By Jim Hagarty
2006
Insanity has been defined as doing the same things over and over and expecting different results each time.
This can be the only explanation as to why I once again found myself on Sunday climbing up the many steps to the platform from where crazy people were willingly placing their bodies in long, twisted plastic tubes filled with rushing water which promised to hurtle them at (literally) breakneck speeds to a little pool of water hundreds of feet away.
Two years ago, I allowed myself to be talked into plunging feet-first down a similar tube of torture, except that one was not fully enclosed and it did not curve, but was designed instead to get it over with quickly, for those who want their horror served straight up with no twists and turns. Sort of like bungee jumping without the bungee. During that nightmare, I found myself screaming for the first time in many years as I dropped out of the sky to the thimbleful of water that was below. Incapable, in the midst of the near-death experience, of remembering to keep my legs raised in the air when l hit the thimble, the water, instead, hit me with all the force of a sledgehammer to the groin. As a former sports reporter was in the habit of saying (sarcastically) on several occasions every day: “Good times.”
So, how could l possibly find myself ascending those dreaded steps again with a heart almost as heavy as those poor French citizens who climbed the stairs to the guillotine so long ago? It happened on Sunday the way it happened two years ago: pressure from my progeny who, as with most kids these days, are not in the habit of being disappointed. What a man won’t do to solidify his reputation as a great dad…
When my son and I had made it almost to the front of the line at the top of the steps, some poor schmoe had realized the serious error he had made a few feet into his watery plunge and this unfortunate soul, who would have fit right in at the Reign of Terror, let out a prolonged blood-curdling howl that would have put a smile on Alfred Hitchcock’s puffy face. This was not a confidence builder.
To be honest, I still can’t believe I did this.
Again.
I wanted to back out at the last minute, but once you’re in the tube, your fate is sealed. Any idea I had that a curved tube would deliver a slower ride than my straight-down plunge of two years back, was quickly squashed. Now I know why the tube was fully enclosed. Had it not been, I would still be in orbit somewhere over the city. l can’t describe the feeling except to report that the screaming l did two years ago resembled a soft whisper compared to my yells of fear and despair on Sunday.
Along the way, my left arm decided to try to get away from the rest of my body and thus it was that I hit the puddle below in a pitiful, contorted form. The pool, it seems, was deeper than I thought and so disoriented was I that I could not find my way to the surface.
“This is it,” was all I could think. Suicide by water slide.
Eventually, I did re-emerge and, waiting for me there were three family members who apparently had inhaled copious quantities of laughing gas while I was water slide fodder as they seemed incapable of restraining their joy at the sight of my suffering.
“But Dad,” said one of them. “You’ve got to admit it was fun.”
“No I don’t.” I don’t have to admit that at all. And if I live to be 110 (unlikely if more waterslides are in my future), I never will.
