The alliteratively named ‘Wild West Waterworld’ boasts of having the longest waterslide in the county which, unless this specific Washington County is known for being particularly abundant in waterslides, seems like a non-boast to me. I’ll grant them they discovered a goldmine in their wedding of the old west and water themes with attractions named ‘The Revolver’ which is like a massive spiraling toilet bowl and the ‘Six-Shooter,’ where kids and adults alike are encouraged to race down six identical, steeply-sloped tubes and to skid madly across the shallow pool below. Less gracefully realized are the attendant costumes: tightly fitting swimwear and leather ornamentation in the vein of cowboy hats and heavy-looking holsters for plastic, water-spewing pistols. Some walk around in cowboy boots but they do so begrudgingly, even I can tell.
Reader, I have migrated south since last I wrote, perhaps unconsciously, or even semi-consciously, toward this entry specifically. The ordeal at Rest Stop #212 some time ago did a number on my psyche and the determinedly carefree nature of a waterpark has been something of a guiding light. The weather is warm, the breeze, gentle, and the staff willing enough to turn a blind-eye to a single man dribbling a flask of rum into a steeply-priced frozen slurry drink.
Life is not good, reader, but it’s certainly better than it was.
“It is said ‘A man is known by the company he keeps,’ and if we might extend that truth to a place then ‘Wild West Waterworld’s’ reputation is a poor one. There is very little wrong with park itself, the facilities are clean, the attractions well maintained, and the food mediocre, but the people who live there are of the worst caliber and it is this man’s hope that they stay put, so as not to be encountered on the outside.”
My leisurely consumption of the drunken slurry serves the double purpose of easing my nerves and masking my true purpose, to stake the place out disguised as a casual pool dude. With earbuds in and aviators on, plastered in a thick coat of sunscreen, I sit very still and watch people in a way that I hope comes off as passive and not creepy.
I’m right on the edge of a good doze when a guy trips over my ankle and apologizes quickly, catching up to a few of his friends ahead. Together they make up a group of thirty-somethings, no one peculiar on their own but strange for a sort of faded look they all share. The colors of their swim trunks are flat and washed-out, their skin pale to the point of translucency. The guy that tripped over me is blonde but his close-cut hair has taken on a greenish-yellow tinge. Together, they make their way up the tall staircase toward the entrance of ‘Boot Hill,’ a long, winding slide that twists carefully amidst the others, sometimes under and other times above, so that its exact path is difficult to parse from a distance.
I follow the group by blonde guy’s milky-red swimsuit, tracking their progress until they disappear, one after the other, into the depths of ‘Boot Hill.’ I scan the exits and I wait, relying on the guttural surety I’ve cultivated toward this very purpose, toward the purpose of spotting inconsistencies. Time passes and they do not emerge.
For once, I was expecting this very thing.
Someone involved with the production of Shitholes deemed it important to publish an appendix of bizarre maps in the back of the book, none of which adhere to any sort of scale or seem attached to particular articles. One of them is more like a collection of colorful squiggles than anything else but some of those squiggles are labeled and they are labeled with the names of ‘Wild West Waterworld’s’ slides. One such line is labeled ‘Boot Hill’ and several hastily written exclamation points alert the reader to its importance.
It takes only a moment to finish the slurry and only several, wheezing minutes for me to climb to the top of ‘Boot Hill.’ A woman is there to assure that I enter the slide feet-first, that I cross my arms and hold them to my chest. This, she says, is important. She tips her hat to me; I wink and immediately regret doing it. I can’t remember a time when winking was ever the appropriate reaction to anything. I escape into the tube.
‘Boot Hill’ starts off slow, easing me through a red, counter-clockwise spiral before dipping and picking up speed. Before long my body is sliding up the corners and noises from the outside become distant and echoed. The air inside is damp and close, I lose sense of how far I’ve gone and how much further I could possibly go. There is a sharp drop where the water seems to jettison me forward and down a length of green plastic faster than ever. I start to panic, knowing that whatever has warranted this waterpark’s entry into the book must be coming, that I slide toward my fate in sunglasses and swim trunks. I uncross my arms, try, in vain, to slow myself on the wall. There are no handholds, no place less slick than the last. In a final effort, I try to wedge my legs up into the ceiling but I only spin onto my back, now facing forward down the slide.
Then a splash.
I am underwater.
I try to swim up and find a solid concrete barrier. I try to swim up another way and break into the fresh air. A lifeguard’s whistle sounds.
“Dude,” he yells, “No head-first sliding.”
I’m at the bottom of ‘Boot Hill’ and those people are nowhere to be found.
I climb the stairs, dripping water as I go. The attendant at the top reminds me of sliding procedure. I refuse to look her in the eyes, afraid I’ll wink again, sure I would if given the chance.
My second experience of ‘Boot Hill’ is much the same as my first and by the third trip down I am feeling confident that the slide itself will not subject me to something on its own, that this is the sort of thing I need to figure out proactively. On my fifth slide, dampened and woozy, I depart once more from sliding procedure and uncross my arms, letting my fingers drag along the walls of the tube and, sure enough, just before the violent drop from yellow tube to green I feel the walls become rough and scratched. With a mad, twisting glance I spot a second exit just below the jettison point. By then, of course, it is too late.
I miss it again on the sixth, distracted and ashamed by the concerned look on the attendant’s face as I clamored in. The seventh time, finding she has been replaced with a stern-looking, fully-clothed man, I find the right system of pressure and leverage early and I slow myself down before the tactical precipice.
The texturing on the tunnel walls is undoubtedly the dragging of fingernails, a history of people scraping to a stop as I have. The water rushes around me as I maneuver, carefully, down and into the hidden slide. This is a black tube and the thick plastic allows no light to enter. I hold myself steady, gripping the ledge and wondering if this isn’t-
A rider thunders down ‘Boot Hill’ and out of the yellow tube, knocking my fingers loose and sending me into the darkness.
The rasping at Rest Stop #212 returns as soon as the pale green light behind me disappears and I plummet downward, the stagnant swirling in my ears the same as what existed in the restroom. My arms and legs reach out but find no purchase and I spin and choke on water, blindly led further into the depths of ‘Boot Hill.’
The panic recedes and I find myself shivering, pushed lazily along by a shallow current. It is still dark, reader, but now only a pathetic sort of dark. I stand and the warmish water is no higher than my ankles. I take a step and slip, like an idiot, back to my knees. The impact of my body echoes hollowly and I hear no noises from the outside. This is, by all accounts, still part of the slide.
“Hey,” someone says, “Why don’t you step out of the water? It’s slippery there.”
The plastic here is not as opaque as I had thought, as my eyes adjust I am able to make out a vague perimeter of the area, a rounded plastic room, bisected by the persistent stream of water at my feet. There are people in the room with me, mostly sitting, and piles of indistinguishable objects. As my bearings return I see a shadow reach out and offer a hand. I take it, and step forward.
The dry plastic is sun-warmed and easy to stand on, the air humid and stifling.
“Who are you all?” I ask, “What is this place?”
“We’re… wait, everyone I’m turning on a light for the new guy.”
The people around me grumble and then cover their eyes as an LED lantern comes on in the woman’s hands. She squints at me.
“We live here,” she says, answering neither of my questions.
The fact that these people live here is abundantly obvious now that I can see. Each person seems to have carved out their piece of plastic with a sleeping mat and a few personal items. There are a lot of old radios, limp looking books, and packets of food. Everything bears the telltale signs of slow chlorine bleaching and mildew rot. Even the people.
Especially the people.
“Why?” I ask, “Does the park know about this?”
“Of course not,” another guy chimes in, “That’s why we’re here. It’s paradise.”
A few of the faces around me seem to agree with him and the rest are mostly neutral on the matter. A couple look skeptical.
“Paradise is a strong word,” the woman admits, beckoning me over to what seems to be her mat, “Most of us were just looking to get away from the outside world for a while.”
“There are places like this all over,” the excitable guy chimes in again, “Places people forget about- old warehouses, walled-over bathrooms…”
“Vestigial sections of water slides?” I ask.
“We don’t know why this is here,” the woman says, “But we’re glad it is.”
“Hmm…” I say, and it seems to vibrate the room.
There is an expectant silence that drags on for several minutes while I make a show of observing the entirety of the place. It doesn’t take long.
“What do you do here?”
“Some of us knit,” the woman says, “Or read. Sometimes we talk to each other.”
“Only some times?”
“We don’t really have a lot in common except for the slide.”
This is the first thing everybody seems to agree on. ‘Boot Hill’s’ proper channel thumps noisily above us, sending another passenger along.
“Where do you go to the bathroom?” I ask.
“We use the park’s facilities for solid waste,” the woman says, a light red coloring her face.
“Look,” an older gentleman interjects, “the park chlorinates the water beyond what’s necessary to destroy common diseases carried by urine…”
“It’s not about disease, Jeremy,” someone else says, “It’s about ethics of relieving oneself into a children’s pool because you’re too lazy to use the regular restroom.”
The woman who greeted me remains red and quiet while the others join in the argument, highlighting this community’s third rail- whether or not they should be pissing into the stream.
If I try really, really, hard I can sort of see where these people are coming from. I suppose my truck and this stupid trip are equivalent, in some ways, to their longing for a place to escape to, a place that’s cut off from the world. It’s been a long time since I’ve met somebody I wanted to talk to more than once. It’s hard for me to tell whether that’s a result of my being constantly on the move, or if it happened the other way around.
The guy at the fairy fern place: I suppose I wouldn’t mind talking to him again.
If only for some clarifications.
No, I’m calling this one for me. I’m definitely better than these people, who seem to have motivation enough to bring little battery-powered DVD players down a water slide but not to use restroom facilities so nearby. I’m better than these people in a lot of ways and that realization is enough to put a big, smug smile on my face and a flicker of hope back in this road-weary heart. A little perspective goes a long way towards solving life’s problems, or, if nothing else, making them easier to ignore.
With little fanfare I walk to the room’s toilet/exit and finish my journey, emerging into the waterpark proper once more. I paddle to shore and walk back to my towel, packing the few things that seemed necessary.
“It’s pretty gross in there, huh?”
The woman from before stands behind me in a one-piece, her skin a pallid gray. She squints in the sunlight with eyes unused to the outside and we drip together on the sidewalk, two damp people in a vast, dry world. I scratch my leg and offer the only consolation that comes to mind.
“It’s gross everywhere.”
-traveler
