Few people actually know how close I have come to death. And my close encounter with my own mortality came in pretty much the most hilarious way possible. Here’s how it went down:
When I was about 16, my then girlfriend and I went to Noah’s Ark in Wisconsin Dells. I grew up in Wisconsin where this is actually a legitimate vacation destination – leave me alone. At 16 year old, this was my Elysium: I not only got to spend the entire day away from my parents, I got to spend it hanging out at a water park with my super hot girlfriend who was wearing a bikini. And afterward we were going back to her house where her parents weren’t going to be. Awesomeness? Check.
We rode a few water slides, did the water park thing for a few hours, and then we headed to the wave pool. Little did I know the effect this was going to have, not only on my day, but on the rest of my life. We were hanging out in the wave pool for a while, and everything was going fine. At that time, there were no waves so, after a few minutes, the girlfriend and I started to head back to the edge of the pool, because a wave pool without waves is like a sandwich with no meat: pretty damn boring. It was at this point that two things happened almost simultaneously: The waves started with gusto, and I got the worst cramp in my leg that I have ever experienced. Now, before you write me off as a wimp, I’m in pretty good physical shape (even more so then than now). I’ve played sports, and more importantly, I’m a fairly strong swimmer. I have injured myself pretty badly on several occasions (sprains, pulled muscles, tendonitis, &c.) and played through all of them. This was by far the worst pain I had experienced in my young life. I could not move my right leg. Which meant that consequently, I could not tread water. The waves had worked up to pretty good size now (about 40 foot seas, if I had to hazard a guess) and I could not keep my head above water. The water was too deep for me to touch the floor of the pool with my good leg, and I couldn’t tread well enough with one leg to keep pace with the waves. Every time I got my nose above the surface to gasp a breath, I got pummeled by another tsunami-sized breaker that pushed my head back under the water. I was drowning. In the fucking wave pool at Noah’s Ark.
As I’m being battered by the man-made surf, a few things are running through my mind:
A) What a way to die.
B) This is going to be terrible for my relationship. Even if I survive, I may not have a girlfriend anymore.
C) I sure do feel sorry for the ten-year-old and his mommy who find my dead body washed up on the astro-turf beach next to the plastic chaise-lounges.
D) Who came up with the idea for a wave pool anyway, and then designed it with no fucking safety device? Wave pools aren’t even that much fun when you’re not drowning.
It was then that I decided that there was abso-fucking-lutely no way I was going to die anywhere at Noah’s Ark – it would be far to ignominious. I kicked the survival instinct up a notch, grabbed a breath of air between waves, and started to body surf. Yep, I body surfed my way back to the shore of the wave pool. I finally got close to the edge, and as a final insult, one last wave broke over my head, and slammed me, chest first, onto the astro-turf beach, giving me a mean case of rug burn on my chin, chest, and stomach. It felt great on my sunburn.
I spent the rest of the day riding a huge inner tube on the “Lazy River” because I was too afraid to go on any of the other rides; almost dying in the fucking wave pool doesn’t really make you want to ride the “Point of No Return.” One brush with death in a day was enough for me. To be fair, the girlfriend was relatively gracious about it, and she still hung out with me instead of reacting with shame and disgust as I had imagined she would. But, adding still more insult to my injury, I got a funny sunburn from sitting in an inner tube in the sun all afternoon. I can’t make this shit up.
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