I have four grandchildren now, and all of them love to go to the water parks where there are endless watery attractions. Waves, fountains, deep end, water falls, shallow ends, tunnels, slides. It's the slides that take me back to my own childhood in the 1940s on a wheat farm in the Dust Bowl.
Of course we didn't have water slides; we had a big cow tank that we cleaned once a year so the cows could have cleaner water and so the kids, including neighborhood kids, could teach themselves to swim. But that was later, before my sister and I discovered, after a particularly heavy rain storm, a racing stream of water that ran from one pasture to another. We created what was possibly the first water slide in the Oklahoma panhandle.
Out wandering around in the fresh mud, because we had carte blanche from our parents to go wading any time we wanted, we found the water gushing like nothing we had ever seen. We called it the washout. Nothing could stop us. We waded right in to the top of the washout and let it carry us under the barbed wire fence into the next pasture, about fifteen feet. Then we climbed back to the top and did it again. And again. And again.
Submerged, letting our long hair flow out behind in the muddy water, giggling, making the most of our good fortune before the water ran out.
Did I mention muddy water? Did I mention that cows and horses grazed in those pastures? Did I mention that cows and horses poop in pastures? And that the water must have been filled with liquefied animal poop? We never thought of poop. Germs never entered our minds. We were ecstatic.
I sometimes wonder if we didn't have more fun than my grandkids.
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