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Stephen Quinn is the host of On the Coast on CBC Radio One, 690 AM and 88.1 FM in Vancouver.

As the long, hot, dry and smokey summer of 2017 in the Vancouver region draws to an unofficial but merciful end, I am grateful for a particular public amenity that in my adult life I could pretty much take or leave: the public swimming pool.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to my eight-year-old who has dragged me – sometimes against my will – to Hillcrest pool day after day and rekindled in me not only the childhood joy of playing in the water but also an understanding of the value of an excellent community facility.

You see, I'm not much of a swimmer – I'm not good at it and I don't really like getting wet, especially in public and specifically when it requires the removal of my shirt. But as summer wore on, I moved from barely tolerating the outing, to accepting it, to finally enjoying it and even looking forward to it. Part of that was that it provided relief from the heat. The bigger part was watching my son, who went from an improvised dog paddle to launching himself off the edge of the diving pool with a somersault/twist combination and emerging with a huge grin and a mouthful of water that statistically has a 100-per-cent chance of containing at least some urine.

The other realization that came to me over time was that the pool was a place for everyone, regardless of socioeconomic standing, age, race, religion, ability or body type. It is truly public, in a way that the word "public" isn't code for "substandard."

For those of you unfamiliar with the place, Hillcrest Aquatic Centre is Vancouver's largest aquatic facility. There's a shallow kids' pool, a swirling circular trough of water known to the kids as "the lazy river," a pool to swim lengths, another for swim lessons and a diving pool with one-metre and three-metre springboards, and a five-metre diving platform. Much of it can be reconfigured according to need. There are also outdoor pools surrounded by chairs that migrate as the sun moves, a sauna, a steam room and a massive hot pool.

On a hot day, the shallow pool is a cacophonous, writhing tangle of child-flesh and pool-noodles – parents gripping toddlers and ducking to avoid projectiles. The diving pool is the place of preteen dares, dubious acrobatics and children summoning unknown courage and stepping into thin air, rather than disappoint their friends below by turning back.

The hot-pool is the social hub for elders, squirming to get the jetted water to hit just the right place – a shoulder blade or cramped calf – their expressions of relief indicating when they've got it just so. On a good day, there is a slight, elderly Asian man offering head and shoulder massages to women roughly in his age range. I know – it sounds creepy. It isn't. And he must be good because his lucky subjects literally wait in line.

The sauna and steam room house tiers of the unselfconscious, sweat dripping from the tips of their noses.

While it is a celebrated and in all ways modern facility, there is something very Old World about the place.

What it rekindled in me was the desperation with which we sought out pools when I was a child – first the wading pool of our public-housing complex in Ottawa, where we waited every summer morning for the shallow concrete basin to fill and the park workers to season the water with scoops of powdered chlorine, stirring it in with a canoe paddle.

Then further afield, by bus, to the Champagne Bath in Lower Town which was built, along with the Plant Bath in 1924, to promote hygiene among those who lived in the nearby working-class neighbourhoods.

Finally, there was the amazing discovery that we could buy our way in to the pool in the Château Laurier hotel for a fee of 50 cents. That included private change rooms, an impossibly luxurious white towel and lounge chairs with amber heat lamps overhead. It was an unsupervised marble palace where I'm certain the echoes of our screams annoyed the actual hotel guests to no end as they wondered how these skinny, sunburned creatures badly in need of haircuts managed to gain entry.

Maybe it's the smell of the chlorine – or the faint mould of the shower area – but spending a good part of the summer at the pool brought with it a flood of unexpected but not entirely unwelcome nostalgia.

Now, I watch my youngest son, his reddened eyes squinting against the sun as we leave, his hair matted, his expression part satisfaction, part weariness.

And I think, "Yeah, I know that look."

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