Water Wonderland

One simmering summer day a friend of mine decided we should go see what all the ‘wonder’ was about at the local “Water Wonderland”. I had never been to this mystical oasis and decided it might be fun. Upon entering the park it didn’t seem to look as enticing as the commercials led me to believe through my entire childhood. But, I figured as long as they had water I would enjoy it.

We went to something called a ‘flume slide’. They gave us a blue square to put our bodies on as we went down the slide. As my turn to go came closer, I began to notice that the blue square was not long enough for my body. The time had come though and I had to head down. I positioned my torso the best I could and away I went. It didn’t take long before I realized that the slide was as smooth as a cheese grater and my knees were scraping along. I didn’t dare reposition myself though, because of the risk of falling off my square and shredding my chest or back. It was pure torture all the way to the bottom. I heard that Satan ordered the blueprints to put a flume slide in hell.

After I got the bleeding to stop, we headed up to the zip line. It looked harmless and fun from afar. The participant would hold onto some handle bars and zip out over a large pool. The handle bars were attached of course to the zip line cable and had a rope tied so they could be retrieved by the Wonderland employee. The rope would allow the handle bars to go only about half way down the full length of the cable. My first friend went and did some crazy stuff in the air as he released from the handles. My second friend held on tightly and seemed to be oblivious to the fact that the ride only went half way down the cable. As he reached the halfway point his body’s momentum swung his feet upward toward the cable, which startled him and caused him to let go. His back was now perfectly parallel to the water that was waiting below. I still see it in slow motion as he is heading toward the surface while flailing his arms in circles to no avail. It was the loudest slap I have ever heard in my life and I hope to never hear one louder. His body seemed to be set on top of the water for a couple of seconds before he sunk down. The Wonderland employee held up the line and looked down, poised to jump in for a rescue. My friend was not moving. He just floated back to the top of the water. The employee yelled out to him, “Are you OK?”. It was all he could do to put his thumb up. He cleared away from the zip line path and slowly followed the current over to some stairs. I waited for my turn to zip down and I made it to my friend just after he got out of the water. He seemed to be in shock and his back was red like Santa Claus. The zip line had taken him out of the quest for wonder.

The temperature was around 110 and as we made our way across the park to different destinations our feet were melting on the pavement. The park seems to have been designed by sadists, as there are many long stretches of plain concrete sidewalk, which are not close to any pools from whence to splash water on the path to cool it off. Only every once in a while would we encounter what used to be something resembling astroturf, but was now boiling carpet glue, which brought sweet relief from the searing sidewalk.

After walking past some mysteriously unused watercraft in one pool that was closed with caution tape, we meandered over to the wave pool. Now there is no way this could be messed up right? As I entered the pool I felt things would be just fine but a few yards in I noticed some trash floating in the water. (And there was garbage too.) Before long I had lost my appetite for adventure and decided to exit the pool. As I got closer to shore I started to feel more and more like Chewbacca storming the beach at Normandy. I began clawing at my flesh to remove what seemed to be weighing me down and found a plethora of very long dark hairs clinging to my skin. When I regained control after the full body tremors I clawed even faster to get it off. Once I had the hairs off, I looked around and saw an inordinate number of long-locked ladies hanging out in the pool. Even with the number of people shedding in the pool, this amount of hair must have been the result of years of accumulation. My day of wonder was officially over. I joined my scarlet backed comrade in the “let’s get the heck out of here” chorus, which he had been singing since he regained normal breathing abilities, and we got the heck out.

That night on the evening news I learned that a youngster had been burned at Water Wonderland by a battery that exploded on his watercraft. That seemed about par for the course and explained the caution tape.

We never found out what all the ‘wonder’ was about. Could it be the wonder in how one pool could have so much hair. Maybe it was, “I wonder why I paid for that.” An obvious one is, “I wonder how we survived.” I suppose it was just meant to be, that I will always ‘wonder’ about Water Wonderland.

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