Reading or Drawing Class Lines

I'm trying to remember when I started reading class lines.  I don't have much to go on.  There was the time when, fishing at the Missouri River we took a sort of resort "dock hand" along because we couldn't catch a fish and he promised us he could.  The kid had stringy hair and two sets of teeth, literally one behind the other, which both gave him a buck-toothed appearance and affected the way he talked.  I didn't trust him, of course, felt threatened by him in some way.  He was socially awkward, always hanging around and trying to leech a trip with someone.  But dad was desperate to catch fish and so was I, and so the leech went along. 

By now, of course, reading class is what I've been trained to do.  Uh, that is, in theory I'm supposed to be cued into the inherent power systems and codes that enable class divides.  Poolside at our motel several weeks ago these class lines were bright as blood, and as I sat there and watched the kids swim I tried to read the text of the pool as neutrally as possible; the extent to which I failed or succeeded is debatable. 

Poolside family type A is the family that we were when we initially came to this hotel several years back.  At the time we didn't want to burden any of our friends or family with little children, and we wanted to take the family swimming.  An internet search yielded this hotel with two pools: one a wading pool with water jets, a baby slide, and other attractions; the other one four foot deep with basketball hoops and a waterslide.  Kid friendly.  When we found out that a continental breakfast was included in the deal all for under a hundred bucks, we were sure we'd found the most popular hotel in the tri-state area.  Family A, then, is white, middle class, has 1-3 children, and the father with newly sprouted black chest hair lifts his toddler daughter with adorable pink swim suit in and out of the water as mom watches in her matronly suit at the pool's edge with a camera, and sometimes a grandparent reclines in street clothes from a safer distance, smiling. 

Poolside family type B is seemingly seeking rougher attractions.  They may be white but not necessarily;  they typically have many older children whom they leave to the pool; these children dominate the slide, finding illegal ways to go down it, or, more to the point, to stop at the end of it or go backwards up it.  The parents, meanwhile, are not just parents but a party of adults, complete with alcohol, filtering in and out of rooms in questionable states of coherence.  Their swimsuits may not be swimsuits but cut off shorts and t-shirts or may be ill-fitting, typically in gross ways.  For several of these family-groups, I'm left wondering if a stay at this hotel, complete with ordering pizza and drinking beer, may be their vacation for the year.

Over, let's say a five-year period of 5 stays total, I've noticed a shift from more of the type A families to about a 50/50 split.  Actually, I may not have reflected on this "shift" at all except for the event (which, let the record show, I was not witness to and must go on the hearsay of others) that precipitated some reflection: friends of ours saw two girls and a guy kissing in the pool during non-peak hours.  The kissers in question were teens or young adults from type B. 

When I heard this, I began to wonder about my options.  At check out, I consider mentioning the behavior to the front desk, then consider what that might look like.  "Yes, excuse me, we're middle class, respectable white--er, well, my wife's Southeast Asian, but, trust me, she's lived in the middle class long enough to be one of us.  Where was I?  Oh, yes, we're from respectable middle class morality and we saw some uncouth behavior in the pool this week from people who, well, frankly I can't believe they can afford to stay here.  Is there anything you can do to eliminate those type of folks from here?  Can't they take their two-day vacation somewhere else--somewhere where I can't see them and their confused sexualities?  What's that?  Jack up the prices to eliminate them?  Hmm, well, yes, I suppose that would work?  Excuse me?!  Maybe this is a sign that we've climbed the social ladder and should look up the road for a fancier hotel?  Well, I never!  We're respectable Americans, the backbone of this country and..."

Yes, as I read the class lines it seems to tell me as much about me as about anyone else--tells me how small my world is, how little I know.

Our Missouri river boy took us across the river to a shale bed.  We dropped out our Lindy rigs with nightcrawlers and began trolling.  Not even fifty yards up the river, he shook his head.  "This will never do--we're going too fast," he said.  He had my dad cut the engine, then he grabbed the emergency oar and went and sat on the prow of the boat, dipping the oar in the water and pulling us slowly, awkwardly forward while holding his real between his knees.  In another fifty yards, he grabbed his pool with one hand.  "I've got one goin'," he declared.  My dad and I eyed each other knowingly.  We had "bites" of the same kind, setting the hook only to find ourselves hooked on rocks.  "Come on, take it," he said to the fish, feeding line.  When he did set the hook, it quickly became clear he did have a live one on the end.  He brought it up slowly, expertly, and my dad netted it, a four-pound walleye with the dark camouflage bars distinguished in the light like a row of pine trees against the clear sky. 

It was a beautiful fish, spectacularly beautiful, and I looked at the boy with two sets of teeth, this boy who already knew the craft of fishing like I never would, never being so conflicted as to what I envied and what I didn't.