Fear of Drowning in Fairview’s Pool Fiasco
Choked-out by Bureaucracy
Fear of drowning in Fairview’s Pool Fiasco: Choked-out by Bureaucracy
In 2012, my wife and I moved to beautiful Fairview Park, Ohio, a wonderful residential village west of Cleveland. She’s a Fairview native and I’m San Diego born and raised. Aside from the incredible natural beauty of this whole region is the fact that Fairview Park, I soon found out, has an absolutely awesome swimming pool and gym facility at their “Gemini Center”.
Back then, I hadn’t had access to a swimming pool since I was in the Navy back in the early 90’s. And that’s why I must explain the reason why pool therapy is one of the only things that I’ve found that truly helps with my Combat PTSD and physical pain issues.
But first, a quick review of why I have an INTENSE fear of drowning.
As a child, even though I grew up in the super affluent town of La Jolla, CA, where many had beautiful backyard pools, and lived only half a mile from the ocean, I never completed swimming lessons. I think it was because of things that occurred at one of my first formal lessons at the age of 4.
(Photo: The famous Belmont Park Plunge “back in the day”. This pool is not only over 100 years old, it used to be a salt water pool, given that it’s located mere feet from the Pacific Ocean. https://www.sohosandiego.org/enews/0216plunge.htm)
Not a small backyard pool class, but at the massive Belmont Park Plunge indoor community pool in Mission Beach, CA, usually packed with all sorts of kids. As a little punk, I soon learned the bigger kids just loved shoving the smaller kids’ heads underwater just to see them freak out.
And I’m pretty sure that’s where a lot of my fear of drowning began. Subsequent classes only made me go into full-blown panic mode anytime I got in over my head.
(An “epic” evening at Wind’n Sea beach in La Jolla, CA, circa 1983. Just south of the infamous “Shack” and north of the even more infamous “Pump House”, made even more so by writer Tom Wolfe’s classic “The Pump House Gang”)
And although I spent many, many years as a teenager body surfing in the huge shore break at the infamous Wind’n Sea beach just down the hill from our house, I still never shook my fear of drowning. That’s why shore break, or “Whomping” was my preferred choice between that and actually surfing. I had skateboard buddies say, “Dude, you are such an awesome skateboarder, why can’t you surf like that?” Fear of drowning once again, but I never told anyone.
Fast forward to 1987, and I join the Navy. I guess at the time, I never connected the Navy with water. Simple stuff got past me back then.
The highly coveted NACCS sweatshirt. A stepping stone to being a real “Top Gun” type. (Photo: https://theaircrewshop.store/)
In my chosen training pipeline to become a Naval Aircrewman and S-3 Viking Sensor Operator (SENSO), I was required to attend the elite Naval Aircrewman Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida. This school sent the prospective Aircrew Candidate through myriad physical and physiological tests and evaluations. And of course, swimming and water survival were a major portion of the overall curriculum.
(An aircrew candidate treading water in full flight gear and boots for 5 minutes, then transitioning to face down in the water for another 5 minutes, raising your head only to take breaths. This evolution saw many students fail which sucked, because you had to keep trying over and over or the Instructors would roll you back to another class. This among many other water evolutions was why the attrition rate was so high.
Many of those tests are in the pool. Drown-proofing in full flight gear and boots, underwater swimming to simulate swimming under burning oil, and a mile swim in a flight suit, no boots, and a few other water survival tests. I BARELY passed all of those evolutions, and almost failed the mile swim, as it took me 70 minutes to complete, and I had to do the entire mile on my back, because my swimming skills suck so bad.
Most people have seen the wildly famous “Top Gun” movie. If you remember the scene where Maverick and Goose were forced to eject their crippled Tomcat. The next scene has them in the ocean, and Maverick is holding Goose’s lifeless body. Just then, a Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer jumps from a helicopter and swims over to retrieve the two downed aviators.
The Navy has their own Rescue Swimmers, aka, (SAR) Search and Rescue Aircrewmen, on nearly every ship in the Navy, usually flying aboard helicopters, or some are shipboard Swimmers.
Unbeknownst to me, was that the Rescue Swimmers School was also located at Pensacola, and at that point in time the Navy was having a shortage of qualified Swimmers, and started ORDERING any and all Aircrewman, who were otherwise slated to fly in fixed wing Anti-Submarine Warfare aircraft, either the P-3 Orion or the S-3 Viking to attend Rescue Swimmer School.
Well, what does the Navy Instructor tell me when I said, “but I can barely swim!” …. “That doesn’t matter, you’re a good boxer.” One of the training evolutions at the time was boxing in a ring for 3 minutes with a random opponent, and I just had to show off my then-10-years of martial arts training. Ipso facto, you’re just the right person we want jumping out of helicopters to save drowning people.
And let me make this perfectly clear. The Rescue Swimmers are some of THE most physically fit, highly trained and heroic members of the US Navy, and play an absolutely vital role in retrieving downed Aircrew and others at sea, sometimes in hellish weather conditions, gnarly sea states and dangers beyond comprehension in combat.
It was either that, or “you’ll be sent directly to the Fleet, without continuing on your training path, you’ll have no job rating and will be scraping food trays forever on the USS Never Dock.”
Reply? “Ooooh-Raahhh!!!!” … “Gotta go, gotta go”. (A couple of the motivational lines we’d yell out)
Making a very long story a bit shorter, right after I “rang the bell” or “DOR-ed” Drop on Request from the RSS training, 5 Rescue Swimmer Instructors were tried and found guilty of conspiracy to commit battery and negligent homicide of a recruit by the name of Airman Lee Mirecki, (AWAN) and I was right in the thick of the worst abuses that were documented during the Navy’s Court-Martial proceedings. Basically, they were doing unauthorized underwater hand-to-hand combat on young Sailors and killed one of them after months of drowning-then-resuscitating many other students.
And they tried to drown me too. See my “The Killing of Mirecki” short video series.
Those interested, can go onto my YouTube channel and watch the short 4 part series on “The Killing of Mirecki
Airman Mirecki died of a “fear-induced heart attack” and while the instructors were trying to revive him on the side of the pool, they made the entire class of Rescue Swimmer students stand, face the wall and sing the national anthem.
In short, during a window of time back in 1987 and ’88, a group of Rescue Swimmer School Instructors took it upon themselves to run unauthorized and illegal training methods on the students. Sadistic swimming apes performing underwater hand-to-hand combat and then punishing the student and his entire class if he dared to fight back.
You might say that “Sharks and Daisies left an impression on me.
One particular evolution was nicknamed “Sharks and Daisies”. This is where the student was ORDERED to swim in a tight circle in the deep end of the pool, with their eyes closed and their hands held behind their back, wearing only swim fins and a diving mask, no snorkel. 4 to 6 Instructors, (many in incredible physical shape) were the “Sharks” who would be treading water in a circle around the “Daisey”. Randomly, an instructor would grab the student, pretending to be a delirious pilot, maybe hallucinating from being at sea for so long, in some sort of panicking tight bear hug, and the Daisey was required to perform a specific release technique to subdue the survivor in a specific swim carry position. Failure to do this maneuver EXACTLY meant near-drownings and hundreds of push-ups for the entire class.
Why “Smurfed”? It’s when the student turns blue from the lack of oxygen. (Photo source: Nickalive.net)
The students all knew the term “Sharks and Daisies”, that make-or-break point of Hell Week. As well, the term “Smurfed” was coined, reflecting the popular TV cartoon “The Smurfs” who were blue. Getting “Smurfed” is when the student is intentionally drowned and then brought back to consciousness on the side of the pool. (See the above noted videos for a detailed overview of how they killed Mirecki)
So, I’m sure the reader can now understand how someone with a childhood fear of drowning complex would not do too well under such insanity. As well, you could understand how access to a public pool could be so therapeutic, as seen by the many patients from Fairview Hospital for physical therapy.
The Gemini Center pool facility provided a vast array of water therapy options for patients from the nearby Fairview Hospital.
Rescue Swimmer students practice underwater escape and restraint maneuvers in Pensacola, FL.
When I first started using the Gemini Center’s spectacular leisure pool, I thought I had won the lottery. Especially with that cool “lazy river” feature. This meandering stream of current was perfect for swimming underwater and pretending you’re a lonely sea turtle just cruising the coral reefs of Hawaii. So relaxing, so good for my constant pain, and so soothing for my fear of being choked-out underwater by some 6-foot 2-inch sadistic swimming ape.
Since the closure of the Fairview pool nearly 4 years ago, I’ve had to travel to the neighboring village of Rocky River and pay extra just to use their pool. That facility is also very nice. It’s quite a bit older, but somehow didn’t disintegrate after a mere decade in existence.
Coming from a Navy background, I like to quip that “If I were in charge, I’d reach out to the Navy and see if they can do a deal where they bring in the famous Construction Battalions known as the Fighting Seabees and have the new pool completed in about a week.
The Navy can call it a “Training Exercise” and bring in helicopters and massive trucks with about 100 expert builders to whip it out, just like how they famously would land on a jungle island in the South Pacific during World War 2 and the next day there’d be a functioning runway to land fighters and bombers. But NOOOO, they won’t listen to me.
America fought two massive enemies at once during World War 2 and beat them handsomely, on multiple continents and far-flung islands across the globe. That gigantic project took just under four years to complete. See where I’m going with this?
Just because you don’t swim nowadays, or never actually took the vitally important swimming lessons as a child, you can at least understand how such a wonderful facility needs to be back up and operating as soon as possible.
As well, any future pool maintenance supervisor should be subcontracted out to a third party specializing in professional pool facility maintenance, not some minimum wage flunky that also works at Walmart.
And “gettin’ er done” does NOT mean rushing the installation, it means having a job boss that can crack the whip when the inevitable delays, logistics foul-ups and weather events pop up. It means demanding attention-to-detail at every phase. It means regaining the trust of those who voted for you.
Resurrecting such an awesome facility would make Fairview Park’s Gemini Center stand out once again as THE athletic and therapeutic destination.
One would think that Fairview Park alumni and taxpaying homeowners would just band together and circumvent the bureaucrats, lawyers and kick-back loops and have the pool built without bothering the oh-so-busy City Council. (Initial estimate was 8 million. Now 14.1 million). I know, “too late now".
Dana F. Harbaugh
Fairview Park homeowner.