Growing up, great swimming holes were as much a part of being a kid as hockey cards. (DAVE CHIDLEY/SUN MEDIA)

Canada's top camping sites Canada's best hiking trails Top cottage regions in Canada Canada's top fishing retreats

I don't worry much about dirty bombs, the price of gas or catching the flu from sneezing pigs.

Instead, I fret more about the weeds in my lawn, a developing pain in my right thumb and the sad truth my children are growing up without knowing the wonder of spending afternoons around a swimming hole.

They have a pool in their suburban backyard, and know what it’s like to swim in a lake and even the ocean.

But a secret, secluded section of river under a rail bridge or a deep pooling in a creek bend is as foreign to them as TV dinners cooked in the oven.

Growing up, great swimming holes were as much a part of being a kid as hockey cards and knowing television theme songs.

There was one at the end of our street when we moved to the country — a cold bath of a creek where the country girls would come and water their horses.

In high school, we all knew the best place for a midnight swim was near an abandoned quarry on the outskirts of Halifax.

We would trudge in through the low bush, light homemade newspaper torches and leap — stupidly — off a cliff of rocks, into the black water below.

Into my first journalism job, I still found time to retreat there.

And over the years, while on reporting assignments, I’ve managed to fall into remarkable cradles of water — from time-worn sandstone pools found along British Columbia’s Nanaimo River, to a bend in a creek in India to, last year while covering the China Olympics, joining a group of elderly men who swim around tourist paddle boats in a lake in the middle of Beijing.

There are few things — short of sand in a bathing suit — that remind me more of summer vacation, than the rush of clear and cool water after a cannon-ball into a pristine lagoon.

But a combination of development and pollution has robbed Canada of some of our hidden water treasures.

Generations of city kids are growing up without napping on a warm rock beside a cool, all natural basin.

They don’t know nature invented the public pool.

So to remind them, Sun Media is searching for the best swimming holes in Canada.

In 120 words or less, tell us where you’ve found heaven on water. And if your favourite basin has been filled in to build a subdivision, tell us what memories remain.

Send your comments and even pictures to thane.burnett@sunmedia.ca, so that I can teach my children some water is just sweeter than the rest.