A few weeks ago, my brother-in-law sent us some pictures from a day that my nephew spent with his friends at a water park in Cairo, Egypt. Aqua Park, often called Aqua Bark since the letter “p” doesn’t have an equivalent in Arabic, holds a special place in our hearts. We took Emma there as a three-year-old when we lived in Cairo, and it was love at first sight with water parks. There are many reasons to love Aqua Bark, as long as you aren’t too hung up on safety, slide maintenance, or manageable crowd sizes. The best thing about it has to be the loose enforcement, if at all, of safe sliding rules. Can YOU count the number of boys in this picture who went down this slide together??
The staff are more of a benevolent presence than keepers of safety. Being at Aqua Bark is like going on a road trip without a car seat for your children; it has sort of a retro, spreading out in the back of the station wagon kind of vibe to it.
Fast forward a couple of years to our experiences in American water parks, and we are in a totally different world. We had a great trip to Raging Waters in southern California when we first moved back from Egypt, but each line was over thirty minutes long. Apparently there are rules for how many people can go down a slide and when they can do it, and they need to have safely exited the water and basically walked to the other side of the park and dried off before the next person goes. The pace of fun slows remarkably when you can’t just throw yourself willy-nilly down any slide whenever and however you want.
Last fall, a day after Dan broke his shoulder in a bike accident, and after Theo’s lingering cough was diagnosed as walking pneumonia, we went to an indoor water park. Naturally. Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg, VA has a weird thematic mix of wolves in the wild and manufactured indoor water/beach fun. The lifeguards actually have to pace the pool decks ducking and whipping their heads around in a bizarre attempt to appear like wolves on the prowl. I’m not sure how that is supposed to feel to a toddler in the water… friend or foe??
A favorite ride for us was the Howler. To get on this ride, you haul yourself into a four-leaf-clover-shaped innertube with three other riders, the attendant pushes you off, and you drop down a chute to come out in an enormous toilet bowl-like enclosure where you spin and spin and spin until you finally gurgle down another chute and eventually arrive out at the bottom.
Apparently, this ride stuck with me in a way I wouldn’t have anticipated. I recently attended a writer’s workshop for four glorious, child-free days up in Princeton, and one of the seminars I went to was led by the amazing Sophfronia Scott, on the Art of Memoir. She had our class do an exercise to practice using metaphor in our writing, recommended by Bill Roorbach in his book “Writing Life Stories.” In it, he says that we often compare the mind to a steel trap. But what does that really mean if we were to apply the metaphor beyond that one phrase? Sophfronia asked us to come up with a metaphor to describe our minds. After sitting in total bewilderment for a few minutes, this came to me (forgive the sloppy inconsistencies),
“A thought enters my brain like I enter the Howler waterslide at Great Wolf Lodge with my kids. The attendant pushes us off, and right on the edge of panic, my thoughts drop down and my emotions are in my throat. The tube emerges into the huge, toilet bowl-like enclosure and around my thoughts swirl, changing position, whirling faster and faster, sometimes forward, sometimes backward, narrowing in circumference and focus. A curious calm comes as the swirl gets smaller. Heading into the final chute, the thoughts settle into a straight line and I emerge, slower, more sedate, my thoughts on track, facing forward, a clear direction ahead.”
Sophfronia asked us to extend the metaphor as much as we could, which I didn’t have time to do in class, but I’ve since been thinking about it. What would it be like if my mind was the Howler at Aqua Bark? The one innertube would likely be five innertubes, shoved off all at once, chasing each other around the bowl, running into one another, maybe flipping some folks out, and all landing in a jumbled, exuberant heap through the final chute out into the water… only to be rammed from behind by all the other innertubes emerging too.
Interestingly, this cross-cultural waterslide/mind metaphor mashup correlates pretty closely with the state of my mind in real life as our family moves around to different and new locations. All of the anxieties and worries and excitement and logistical details and cultural newness load into my mind at once and chase each other in an overwhelming and exhausting race to get to the final chute where things will eventually get sorted. This upending is overwhelming and disorienting. But there is also a crazy, is-this-exhilarating-or-is-this-terrifying feeling when life as we know it is tweaked just a bit–or a lot– that makes going down a slide something else altogether.
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