by Naomi Shihab Nye
Places designed for fun made her feel particularly glum. Motto clipped
to her refrigerator door. Visitors would ask, Where did you get that? I made
it up. They laughed. They copied it into their checkbooks. They said they
felt that way too.
Then who were all these other people, clogging highways with cars full of ice
chests, sun hats, and hopeful children?
She hated Sea World. The only true moment at Sea World had been when the whale
splashed them with its tail. That seemed well-deserved. But remember, the
“splash zone” was prescribed, as everything else seemed to be. She hated
the otters wearing bandannas, mimicking country songs into a microphone.
She hated carnivals, fiestas, Six Flags, Disneyworld, Epcot (despite its fancy
cultural intentions), and, most recently, water parks. She and her son had just
spent their first day at one. They had been planning to do this since he was in
kindergarten and he was now nearly in third grade. It was time. Actually, it
was good they had waited, since he had become a much better swimmer. Her own
swimming had not improved in 30 years. The park bore a German name because it
was in a little old Texas German town. It was also very expensive. Did people
save up all year to come here? Was it their one flashing fandango? Where did
everyone get their money?
They arrived at exactly 10am, imagining they would be early. At least a
thousand people were already inside the park. Standing in line, something nice
happened. “Naomi, would you like a coupon?” A woman looking vaguely familiar in
wide sunglasses said, “We went to high school together. I’m Letty. Remember?”
It seemed an important part of fun that people would turn up like
this.
The coupon lowered each ticket by two dollars.
Inside the park, they felt overwhelmed, like entering a Japanese department
store during rush hour. Which direction? Inner tubes where? Staircases extended
every direction. Where did these lines begin?
A map described which attractions were relaxing and which were
life-threatening, bone-jarring, not recommended for pregnant women or people
with heart conditions.
Even the map was hard to interpret. She felt threatened just examining it. A
minimum of “easy” activities; many more designated “intensive participatory.”
People obviously had vastly differing degrees of tolerance for thrills and
spills.
Other people wanted their inner tubes to pitch over a cliff. They wanted to be
toppled, tumbled, startled and screaming. Otherwise how to explain the long
wait for the scariest ride, the steepest plummet, where screaming teens
straddled rubber boards, clutched two thin handles and roared down a nearly
vertical channel? Her son, with his usual good taste, said mildly, “You could
break your neck doing that.” He was so optimistic inside his muscular little
frame.
They walked and walked. The sun was blazing now so they dried off quickly
between dips into various mild-mannered pools. They lumbered up steep stairs
with their unpleasant black innertubes leaving streaks like giant bruises
across their shoulders and lumbered back down the same stairs looking for
something they felt like doing.
They developed fetishes — he, that they would be separated by a fork in the
waves, so to speak — they had seen at least three water channels veer off in
different directions from the same starting place. Her fetish was that she
would find herself on a terrifying ride unable to get off.
So naturally she was observing every ride intently but many of them had parts
you could not see from dry land.
Their interviewing skills went into over-drive.
Have you ridden this before? Is it scary? Do you plummet? How would you
rate it compared, say, to the Raging River Ride or the Cliffhanger?
People seemed happy to be spoken to, mouths opening gratefully around their
vocabularies. Otherwise, the language code here was a series of shrieks and
groans. Everyone said nothing was scary. She did not trust them.
At a “Wave Pool tucked into one corner of the park,” a mysterious underwater
machine created a reasonable facsimile of The Beach, sans sand, crabs
and seaweed. Her son liked this place best. He hopped in the waves, drifting
and splashing, for at least an hour. She considered it. They could have driven
to the coast, for free. She watched toddlers clinging onto their parents’ legs
when the big waves crashed in. She missed having a toddler. She also missed
being one.
They wandered and observed. Do you want to do this? she’d ask her son,
praying, Please say no, and he’d say, I don’t think so. Let’s come
back to it. (Was it something in her tone of voice?) A number of the milder
attractions appeared to have closed due to lack of interest. Cowards must be in
the minority by now.
They rode a crowded tram to the other section of this water park a mile away.
They rode barefoot, which felt strange. The tram passed some nice old houses
with porches and vines and yards and mail boxes. She felt jealous of people
inside those houses doing regular things like clearing the table after lunch or
folding laundry. A young woman fainted on the tram and had to be carried off
it, her head dangling limply.
A ride called The Dragon Blaster was heavily touted by the tram driver.
There is nothing like it, he said. So they quizzed more people. Everyone
said It is great. It is like a roller coaster, but you are on a double
innertube, inside another tube, high up in the air, and heavily splashed. The
water blasts you along so you surge around corners and up and down swoops. It’s
just one wild curve after another.
This sounded like the worst thing she could ever, ever imagine.
Her son said brightly, But the good thing is, the inner tube is double.
That means we wouldn’t be separated. Maybe not, she thought. Dead,
maybe, from fright, but not separated.
She actually followed him when he said Let’s try it. Her guilt was
swelling. They went to stand in line. A man in front of them said, You
realize this is only the line for getting your inner tube. I bet it will take
45 minutes to get one. I know, since I rode this twice before today. And then
you have to stand in the real line for the ride itself which right now is
running about a 30 or 40 minutes wait. But it’s worth it.
She examined this character. Worth it? He had a blurred tattoo of a skull on
his left shoulder. He had dirty-looking stubble on his chin.
Her son said emphatically, I don’t think it’s worth it. That’s more
than an hour of just waiting!
Her inner chorus sang hosannas.
They went to another line called Family Blaster (were these names designed to
fit current society or what?) which was much shorter. A woman with two teeny
braided girls stood in front of them. This is not scary, the woman kept
repeating. It’s the only thing I can get them to do. They screamed bloody
murder on the Raging River. But this is a piece of cake.
Cake. She was hungry for cake. At least she and her son got to ride in a blue
and yellow raft, together. The raft shot down a fairly civilized tube, swooped
around a curve, then pummeled up a slope, blasted along by heavy shots of water
which hit their raft under their bottoms. Apparently the new craze in water
rides, someone had mentioned, was to feel yourself going up instead of down.
The entire ride took approximately 40 seconds.
She tried to imagine who dreamed these things up.
Her son loved this one. He could call it the Butt Blaster and get away with
it, at least till she asked him to stop.
They rode it five times.
For some reason the fourth time was most exciting. Maybe they swooped higher
on the curve, or the current caught them at a slightly different angle. After
they finished with it, they felt a little proud of themselves, as if they had
finally done something to make it worth their while coming here.
They floated in circles around a fakey island, riding on the back of a hard
plastic snake.
The sky kept looking stormy, which might have been exciting. She caught
herself wishing for a tornado.
They rode the tram back to the other half of the park and, with a flurry of
confidence, stood in line for the Raging River Ride. She felt inspired because
she had heard a teenager call it boring.
The list of Don’ts was daunting, though. Don’t hold on to one another.
Don’t ride together. Don’t get out of your tube. Blah blah blah. Don’t do this
if you’re prone to hysteria.
Mightily, they plunged into the shoot. Before they were ten yards along, her
son flipped out of his tube and began flailing in the heavy current. Help
me! Help! She, who was speeding without any semblance of control exactly
past him, reached out to feel the hard tug of his arm, but now his tube was
zooming out of reach and they might lose one another entirely, or catapult
together into the rage.
This was not fun. Was it?
Luckily for them, a lifeguard stood waist-deep in the wild water at the bend
and gripped their riderless tube as it roared past him. Hop in, he
shouted at her son. To her he said, Let him go. Go on without him.
What? Was this the spectre of future years rising up out of roiling waters to
instruct her?
They roared down the channel with a gap between them. She found herself
zooming backwards down the worst raging incline, unable to see what was coming,
clutching her hat and sunglasses (the sign at the beginning instructed you to
prepare to part with such items forever and hold no one responsible) and came
out breathless, hyperventilating, splash-struck and bruised at the end.
He didn’t say Let’s do it again.
After that flamboyance they walked around for awhile. They ate ugly things and
drank sharp-edged drinks.
Her son agreed they could leave the park a half-hour before it closed, to beat
the traffic back to the highway.
Driving home, with sunburnt backs and charred knees, they passed the sign for
Natural Bridge Caverns and discussed briefly what it would have been like to
spend the day underground instead of wet. He seemed to get pleasure from
talking about his spill. He liked considering alternatives. What if there had
been no lifeguard? What if he had flailed down the entire ride without a tube?
What if she had toppled out of her tube too and everybody else bumped into
them?
She, on the other hand, was considering how her father had grown up on the
other side of the world in an ancient city where no one had any toys. Oh, they
had sticks, cans and a few bouncing balls, but their world was, essentially,
toyless. Her father used to tell her this when she was growing up in the United
States surrounded by dolls, happy books, and fuzzy bears. He didn’t tell it so
she would feel guilty, but with a certain wonder in his voice. How could we
have felt so wealthy with nothing but sticks and cans?
They had stories too. Stories were free, and portable. Stories washed over
them like the cool rain of a Jerusalem springtime, the rain that made whole
fields of poppies rise up overnight. You could carry stories to the roof with
you, where the children liked to sleep when it was dry. They passed stories
around from pallet to pallet. They splashed in them, laughing. Some had secret
rivulets. Her father might fall asleep in the middle of his brother’s story and
find himself floating on it later, dreaming a different ending. He wouldn’t
have called his life “fun,” but he wouldn’t have called it “trouble,” either.
San Antonio-based poet Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of numerous books, her
most recent being Never In A Hurry, and is profiled by Phil West in this
issue.
This article appears in August 16 • 1996 and August 16 • 1996 (Cover).