Yesterday for a summer holiday sort of shindig type thing we went to suburban Toronto's Wild Water Kingdom, which bills itself as Canada's largest waterpark. If you're tossing superlatives around I would also suggest adding "strangest" and "most dangerous."
We arrived yesterday around 11 a.m., and the first indication things were a little off happened at the booth where you pay for parking. We pulled up, our wagon one in a long line, and when we stopped alongside the kiosk the adolescent girl inside stared at us blankly. "Hi," I said, and she said hi back, and then silence. "Parking?" I asked. "Sure," she said. "Can we pay for parking?" I said, and she brightened, specified $8 as the fee and the transaction happened.
The next forty minutes we spent finding our way to our own cabana. We were with Natalie's brother and his wife, and their two kids (pictured above with Myron). The cabana cost us $40 but was totally worth it. I reserved a two-person tube. We arranged the diaper bags and did that towel-around-the-waist shimmy that lets you change into your bathing suit in public, then headed for the kids area.
Pretty neat. Giant elevated buckets filled up and tipped over, splashing the people below. Gently inclined slides spat kids into knee-deep pools. There was a wider slide where kids slipped down on inner tubes. Super-fun looking. We were walking along an incline that joined one little pond to another when the next sign happened. Most of the wet ground was coated in a layer of grit, to provide grip, and then Myron stepped at a spot where it was worn smooth. His feet went out from under him. He landed on his bum. "You OK buddy?" I asked, picking him up. He nodded. Another kid slipped on the same spot. A lifeguard watched. I expected something to happen -- a uniformed staff person to materialize, set down a pylon and announce the area off-limits. But the lifeguard just sat there.
We moved on... Myron went down this little frog slide. Penny freaked out over these little spouts of water that spat up out of the ground. We laughed at the come-ons from a megaphoned barker at the hot-buttered corn kiosk and bought a completely non-nutritious lunch of Pizza Pizza and fries that exploded the kids' heads with saturated fats and inorganic ingredients. But whatever. It was that kind of day.
What finally clued me into the vibe of Wild Water Kingdom happened just after lunch, when Myron went down one of the kids' slides by himself. This was a big deal. I had seen him looking at it earlier in the day, and when he asked to go on it he let Natalie hold his hand on the stairs leading up to the slide's beginning--something he's usually too independent to do. The slide was too flat to be much of a thrill; he had to scooch himself along on his heels at one point, to get some speed. It ended in one of the knee-deep pools. Where Myron lost his footing. His head went under. The lifeguard stationed at the slide's bottom just stood there, watching him. With Penny in my arms, I was sprinting into the pool when the lifeguard finally deigned to step forward and help Myron. He was freaked for a minute or two. I probably should have yelled at the lifeguard, something along the lines of "Do your job!" But the look of apathy on her face suggested it would be useless.
Thing was, all the staff in the place radiated a druggy apathy. The place felt like the lair of a James Bond villain, or one of those towns from a Twilight Zone episode that turns out to be purgatory. Or maybe it was just that every staff member in the joint had inhaled a little too much of BC's finest. Or maybe it's about to go out of business, so no one cares. At first it alarmed me. And then, the weird thing is, I started to enjoy it.
No one cared. The climbing wall had an age limit of 12, but the staff member operating the line let my 7-year-old nephew on the thing, no sweat. The batting cages had the ambiance of a post-apocalyptic horror movie. No staff anywhere. So we figured out how to run the pitching machines and swung at softballs until our arms got sore. Those smooth spots in the kids park? Once you realized they were there, you walked more carefully, and maybe even used them as slides themselves. And the playground structure was maybe 20 years old, with wood that looks like it's near collapse--but again, that made it sort of fun. There was a slide there that sagged in such a way that it threw up the slider right at the end of the ride.
A little bit of danger can make things thrilling. In its apathetic negligence, in its air of decrepit deregulation, the place was a refreshing departure from the atmosphere of hyper-vigilance that now pervades anything kid-related, where every ledge is bordered by a railing and every drop is bottomed with recycled-rubber cushioning. Wild Water Kingdom. Check it out yourself, before someone sues the place into bankruptcy.
