On September 10th, 2023, a few weeks after it was easy to do anything about it, I came to a nasty revelation. Summer was over, the year was winding down, and for the first time in my living memory, I’d never made it onto a waterslide.
In horror I ran over the possibilities in my head. I’d been swimming a few times that year, but only in lakes without slides. When I visited my brother in Nashville we stopped by The Grand Ole Opry hotel, they had a waterpark. Yes indeed, but we only walked the grounds, we never went to the park proper. Okay, so what about this supposed streak? Did I make it to one in 2021? Yes, I did, on my honeymoon. Surely, I didn’t in 2020, when the plague was raging across the country? My wife-to-be and I spent the very first day of that year, months before COVID was a common talking point, at the Chula Vista waterpark in the Wisconsin Dells. 2020 was the first year since I was seven I never made it on a roller coaster, but I did, indeed, make it on a waterslide.
There are probably two camps of adults on this particular topic. On the first are those who could not possibly tell you when they hit such a milestone, and could not possibly care. But anyone who could tell you that, I’m inclined to assume reached a similar level of distress to me when they realized it.
I still had time to avert that awful fate, but the timing of the epiphany proved damning. There’s a pool fifteen minutes walk from my house with two slides, but it closed the same week students went back to school. The doggy dips at the others pools around the metro that marked the end of their operating season ended that very day, so outdoor slides were suddenly an impossibility. My eccentric, pragmatic Uncle Kraig referred me to the water park inside a Ramada hotel just a few miles from my house. The internet reviews were not kind to that hotel, not only for the mold in the carpet but, indeed, for not being open about the fact their waterslides had been out of commission since the pandemic.
The following weeks brought with them the most intense research into a topic I’ve done since college. I came across the Wasserbahn Waterpark Smock and Hotel in Williamsburg (permanently closed) and a Comfort Inn in Iowa City (hotel still open, waterslide gone.) Marshalltown’s YMCA had an indoor slide only available to registered Y-members. And within an hour of the border of every single one of Iowa’s neighboring states is a park with an indoor waterslide of some kind or another. But I’m a working man of thirty with forty-hour work weeks and a mortgage, as much as I wanted out of this awful predicament, there was only so much time I could devote and so much money I could allot.
November arrived, and I put together a plan. My wife and I were already going to Minneapolis for a comic convention. Minneapolis, being better than Des Moines in just about every way imaginable, hosted several parks and even community centers with indoor waterslides. Over in Minneapolis’s twin city, Saint Paul, I found a community center just ten minutes away from our hotel. Monday through Friday only bore a two-hour window, 10 AM to noon, in which the slide was useable, but I could swing that. Saturday and Sunday we could go to our convention, Monday I could hit the slide right after we checked out of our hotel. As I was in total planning mode, I even figured formed a contingency plan- I’d be making a quick trip to Kansas City the next weekend, it didn’t take much to confirm they, too, had publicly available community centers with waterslides. If, heaven forbid, something went awry up north, I could solve my problem down south.
The Sunday morning after the con arrived. A family emergency we feared since before we left suddenly happened. Our trip ended early. It was essential I be around for my dear ones for the immediate future, my upcoming trip to Kansas City was cancelled. There was no time or place to linger on my very silly odyssey when such matters were at hand. Those two shots were lost, there were far more important matters to deal with.
Eventually though, when life returned to something closer to normality, the siren’s call of this ridiculous fixation returned to me. November was at an end, if I was going to make it on that slide, it was imperative I act fast. Furious research resumed, I reached the point of searching for every pool throughout the state to see if they had an indoor section, and maybe if that indoor section had a slide within. Spirit Lake and Okoboji? Yes, but too far and too expensive. Oskaloosa? No. Ottumwa?
I can’t find the link anymore, but it was, indeed, a newspaper article from the late 2010’s that turned everything around. The piece was about student swimmers practicing for an upcoming meet and trips down a waterslide between laps somewhere called, “The Beach.” My heart skipped a beat. If students were swimming there, that had to mean it was open during the school year. I threw in another google search and there it was: “Beach Ottumwa.” In the summertime they had all kinds of equipment at the ready, but in the winter they had an indoor section still operating. And as I looked through photographs online, I beheld the sight of an operating indoor waterslide. It was an hour and a half away, still a high cost in time and gas for my silly quest. But there’s always a point where indignation overcomes investment.
On the morning of December ninth, I called.
“Beach Ottumwa, how can I help you?”
“Hi, you guys open to the public today?”
“Yes we are.”
“Your waterslide running?”
“The indoor one? Yes it is.”
“All right, great, thank you.”
I left the house around one, journeyed with an audiobook I didn’t particularly enjoy, and arrived just after two thirty. The teenage receptionist had to reject me when I first approached, they didn’t take credit cards. After a jaunt to the nearest ATM inside a nearby Casey’s I returned and paid the four-dollar entry fee.
The inside of Beach Ottumwa was full of the smell of chlorine and the shouts of children. It must have been someone’s birthday, because tables lined with cake and Dominos pizza stood near the water. Preteen shouts reverberated throughout the room, kids laughed and splashed and fell and cried on the slick floor. Adults were there too, but they only observed their progeny. I was by far the oldest person in a swimsuit. My commitment to satisfying my inner child always runs deep, but I hate how that little punk sometimes makes me look like some kind of creeper. The best course of action, I was sure, was to get the task over with quickly and then get out.
A line of kids stood beside a secondary pool, and after a moment of watching, I saw another child shoot right into the water. I took my place in line behind three youngsters and waited. Past an open door stood a staircase that wound upward into darkness. No lifeguard waited at the top, just a sloped exit point given flow by a pair of waterjets. Last time I’d been on a waterslide that ominous, it had one of those trapdoors at the bottom that made me think I was about to descend into some level of Willy Wonka hell. But eventually, the linger passed, and I laid down.
My trip only lasted a few dark seconds. The slide at Northwest Aquatic from my very earliest pool memories probably stood twice as tall. And yet, I still uttered a high, “Wooo!” before I hit the water below. As I grow older, I continue to approach that year which will end without my riding a waterslide. But it would not be my thirtieth year.
I’m already looking into when that one right next to my house opens again next summer. Even if I just pay to get in, get the job done, and come home in ten minutes. I just can’t let this shit catch me off guard again.
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