Were you to be driving along 17th South Street last week, you’d have spotted an old man standing motionless at the perimeter of a deconstruction site, fingers entwined in the links of a chain link barrier. That old man was me, come to take one last look at the shuttered water park where I spent the better part of what otherwise could have been my most productive years.
I was in my late Thirties when Raging Waters was built—in a hurry, it seems. To reach the top of a water slide, you had to climb a rickety staircase consisting of carriage-bolted timbers reminiscent of, say, a nineteenth-century railroad trestle. Once at the top, you’d stand on a gently undulating platform, clutching a gently undulating railing, until the lifeguard gave you the go-ahead to launch. Down the fiberglass chute you’d go, one twisty turn after another, until suddenly the bottom would drop out and you’d go airborne. Next thing you knew, you were skipping like a stone across a splash pool. Whee!
Was it safe? Of course! Hastily-constructed water slides overseen by teen-aged slackers—what could possibly go wrong? Which is how I ended up spending so much time there, because of an ongoing demand for adult supervision. It started with a neighbor boy named Brandon, whose single mother had to work for a living. Then came my own son Alex, along with his playmate Nell. Both children had mothers who worked day jobs, and even if they had been available to chaperone their kids to the water park, they wouldn’t have volunteered. “Raging Headache,” is how my wife phrased it.
As the kids grew older, we explored other venues, including Lagoona Beach in Farmington, Saratoga Springs in Sandy, Cowabunga Bay in Draper–even Wet ‘n’ Wild in Las Vegas. It was at Wet‘n’ Wild that Nell became momentarily “lost”—for which she blames me to this day. But honestly, who can possibly keep track of which kid is which in an inland wave pool teeming with bobbing bodies?
Bottom line: Nobody drowned; nobody got seriously injured. Nell is now an adult with a son of her own. My son Alex has a daughter, aged three. As I type this, the pair are frolicking at a water park in Hawaii. It’ll be my granddaughter’s first trip down a chute, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be her last. Like her father, and his father before him, she’ll be living the life aquatic.
