Summertimes Spent Slipping and Sliding

Do you recall the Slip 'n Slide? Let me jog your memory; it was one of those ultimately dangerous children's outdoor toys, the kind that when your mother sees it on TV, she says, "Well, that doesn't look very safe," and you argue, "If it wasn't safe, they wouldn't be able to sell it."

And as it turns out, Mom is always right.

Lets analyze this for a second. The Slip 'n Slide with the pool attachment had four instructions:
Step 1) You run
Step 2) You slide
Step 3) You hit the jump
Step 4) and take a dive

Only two of these instructions seem to apply to the Slip 'n Slide's standard model, the 20 foot wet path with the vinyl "Receiving Area", as my wife had lovingly termed it. The idea was that you would throw yourself down this plastic pathway with little plastic sprinklers mounted down the rows on each side, and, if you were capable of basic physics calculations when you were 10, you could avoid being thrown off of the Slip 'n Slide for using a less than head on angle of approach. It usually ended that way. Run... Slide... off of the path where your foot catches the ground and you are thrown from the slide.

This could be avoided if you were willing to languidly glide to the end. My wife admits that as far as she was concerned, languidly gliding was the height of her interest in the Slip 'n Slide experience. I, like her sister, and like my friends could not be content with such an abominable use of my childhood. I preferred the adrenaline rush that came from sprinting like I was going to beat Michael Johnson to 5 feet from the beginning of the treacherous avenue then flinging my body and all caution to it's mercy, generally, headfirst, as it was easier to maintain momentum this way.

This was the stuff safety recalls and class action lawsuits were made of. With luck, about 95% of all the children who used the Slip 'n Slide would survive to play another day. And that's only because the other 5%, the poor bastards, were injured before our very eyes. Careening in to one of the sprinkler units was usually the end result of not properly aligning yourself with the Slip 'n Slide apparatus. And if you were lucky, a 6 inch scar down the outside of either your right or left leg was all you had to show for it. Our martyr, poor little Joey from next door, will have a scar down the left side of his torso. It was less an act of pure Darwinism, and closer to Russian Roulette.

We had 3 good summers with Slip 'n Slide action, and the fun didn't end until after Joey and Andrew from next door got the version of the Slip 'n Slide with the attached pool. Their yard, sloped, and littered with German Shepard remnants, did not present a suitable location for the usage of said implements, so in exchange for permission to use our yard, we were enabled the ability to use this new, dangerous invention.

It would have been enough to use the 10 feet of Slide that came with the pool, but, like most people who had already owned a Slip 'n Slide, there was a need for more excitement. In a feat worthy of MacGuyver, we ingeniously attached the original Slip 'n Slide to the pool unit for a combined runway of 30 feet.

Obviously, not of sound mind, our belief was the longer you ran for, the better the Slide experience, which may have been true, considering the distances we brought ourselves to were just ridiculous. We'd back up to the fence and run longer than the distance of the Slip 'n Slide to the Slip 'n Slide and dive for the 30 feet until launch. This almost guaranteed Joey's future incident, of course, you don't consider that as a child.

An unfortunate side effect of this new 30 foot runway was that when you had actually hit the pool, it was possible to gain momentum from the length of the boulevard and the moisture. By the time you had hit the ramp, you'd have been going just as fast as you were when you were running, causing you to fly over the pool, and to bounce off of the outer edge.

I have many other memories of the Slip 'n Slide, most of them fond, but the ultimate results of all Slip 'n Slide usage, unless you were like my wife... languidly gliding down the river, you were guaranteed some form of injury. The next time you reminisce about the glory days of the Slip 'n Slide, remember to pour some on the curb for our fallen brethren.

It was them or you.