Ladders can be used for lots of things. They can be used for work, to climb to the highest rung and dangle with a paint can and brush, leaning frightfully from side to side in order to paint the most wall before the ladder must be moved in the direction of your work. They can be used to rescue, kittens in trees, children from fires, that sort of thing. They can also be used to help fish along and over dams in rivers, but that’s more of a ladder in theory than a ladder in practice. Ladders can be used to support a scaffold of sorts, a plank that stretches between two ladders that one might walk on in order to paint more or work more efficiently, but those are still ladders being used for work. Work bores me. I’m really more interested in ladders that lead me from water to white pier.
If a swimmer first dives from the deck of a pier, then swims, perhaps treads, then swims back to that pier, a ladder will greet that swimmer. The ladder should be white, though years of submersion will cause the underwater portion of that ladder to dull and gray, leaving just the dry portion in a white splendor. The ladder should extend from roughly 3 feet, no more than 4, from the deck of the pier, and should extend through the deep all the way to the lake bottom. That end should have the vertical supports cut at an angle, and upon installation each spring that sharper end should be thrust downward into the soft lake bottom below. Stepping on the top horizontal step of the ladder during installation will make this angle dig into the lake bed, and it will stay there until fall. The ladder should be attached to the face of the supporting stringer, possibly with screws run through metal brackets, but bent nails hammered with the side of a wood handled hammer will suffice for decades of attachment.
The first move to a ladder should be with your hand, I typically use my right, but I know I’ve also used my left. And when the right, or left, hand grasps the vertical leg of the ladder, your feet, or foot, should reach around for the bottom rung. This bottom rung is going to be slightly mossy, but if your ladder installer has properly nailed a portion of an old roofing shingle, or some other abrasive strip to the surface of this rung, you shouldn’t slip too much. But you will slip some, this is just the way it is with ladders. If you grab with your hand, and plant with your foot, you’ll be brought upright, mirroring the ladder. When you step on the next rung, the plank step should yield a bit, but not twist. If it twists while it yields, it needs another nail.
The steps will get increasingly less slippery as your legs make their way towards the surface. The steps, or rungs, of the ladder will be positioned about 18″ apart, which is further apart that they might be on a traditional ladder that was made for work. This you will have to get used to. The ladder should list, slightly, from deep towards the pier, perhaps just a foot, but the gradual tilt of the ladder towards the pier is necessary to get just right. Too much tilt and the rungs won’t feel natural on your feet. Not enough tilt and you’ll feel too rigid and upright. If you’re a male, and you’re ascending the ladder, it is best to tug on your shorts a bit once they are clear of the water, but tug on them while your waist is just below the deck of the pier, this way you’ll catch any unsightly suction before those pier sitters have a chance to see. This is important. Women can also adjust in a a similar way, but it cannot be more true to say that women adjusting their bathing suits on a pier is a more welcome and acceptable sight than men doing the same.
By now, you’re almost up the ladder. Take care not to slip, because though the steps are wider than a rung on a rescue, or work ladder, probably measuring the width of a 2×6, they will be at least slightly slippery. It is best that they yield, to absorb your weight, though this soft bend under any weight is only perfectly accomplished by aged ladders. New wooden ladders will lack this old shoe feeling, and they’ll be as stiff as a pair of Lee jeans and equally as unbecoming. If there were a way to age ladders before they were installed, like wines and whiskey and cheese, this would probably be a welcome process providing a pleasant, soft result.
If a piece of the shingle that has been nailed to the tread to provide traction comes loose, that’s not an insurmountable problem. A roofing nail should be used to reattach the shingle to the step, which sounds really easy to anyone who hasn’t yet tried to nail a nail underwater. Repairs should always be made to ladders on dry ground, but they rarely are. Instead they involve brothers or fathers or you, and some nails and a hammer and a bathing suit, clinging to the ladder with one arm while flailing at a nail that may or may not be just under the surface of the water. It’s maddening, and people will yell and command and correct, but it’s fun. Swimming ladders are like that.
These ladders should be wood. Always wood. Metal ladders sting my eyes and strain my feet. They do not yield as they should, and make the user feel more like a character in the Hunt For Red October than a water loving pier diver. Metal ladders, along with pontoon boats, and the boat name “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere” should be banned from Geneva Lake. Forever. The Loch Vista pier has a metal ladder. Just one I believe. The others are wooden, and they are as they should be, even if the deepest ladder doesn’t pitch quite enough from bottom to top and invokes a bit of a feeling of climbing from the lower bunk to the top one. The metal ladder is out of place. It’s ugly. It just sits there, trying to fit in, but it can’t. It is an embarrassment to me and it should be to you, and it is an ongoing insult to every one of my senses.
Ladders, in their most necessary form, provide rescue. They are tilted up to trees to pull down weary kittens and they are raised from giant red trucks to people waiving from smokey windows. They are life saving instruments. I’d argue, successfully, that if made right and fastened correctly to the outer edge of a white pier, they are every bit as important there. If you’re in need of rescue, there is no doubt that a dive and a tread and a slow climb up a soft old wooden ladder will provide you with the salvation you seek.