A Chair by a Pool
art by Jameson Currier
watercolor and ink on paper
20240517001

A Chair by a Pool

by Jameson Currier

What worked for Virginia Woolf does not necessarily work for other writers. In A Room of One’s Own, the British author expressed the idea that a writer’s unhappiness interfered with his or her creativity, and that money and a room of one’s own were necessary to set that artistry free. For many years I have taken the opportunity to write where I could: at the bedside of a dying friend, on a break from a temporary job, while traveling somewhere by a bus or a train. Ideas come to me through movement: while walking on city streets, peering into windows and imagining about other people’s lives, riding the stationary bicycle at the gym.

But all this movement is also loaded with distraction and, as it happens with any writer, life intrudes on, well, life and, somehow, whether you have money or a room or neither, writing becomes a little bit harder to accomplish. Jobs, bills, responsibilities, health all get in the way. What I have learned is that within all this movement it is the appearance of calm, the sensation of tranquility, that allows me to become more productive, something Ms. Woolf also agreed upon. So this was what I decided I wanted from my vacation this summer: a chair by a pool. Water is in motion even when it is fully contained. And by water my mind relaxes, opens up, expands, wanders. I wanted to go somewhere outside myself; escape my life in order to find the passion to continue to write about it.

I also wanted to spend time with my friend, John, my college roommate some twenty-six years ago. I was flying from Manhattan to a business meeting in Chicago. He was living in San Diego. As summer approached and the days were growing longer, so was the itch to find a peaceful retreat more intense. After a flurry of e-mails between us, John and I decided to meet in Las Vegas, a place I had never been before and one John had not been to in several years. It hardly seemed the place for a vacation by water. But in my message to John I wrote that I had no intention of gambling; I hardly had enough money to afford the vacation. I only had one suggestion. “Let’s find a place with a nice pool.”

What is it about water that transfixes the mind? The play of light against the surface? The fluidity of its contained shape? The patterns of waves in the overall movement that entertain our brains in the same way as the patterns in fire or a flock of birds overhead in the sky? Many writers have described the effects of water on the human psyche and this is no place to recount them all. But it is clear that something ingrained within the mind responds.to the splash and flow of water. Water soothes and inspires reflection and is a source of beauty, both inward and outward. It also possesses spiritual qualities of its own, recognized in many religions and rituals, from baptism to death. It is the source from which life springs. The first civilizations were founded on the banks of water.

The best source of travel information should have been the Internet. But as we quickly discovered most Web sites for hotels in the Vegas area do not have photos of their pools. Of the seven major hotels that we looked at, four had no photos of their pool areas on the Web. Another one was discarded because the photo it did have did not make the pool area enticing enough to want to spend time there. One was heavily considered because the information described the resort as an “exotic, tropical water environment” even though it had no photos, and another was considered because it seemed to center around water, with a lake, dancing fountains, and a circus performing over an interior pool.

I spent four days in Vegas. We decided on three days at the Mandalay Bay, a resort with a beach, a wave pool, and something called a ‘‘lazy river.” Then a break for two days to see the northern rim of the Grand Canyon, and a final day back in Vegas at the water-inspired Bellagio. The weather was in the upper nineties when we arrived, crested over a hundred during our stay and remained there after we left.

And on the vacation I did not find the time or the tranquility to write or even think about writing. As it happens on vacations our pace was too hectic, walking back and forth to the giant casinos, waiting for monorails to take us to inexpensive buffets. A few days before the trip I had also become ill, and the pain medication I brought with me had made my skin extremely sensitive to the sun and I would become tired and groggy with even the slightest exertion.

But I did not ignore the water. Vegas sits in the desert, after all, and there is something of a collective obsession with water here. There are manmade fountains, mists from sprinklers, interior canals and exterior lakes. Almost every casino I visited sold their own brand of bottled water, marked with their logo. And there was enough time to sit in the shade by the pool. If you sit quietly by an area of water and think of nothing often enough, the world begins to look quite different when you’re through sitting and ready to begin again. Sometimes you don’t realize it until after you leave. You simply feel different. You’re calmer, and things don’t get on your nerves quite so easily. For me, the stillness and fluidity have regenerative and resourceful properties, the sort of spark that will ignite my imagination and creativity.

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“A Chair by a Pool” was written in 2000 and the illustration was created in 2024.