Although by now I could see clearly there was a whole LOT OF HAIR in the water, I held onto my original thought/hope regarding the raccoon’s successful scampering escape across the cover.  At least that’s what I told myself over and over but with less conviction with each ‘over’.

Right about now you might wonder why I simply didn’t look into the water in the pool to determine if the raccoon story made sense.

Remember the shortcut I took in Closing the Pool and not vacuuming the muck out?  I now found myself not only looking at the hairy equivalent of the Sargasso Sea but also at water the viscosity of the Stygian Deep.  There was no way I could see to the bottom of the pool.  My only option was to start vacuuming.

I began vacuuming at the shallow end of the pool.  I pressed the vacuum head down onto the liner and began sucking out the black mass of decomposition, sending it to fill the filter basket.  I turned off the filter, dumped out the muck and repeated the process again and again.

I reached roughly the center of the pool where the vacuum head began to slide down the liner into the deep end.

Suddenly the vacuum head stopped sliding and sucking.  It seemed to be stuck on something.

I pulled it up several times, repositioning it on the bottom of the pool and moving it forward until again it stuck fast.  Although I still couldn’t see the bottom, by now I realized the whole escaped raccoon theory was busted. The wretched varmint hadn’t escaped but had drowned in the deep end of my pool.  I was crushed.  And more than a little pissed off at everything, including myself (shortcuts), God (weather), and the SPCA (animals in general). I also was engulfed in self-pity for being stuck alone having to solve this problem.

But I still couldn’t see the critter and knew as a first step I needed to get the thing out of the pool.  I was going to have to find some way of bringing it to the surface.  I looked at the vacuum in my hands and decided it was worth a try.  I maneuvered the vacuum head back into the water over the area where I figured if I were a drowned raccoon I probably would have ended up, and pushed it down.  I felt it grab onto something.

I began to lift the pole attached to the vacuum head hoping the suction would hold.  It did, but it took considerably more strength to lift than I’d expected. I figured it must have been a rather large raccoon.

Then, after several heaves I watched in horror as the head of what was obviously NOT a raccoon but the ugliest mongrel dog I’d ever seen broke the surface of the water.  That head looked as big as a basketball and as if to add insult to injury, I swear it looked like it was smiling!

I let go of the vacuum and backed off in revulsion, stumbling away from the pool.  Suction having been lost, the head returned to the deep.

I needed a break before tackling what was assuredly going to be the all-time really disgusting Open the Pool session.  It was mid-morning now and the temperature had risen well into the 80’s.  I was drenched in sweat and suffering from I’m sure not a little ‘dead dog discovery PTSD’, I went into the house. I was going to need both emotional support as well as what was in those days the go-to guy solution to most things.  A beer.

I went straight to the refrigerator, blathering to my wife what had happened.

Now this where the ‘for better or worse’ marriage thing should have kicked in and, recognizing the enormity of what had occurred, I felt she should have offered words of understanding, perhaps some sympathy – at least SOME consolation!

But NOOOO!  It was as if I’d been talking to myself about some innocuous, trivial happenstance which in no way involved her either then nor would any time soon. Instead, she looked at me and said, with a very ill-timed hint of disapproval in her voice, “Don’t you think it’s a little early in the day to be drinking beer?”  Expletives followed.

Having realized I was on my own I went over in my mind the ‘knowns’ I had to work with:

a) It was a VERY large dog
b) It was a VERY HEAVY water logged large dog
c) It was looking like the suction of the vacuum might be sufficient to bring it to the surface (at least its head?)
d) I would need something to lift it out of the water onto the deck
e) I would need a second pair of hands which it was clear my wife would not be providing.

I phoned a neighbor from down the block and explained to him what was going on and asked for help.  It took a bit of talking to convince him I wasn’t making the whole thing up, and his response was a whole lot less than enthusiastic, but in the end he agreed to come over and take a look.

While on the phone it occurred to me that in addition to the known-knowns, I would also need something to transport the carcass once I got it out of the water.  Exactly where I was going to transport it to I hadn’t a clue but I knew at a minimum I wasn’t going to be taking this doggy for a walk after I got it out of the pool.  I asked my neighbor if he had anything that would suit the purpose and he offered to bring over his wheelbarrow.  I was good with that.

While waiting for my neighbor I mulled over the problem of lifting the dog out of the water.  In my mind I pictured the body breaking water stuck to the vacuum (ugh, nice visual there) and decided I needed to get something underneath it to maneuver it over to the deck where it would make its first stop on the journey to who the heck knew where.  I looked in my garage and came up with a wide bladed snow shovel as the lifting tool.  It was the best I could do.  I brought it back and laid it on the deck.

I was pretty sure the wheelbarrow was the second stop on the journey to disposal, but what then?

In desperation I decided to put my tax dollars to work and called the Police.

I told them a huge mongrel dog had jumped the fence to get into my yard, jumped the gate on my pool deck, jumped into my swimming pool and drowned. I had no idea who the owner was, or if in fact there even WAS an owner!  Most importantly,  I needed to know what to do with the dog.

They were no help at all.

Their response was that dogs died all the time, and it was the owner’s responsibility to get rid of the remains. They told me to call a veterinarian and see if they could handle my problem.

I was flabbergasted and reiterated that it was NOT my dog, I didn’t own a dog, I had no idea who the owner if any was and surely they could provide me with some assistance in getting rid of this ENORMOUS waterlogged dog.

“Not your dog, eh?  That’s what they all say” was the response.

I was beyond stunned.   I then called several Veterinary Offices and described my situation.  All said they could handle disposal (at cost, of course), but there was a MEGA catch – I needed to bring the carcass to their Office, and they would not provide any help whatsoever in transporting it!

This brought me to a full stop.  I could not for the life of me figure out how I was going to get a TON (it was getting heavier all the time – at least in my mind) of dead dog from my house to a Vet’s Office several miles away.  Stuffing it in my car was a total nonstarter.  I’d need to buy a new car by the time the stinking mess got to a Vet. And I for sure wasn’t going to walk the Village streets for miles pushing a wheelbarrow with a dead dog in it!

But I needed to make what progress I could, and shortly after getting all of THAT good news my neighbor trundled over with his wheelbarrow.

I described to him how we needed to suck the dog out of the pool with the vacuum and that one of us would have to be positioned on the deck to get the shovel under the body to lift it onto the deck.  I could see his eyes rolling back in his head as I talked.  We agreed that he’d do the sucking and I the lifting.

The sucking went ok as those things go I suppose, but as in the case of the iceberg that sank the Titanic, the largest part of dogberg remained submerged until my ‘vacuum holding, dog sucking neighbor’ managed to raise it to the surface. From the look on his face it was also clear by this time his neighborly assistance reservoir was totally empty.

Bending low on the deck I managed to get the shovel under the dog and inched it over. As I inched, I realized I may not have been far off in that ton weight guestimate. Alive that dog must have weighed 70 pounds or better.  Filled with water? A whole lot more, I struggled to lift it onto the deck as my neighbor walked off, wishing me a less than enthusiastic ‘good luck’. The back strain I got from that lifting pained with me for many weeks thereafter, but at last I got the beast out of the pool and onto the deck.

It was past noon now and my thoughts returned to the disposal dilemma.

I frantically searched my mind for possible solutions and in my extremis the one that came up involved the Village pond located behind my helpful neighbor’s house at the end of the cul-de-sac.  Having no other options, I decided I would dispose of the animal there, letting it sink gently into the depths, never to be seen again. And I would use my neighbor’s wheelbarrow to make that happen.

What could possibly go wrong with THAT plan?  I’d find out soon.

But first there was the problem of getting the animal from the deck and into the wheelbarrow.

By this time the corpus disgustus had been leaking on the deck for some time, Even so, I knew I’d need to give it more time to drain before I’d be able to muscle it into the wheelbarrow.  I spread a tarp out on the ground at the foot of the stairs to the deck and using my shovel pushed it over to the top of the stairs.  Then, giving it a final shove I watched in expectation it would tumble all the way down the stairs and land on the tarp.

But nothing this day was going to be simple.

Following my mighty shove, it plopped down exactly one stair and lay there.  It ended up being a ‘one shove per stair per dead dog’ thing until finally it did the final plop onto the tarp.

I’d had a few beers by now and was in dire need of some rest and nourishment so I went into the house to take a break.  By the time I came back outside the mutt was fairly drained. But lying on that tarp in the sun for an hour resulted in another problem. Flies.

It was all too much. Would it never end?

I folded the tarp around the body and began to lift it into the tilted wheelbarrow.  There were several false starts as gravity took over, with the mess sliding first into and then out of the wheelbarrow until I finally found the just right dog-to-watery-weight ratio which steadied the load firmly into it.  It must have been the biggest adrenaline rush of my life that gave me the strength to do that.

And with that I set out with the tarp, the dog, the wheelbarrow and the flies onto the cul-de-sac, heading for the watery grave site.

In a ridiculous sidebar to all of this, my wheelbarrow-lending neighbor’s house was for sale and at the same time I was coming down the street, he was standing in his living room in full view of the street talking with a prospective buyer who saw me and exclaimed, “What the heck is THAT???”  My neighbor responded, “Oh, that’s just my neighbor taking his dog for a walk.”

I’m not making this up!!! It was just the way the whole day was going and would continue to go.

I arrived at the shoreline of the pond, searching for what I thought would be the deepest entry point.  I found a likely spot and positioned the wheelbarrow, dog end first, above the water. Holding on to retain the tarp, with a shove I ejected my load into the pond.

The dog hit the water with a ‘Plop’ landing in about ten inches of water.

So much for the sinking into the depths idea.  It looked for all the world like exactly what is was – a large, wet, dead, and now muddy mongrel lying in the pond attracting flies.

I gave up.  I turned away, leaving the dog in the mud of the Village pond, and wheeled back down the street.  It wasn’t my finest moment.  I knew that.  But I really didn’t care at that point.  I was mentally and physically finished.

Aftermath

In my mind I knew that couldn’t possibly be the end of the story. I knew that some day, some way I’d have to answer for that dog in the pond.   And as it turned out, the ‘some day’ was that same day, and the ‘some way’ was an amazing finale to the whole sorry event.

While I was struggling with my personal canine Calvary that day, my son, age 7, had been out and around the neighborhood playing with his friends.  Of my situation, he knew only what my wife had told him – that I was in the backyard opening the pool and that there had been a dog in our yard.  She spared him the other details.

Towards the end of the afternoon he and his friends were told that a dog a couple of blocks away had escaped from its owners’ yard and was missing.  The kids enthusiastically joined the posse, running around in search of the missing dog.

Timing, as they say, is everything.  Shortly after the posse began its search, one of the kids came across the dog I’d plopped in the mud.  He concluded he’d not only found the missing dog, but THE DOG WAS DEAD!!!   He ran frantically home, wild with excitement and fear.

It just so happened his family lived right across the street from our house.  In fact, his parents were best friends with my wife and I, but they had no idea what had been happening all day across the street.

“DAD, DAD!”, he shouted. “SOMEONE IS KILLING ALL THE DOGS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD!!!”

On hearing this and after some further explanation, my neighbor called the Police.

Meanwhile, after a brief but necessary rest on the couch, my wife reminded me that we needed to leave at 5:00 p.m. that evening to go to a wedding reception. I reluctantly dragged myself off the couch to shower (which I desperately needed by this time) and get dressed.

Shortly before we were scheduled to leave, and before we’d called our son in from play, the doorbell rang.

I answered it in full wedding reception dress (suit, tie) and found myself facing a Police Officer.  I looked out the screen door over his shoulder and could see his Squad Car parked at the end of the cul-de-sac, lights flashing, and neighbors coming out of their houses to find out what was happening.  I knew the jig was up but said, in as respectful a voice as possible, “Good afternoon. What can I do for you Officer?”

“Sir, we’re here about the dog you dumped in the pond,” he responded.

I decided to play dumb.  “But Officer, I don’t have a dog,” I said.

He looked at me, then looked down and as I followed his gaze, saw he was holding hands with my son who’d been standing slightly behind him.

“That’s not what your son told us”, he said, as my son, smiling innocently, looked up at me.

My goose was cooked.  The Officer asked me to step outside and walk over to the Squad Car.  As I did I began a rapid-fire recitation of everything that had gone on since morning, hoping once again that somehow I’d find some understanding, some sympathy, at least SOME consolation!!!

And for the second time that day I got nothing – nothing but an order to sit in the Squad Car, now surrounded by amazed neighbors who had found out what was going on until the Officer and his partner looked over the remains in the pond.

By the time they returned I’d had an opportunity to consider what to do next.

When they returned, they told me to step out of the car.  As I did I asked the Officer, “What happens now?”

He responded, his voice betraying just a little bit of uncertainty, “Well, you’re going to have to remove the dog from the pond.”

I replied, “Officer, there is no way I can physically remove that carcass and dispose of it. So what is the penalty if I refuse to do that?”

He was silent for a moment.

He and his partner exchanged looks.  “Well, I’ll have to write you a ticket,” he said.

What? I thought.  No arrest, no lockup, no jail time???  It was too good to be true.

“And how much will the ticket cost?” I asked.

He looked down at his ticket book and slowly returned his eyes to me.  “That’ll cost you $70.”

“I’ll take it!”  It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

He and his partner kept looking at each other as he wrote me the most welcome ticket I ever received. He handed it to me, looked at his partner and said, “Well, let’s go get our pooch.”

At that, in my mind the heavenly host broke into the ‘Alleluia’ chorus.

But there was one little thing left to really finish the day.  As he and his partner turned to head back to the pond, they paused and looked back at me.

“Do you have anything we could use to carry the dog?”

“Oh yeah. I got a tarp…..”