Raging Waters - RIP Old Friend

-- Time for another tour down memory lane

What's it like to be 12 years old? At the beginning of summer you go to Raging Waters carrying a check your mom wrote to buy a season pass. You give that check to an 18-year-old Raging Waters employee who serves as the gatekeeper of fun. This worker is only six years older than you but he might as well be the president. He's old enough to have a girlfriend. He's old enough to have a job, and with a gig like this heck probably a mortgage and a 401K. He will determine if I am to receive the season pass. He is king.

Will he accept my check? Probably? I mean, my mom knows how to fill it out, right?

Will he accept the obviously fake name I'm about to give him? I'm less sure.

Thank goodness my sister is going first. I never would have had the balls.

"Name?" he asks her.

"Kitty Jarvis," she replies.

Boom, it's done. Not even an eyebrow raise from the worker. Her picture is taken, the card is printed. No interrogation. No request for additional proof of identity. She vaulted the Berlin Wall.

I'm up next and my heart is beating at the fastest rate of its lifetime.

"Do you have your check?" the gatekeeper asks.

I take the check from my pocket and quickly try to smooth out the four folds I applied to it.

"Here you go."

"Name," he asks.

"I'm her brother," I say, nodding nervously at the recently approved Kitty. "So we have the same last name. I'm Alf Jarvis."

In the future I'll realize that trying to defend the validity of my fake name is the most surefire way to have someone doubt its authenticity, but not this day.

Fortunately, the worker was more confused by the spelling than the actual name.

"E-L-F? Like the dudes who work for Santa?"

"No, A-L-F, like the fuzzy TV person."

In the future I'll realize I could have just said Alf as in Alfred, but again. I was 12. Not smart.

"Got it," said the gatekeeper. "Sit over here for your picture."

Success. My heart caught its breath. My ID photo shows the face of the relieved.

What's it like being 12? You find this moment, where you've pulled a con on a Raging Waters employee and invented an amazing altar ego, to be the funniest thing to ever happen in your life.

---

I've searched everywhere for that ID card. Sadly the evidence of my identity fraud no longer exists. Neither, of course, does Raging Waters.

The Tidwell family was the group who brought us to Raging Waters. I mean that in the literal sense -- they drove us to and fro every single time, be it in the cramped van or the luxurious suburban -- and in the indoctrination sense as well. They were versed in what one could or could not get away with in the park.

Want to "accidentally" knock somebody off their tube while in the wave pool? "It's all about positioning and being willing to open your eyes underwater," explained Travis.

"Did you know you can't pee while going down a slide?" said Eugene (née Nathan). "All of us have tried and it's impossible."

Where should we hide our towels so they don't get stolen by the Rose Park hoodlums? "Up the hill, behind the posts that support the triple slides," Tyler guides.

"Can you really skip paying for a tube by getting one from a person leaving the park?" I ask. "Of course," confirms Travis.

It's as if they had a Raging Waters bible they studied from. Want to know where the best spot on the green turf to warm up is? Check 2nd Tidwell chapter 3. How to use the lifeguard hook to recover the rope swing without looking like an idiot? The secret to unlocking maximum speed on Waimea Wave? How to avoid getting a bloody nose on Shotgun? They knew it all.

The Tidwells might as well have been the Kennedys in my eyes. They were beautiful human specimens, blessed with hair that could be arranged in style no matter the conditions. With product, freshly submerged, dried out after a day in the sun, it didn't matter. Their hair was unstoppable. Given my own hair made blind folk cringe I had no choice but to look up to these models.

And let's not forget they were filthy rich.

How did I know that? Because their cars had air conditioning and their house had cable TV, luxuries I understood to be reserved for the top 1%.

Access to cable TV meant that it was at the Tidwell abode that I witnessed the greatest dunk contest of all-time: the 2000 Vince Carter meteor strike. Live on TNT, Vince finished an alley-oop with a between-the-legs dunk that he had never once practiced. It was the first of its kind, it made us vault off the couch in disbelief, and it wasn't even his best dunk of the night. It also wasn't the highlight of my night.

That moment came when the Tidwells introduced me to Little Smokies, the barbeque-basted mini hot dogs. What's it like to be 12 years old? You think this new spin on a classic food is the most amazing thing you've ever discovered, the caviar of West Valley City.

When you add that the events of this night took place in a mother-in-law apartment -- "what do you mean they have a smaller house next to their normal house?" I asked my brother -- it became a wonder to me that our commute to and from the Rage wasn't done by chartered jet. 

With the Tidwells it seemed anything was possible, including overcoming my greatest fear -- breaking rules.  

The first rule to be challenged was the age requirement for entry into what might be the smallest hot tub in the world. After much persuasion I agreed to enter the heated waters even though the rules forbid those under age 14. About 23 people were crammed into this micro-tub when the lifeguard approached and singled me out. 

"Are you 14?" he asked. 

Before I could even get a word out Travis was all over it. "Yeah he's 14."

That was that. Travis spoke with the voice of God and why wouldn't he? He played football. He had multiple female friendships. He was the only member of our troop who could navigate the rope bridge.

No, that's not a picture of Travis in the flesh, but if anyone in our group could pull off the wife beater look, it was him. The lifeguard knew it too, because he didn't talk back. I wouldn't even have to quote my fake birth year to prove I belonged in the tub club. Three words from Travis was enough.

What had I done to receive such backing from our party's leader? In retrospect maybe he was being nice to me to date my sister, but at the time I felt like I'd received a knighthood. I would serve Travis from that point forward.

Thus I watched over our tubes while braver folk went on the scary rides. I scouted for girls of interest while we floated in the lazy river. I made runs to and from the parking lot when someone left an item in the car. I tried (and failed) to carry mine and his yellow toboggan up to the Rampage ride. And most of all, I obeyed orders for Operation Toilet Clog, despite my many, many fears.

Here's how the operation unfolds:

Step 1) A member of the party hides all the season passes so that if the group is kicked out of the park the passes can't be confiscated as well. 

Step 2) The party meets up at the triple slides (real name, Serpentine Slides but I don't know anyone who ever called it that). Everyone gets in line for the same slide.

Step 3) The first slider -- aka the clogger -- casually embarks down the ride, slows down near the middle of the voyage, and gets off their tube. 

Step 4) Once off the tube, the clogger must fully stop and position himself in a crouch like a baseball catcher in order to help block the next sliders. He must also ensure that his tube does not escape during this process because a) the tube needed to be placed between the legs in order to help dam the water flow and b) a tube exiting the slide without a rider would alert the lifeguards to shenanigans.

Step 5) The upper lifeguard, unable to see the blockage, would dutifully count to 20 seconds, then send down the next slider. Travis was our best clogger and would go first. The rest of us would slide down to Travis where he would corral us as a hockey goalie does a puck.

Important interjection: I suspect you may be thinking there is no way a person can stay balanced crouching on a water slide, holding a tube, trying to block water while multiple people crash into him. But you must understand the planning behind this operation was yet another piece of Tidwellian scripture. They had scouted the entire park and identified this one particular spot of this one particular slide as the location: slow enough to stop at; level enough to crouch in; and hidden enough to avoid lifeguard detection

Step 6) The final piece of the puzzle was my sister, who played the role of the plunger (though her impact on our blockage was more akin to a bowling ball detonating pins than a plunger unclogging a toilet but you get what I mean). She'd embark with perfect aerodynamacy, at full speed, and plow into our pile-up of bodies with maximum momentum. Travis would cease bracing at the exact moment of collision and the buildup of water plus the force of Kitty Jarvis would carry us down in a mish-mash of tumbling bodies, spewed out into the bottom pool as haphazardly as a kid dumping out their backpack the minute they get home from school.

It was glorious. You never knew who was touching who, if you were facing up or down, how fast you were going, or how close you were to the end of the ride cause all you could see was limbs and water. It was at this time that I was most grateful for Eugene's confirmation that one cannot pee while sliding.

Generally the lifeguards didn't give a crap about a single thing that occurred in that entire park but hooo boy they did not like this. We'd run the operation twice a week at best, cautious of the oft-repeated threat that if "you guys do that one more time" we'd be kicked out. Sometimes I'd run ahead of our group and scout the situation. "The lifeguard on duty is the one who lectured us two days ago, we better not run it." Travis would tell me to stop being a wuss and that wearing my towel around my neck in the same way a Royal Air Force pilot dons his scarf would give me courage.

What's it like to be 12 years old? When your idol tells you to wear your towel as a scarf, you do it, no matter how soaked that towel will be for the rest of the day. Thus was Alf Jarvis promoted to Captain Alf Jarvis.

The core Tidwell crew was made up of those mentioned above: Travis, Eugene, and Tyler. But sometimes a sister would make a trip, and I confess that the female side of the Tidwell family was also blessed with hair that could make a boy obsessed. Did I have a crush on any of these female siblings? Yes based on the amount of ab clenching I performed while they were around; no based on my unwillingness to accompany them on Acapulco.

It wouldn't be until 10 years later that I gathered the guts to tackle that ride. I quickly learned that walking up the creaky stairs is much worse than the ride itself, though don't tell that to my friend who pushed her sledding mat too low entering the bottom pool and flipped end-over-end ... over-end.

This wasn't the only damage that Raging Waters would deliver over the course of its lifetime. On one trip Mr. Bryan Farnsworth's car was broken into, costing Nicole a dress and the rest of us our sense of security. Why was his grey sedan targeted while my grey sedan, parked immediately adjacent to his, spared?

There are three possibilities.

1) Bryan's car sported a BYU sticker, and given that most criminals are Ute fans, when given the choice the criminal would rather hurt the Cougar car than the generic car.11. This theory would explain why there are so few BYU license plates in the world. We fear the vandals. 

2) My car was a Ford Taurus

3) The burglars saw my darker skin and considered me a brother

Now I know, I know, I've just committed a great prejudice, and I feel obligated to disclaim that just because you have a Ford Taurus doesn't mean you're poor and just because you're darker doesn't guarantee you safety in Rose Park. But nevertheless my next memory of Raging Waters is dark skin so we must plow ahead. 

What's it like to be 12 years old? You never once apply sunscreen. Instead you marinate in the sun to the point that people don't recognize you at the start of the next school year (true story). My invincibility versus sunburns was one of two ways I managed to impress the Tidwells, with the other being the lack of liquids I took with me to the park. While I relied on the drinking fountain, the Tidwells traveled with Shasta and Capri Suns -- Kennedys, I tell ya -- which often made me wonder, why did their mom love them so much more than mine did? On those occasions when Travis would pass me a swig of his Gatorade, I felt like I was in a TV show, bonding with the father who accepts his son over a shared brewski.  

By the time I was old enough to drink a legal beer, or more realistically afford my own Gatorade, the closest I came to revisiting Raging Waters would be via Glendale golf course which butted up against it. The two parks -- one where it was good to go in the water, one where it wasn't -- high fived at the 14th tee box. This proximity, as you can imagine, generated opportunities for youthful hoodlumery which often came in the form of yelling at golfers and less often in the form of flashing them.

This became my most golfed course thanks to an American Express partnership, and what a glorious day it was when a group of kids screamed in perfect unison during my boss's swing. 

My boss was known for the liberal use of mulligans (hence his nickname, Reload) and this botched drive would be no exception. Our squad applauded the youngsters for their timing but mostly I remember feeling that odd sense of déjà vu, or of life coming full circle. After all, hadn't it been just a few years since I was the kid who annoyed golfers by yelling during their swings? Well, actually it had been about 25 years but you know how time works when you're old. 

Nowadays if you go to Glendale and swing from the 14th tee, all that's behind you is ... nothing. The Google maps view tells the sad story: Raging Waters went bald.

I've been there buddy. My advice? Buy a hat. Avoid looking in the mirror. Which reminds me, what's it like to be 37 years old? 

Sometimes you wish you could be 12 again.