Sweat bees down by the ol' slock ride

I've been thinking about the slock ride lately, especially last week when it was so godforsaken hot. What started it was this article in the Times (registration required, expires at some point, blah blah bliddily blah) about these two cool neo-semi-hippies that travel around sleuthing out local swimming holes (via such Dick Tracy techniques as tailing "teenagers spotted on the roadside carrying towels" -- oooh, tricky), then post the info about how to find them on their website. One of the two seems to be especially dedicated, given that he's the site's "New England correspondent" and does most of his prospecting in Vermont, where from what I hear it's only hot enough to swim for approximately nine days out of the year. Unlike Alabama, where the slock ride was and, I hope, still is, and where it's hot enough to either swim or kill yourself approximately 300 days out of the year.

That was the summer I was going through my early-teen-hardcore-religious phase, and I actually attended -- voluntarily -- Southern Baptist summer youth camp. Southern Baptist summer youth camp in Anniston, Alabama. In July. An unusual experience, representing perhaps the only extended period of enforced athleticism in my life, and the most miserable, which I guess goes without saying (see above re. July). Other than the misery of flag football in July humidity, the camp had two memorable quirks, one of which thankfully helped with the other. The first one was the extreme preponderance of sweat bees. Yankees who have no idea what I'm talking about, thank your lucky blue states, because believe it or not sweat bees are exactly what they sound like: tiny yellow bees who land on you and drink your sweat. No, I don't know why. They like the salt, I guess. All I know is that within 10 minutes of venturing outdoors at this stupid camp, you'd be covered in the little buggers. And of course, if you swatted them away you got stung. Better to just let them drink, even though it tickled. The only thing that got rid of them was washing off the sweat in quirk #2, the slock ride.

The slock ride was the swimming hole in the woods near camp. One of the best swimming holes I've ever been in, actually. Reachable only by a single-file path through the woods, it was called the slock ride because it had a smooth, sloped rock leading into the water on one side and because the camp caretaker, a beloved figure who'd been there since Nixon was young, had a slight problem with Spoonerisms. I know this sounds like the plot of some aggressively eccentric Southern coming-of-age tale, but I swear to god it's true. He called it the slock ride instead of the rock slide, so that's what the whole camp called it and had for years. (We also had chied fricken for dinner twice a week, if I recall.) It was really kind of a lazy waterfall; the stream poured down the sloped rock face and had worn down the rock over the years, making it smooth and slidable. At the end of the "slide" there was about a six or seven foot drop into a deep pool. In an Alabama summer, the coldness of that water was the closest thing to heaven that that camp had to offer. It's not listed on the swimming hole site (I checked -- maybe the Baptists won't reveal its existence to Vermont infidels), but I really hope it's still there.