When my husband and I were newlyweds, we loved to go to Myrtle Beach and go water sliding.
Waterslides were new inventions and there was nothing we loved better than to hit the waterslide as soon as we arrived for vacation. We would go to the only one we knew of in Surfside Beach and stay all day.
Since this was the very first waterslide, it was made entirely out of concrete. The slide was divided into three sections. There was a short slide for small children, a longer slide that was higher up for daredevils, and an inner tube course made up of several short slides with small pools at the bottom of each slide, and ending with a large pool at the very bottom of the waterslide.
You had the choice of going down the slides in an innertube or what looked like a yoga mat. No matter which we used, we always had fun.
Now, my husband considered himself a daredevil and thoroughly enjoyed going down the waterslides on the mats. The problem with him was that he tried different tricks as he soared down the concrete slides.
One day we had just arrived at the waterslide and only gone down the slides twice. As my husband went down before me, I noticed that he was sliding down while kneeling on the mat. I grinned and just went down on my belly on the mat.
As I came up out of the water, I was astonished to hear screaming and see people scrambling to get out of the water. What in the world? They were all staring at my husband.
At that moment, he turned and looked at me grinning, and I almost had a heart attack. His face was covered in blood.
I was struggling to move through the water to get to him when he wiped water from his face, looked down and saw blood dripping on his hand. His eyes widened, and that’s when I grabbed him and pulled him from the pool. Lifeguards came on the run, towels were thrown at us and we were pulled into an office.
We were told that he needed stitches and we had to leave. As I hurried him to the car and began driving to the hospital, I asked him what happened. Of course, he had been on his knees when the mat slipped out from under him. He fell over, hitting his head on the concrete slide rim.
Three hours later, we left the hospital with three stitches in his eyebrow and a bandage. We were also given the warning to stay out of the water for a week.
I wanted to choke the life out of the “daredevil”. This was our first day of a week’s vacation, and he had to stay out of the water all week?
That night we drove to the Myrtle Beach Pavilion to play arcade games, and just as we neared the building, my husband suddenly sat up in the passenger seat and shouted. I looked to where he was pointing, and there it was….the new fiberglass waterslide. It was a beauty!
“No, absolutely not,” I said. “The doctor said you can’t get those stitches wet!”
“Do you really think that I am staying out of the water for all of our vacation? Honey”, he started wheedling and coercing me with flattery. “You are so smart! Surely you can think of a way to fix my wound so it won’t get wet?”
He was laying it on thick, but I really wanted to try that new slide.
“Okay, let me figure something out,” I said. I mean, this was like a challenge. Right?
The next day, after a visit to the pharmacy and a lot of begging and pleading with the lifeguards at the new waterslide, my husband climbed the steps and slid to the bottom of the slide, landing in the pool with his head above the water.
Everyone looked at us with a mixture of curiosity and horror….my husband looked like a mummy. I had taped plastic over the wound, covered it with a mound of tape and subsequently had to cover that entire eye. That’s the only way the tape would all stick. When I finished, the whole entire side of his head was a giant white bandage.
He looked ridiculous. But he had a good time, and the main point was that when we removed the tape later that night, his wound was as dry as a bone.
Could all of this happen today…45 years later? No way. Lawsuits, rules, regulations, the CDC, and a host of other initials would have stopped the fun. What am I saying! They already have stopped the fun.
Too bad. I miss the good old days.
