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the waterslide incident

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

We went to the pool in the morning. I ran up to the top of a gigantic waterslide/tube affair with Ki-kun and Yu-kun, the seven- and nine-year-olds. The slide was the kind that Homer Simpson got stuck in, during an early-season episode, a four-storey series of loops, slides and high-speed sections that were fully enclosed. As I'd only been on one of the things before, and that had been both much smaller and unattended (I think it was in Fiji). Not knowing what to expect (or that they'd even allow me to get on) I nodded and agreed with the fellow while he tried to teach me the basics. But I didn't understand.

Now I know what he was trying to tell me. That if you're going too fast, sit up! As it was, I slammed down the thing in a back-flat luge position, picking up speed the whole way. In fact, I was going so fast that I'd ride way up on the tube walls whenever I went into a corner.

This proved to be a very good thing when I caught up with Ki-kun!

I only had time to yell out a surprised, "Ki-kun!" as I glimpsed him giving me a shocked look. He'd taken the ride sitting up, and seemed to have been fairly crawling down the length of the tube. Not knowing that sitting up would slow me down, I simply rolled my left arm out of harm's way as I tore by. Riding high on the wall, I simply shot right past him. This was probably for the best; if I'd sat up or in any other way changed position, I probably would have collided with him.

We all had a great laugh about it when we got to the bottom. Yu-kun, who'd gone first, gaped at me when I shot out of the bottom at 25kph and wondered what had happened to his cousin.