Anthropology ETHNOGRAPHY
ETHNOGRAPHY 1 It was a beautiful sunny afternoon on in October when I decided to observe a swimming pool at the Downtown YMCA in Omaha, Nebraska. It was October 6, 2003 at the urban health center. A swimming pool is a rare oasis in the middle of all the corporate buildings, posh lofts, and rundown apartments which pack the downtown landscape. At five in the evening I decided to watch the people in the pool go about their routine, to establish if there is a trend in who, how and why people come to the pool. The pool itself is six lanes across which equates to nearly fifty feet. It is an American standard pool by being twenty-five yards long. The shallow end is three feet deep, and the deep end is nine feet deep. Three lifeguard chairs populate the deck. The tallest at six feet high, is in the middle of the deep end, while the other two are only two feet off the deck and are on either side of the pool, at the divide between shallow and deep water. I decided to sit along the wall in the deep end to conduct my observation. The most prominent person in the pool area is the lifeguard. She is about eighteen years-old. She is sitting on the lifeguard stand located on the west side of the pool, closest to the phone. She is wearing a red lifeguard tank-top and blue shorts. On her lap, there is a rescue tube and the strap is around her shoulder. She is also wearing a whistle and a hip pack, which is most likely carrying gloves, band-aids, and a pocket mask. On the lifeguard stand, there was also a walkie-talkie. I assume that this is for emergency situations. Most of the time, the lifeguard sat on the stand. She got up and walked around a few times. When the lifeguard did get up and walk around, she took her tube with her and held it across her stomach but she did not take the walkie-talkie. When necessary, she spoke to the swimmers, and waved to them as they left. She was not listening to a radio, and looked quite bored. When I first began observing the pool at five o’clock, there were two lap swimmers already in the water. The first one was a woman about forty years-old. She was wearing a black racerback swimsuit, a black swim cap and black goggles. She swam most of the time she was in the pool. The other person in the pool was a man who appeared to be about forty-seven years-old. He was wearing light blue trunks with dark blue flames around the bottoms, near the leg holes. This man had a lot of chest and back hair which floated in the water like leaves move in autumn in a calm breeze. He was also quite large, his stomach hung over the tops of his ‘attempt-to-be trendy’ trunks. He was sitting by the deep end of the pool when I entered the facility. These two swimmers seemed to know each other. They spoke for a while, and even raced a length underwater. Both swimmers seemed to be in high spirits. On one walk around, the lifeguard came up to this male lap swimmer, said something to him, and then he moved over into another lane. Both of these two used kickboards. When they left, a bit over an hour after I got there, both of them grabbed a towel off the hooks on the wall, waved to the lifeguard and walked towards the locker rooms. Around 5:20, a tall slender man, about twenty-six years-old came into the pool. He hung up his towel, removed his flip flops, and hopped in a lane. This man was wearing a ‘speedo’ and goggles. He seemed very determined in what he was doing. He had a direct goal to accomplish, and was not going to be detoured. He swam freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and also stretched. Midway through his workout, he got out of the pool, retrieved a pull bouy from the basket and returned to the pool. He put the pull bouy between his knees and swam only using his arms. This man did not really talk to anyone, but he respectfully put the pull bouy back in the basket when he left forty minutes later. At 5:30, when the lifeguard when over and talked to the man who was swimming when I first arrived, she asked him to move over so that she could remove two lane ropes for water aerobics. The class started at 5:30. The instructor arrived a few minutes before class began. She was a twenty-one year-old wearing a green and blue racerback Speedo swimsuit. In her class were four women. They were ages twenty-five, forty, thirty, sixty. They all wore typical swimsuits. One had a skirt on it. The skirt was intended to hid unpleasant looking legs, but rather just drew attention to the largeness of the woman’s thighs.