This weekend I met the man with the most dangerous job in
America. Actually he was a high school kid, I think. He looked to be about
thirty to forty years younger than me, and approximately ninety to a hundred
years younger than I feel, so that would put him around high school age.
He was obviously too young to fully grasp the gravity of his
situation, so to speak. No experienced adult male would have ever signed up for
the job this kid had.
We met him on a magical day. We got season passes to our
local water slide park this year, and Saturday was opening day of the season. We
arrived early and staked out our chaise lounges, and then the boys and I rushed
off to The Riptide. It's the park’s brand new ride, and the boys and I have
been salivating over it all winter.
It’s an enormous water slide - easily the tallest in the
park - with four-person “quad tubes” so you can experience near-death with
three of your closest friends, much like the time you let Steve drive the car on
spring break.
You are in charge of getting your own quad tube to the top
of the stairs, and they are apparently made out of equal parts ballistic
rubber, lead weights and more lead weights. I can envision a system where two
adults would be able to carry the massive tubes up the stairs together, but
unfortunately, the boys weren’t much help. After a few minutes of tripping over
each other and almost crushing Son Number Three with it, I reluctantly told the
boys that I needed to carry the tube up the stairs myself.
The Riptide is a very high water slide, so we needed to
climb up a lot of steps to reach the top. I lost count when I came close to
blacking out, but it was probably about three thousand stairs. I didn’t have my
Fitbit on, but I’m pretty sure I burned an entire HomeTown Buffet’s dinner rush
worth of calories on that one climb.
The slide takes you down a steep tube and then rockets your
terrified party of four up a gigantic vertical wall, where you hang motionless
at the top for just a split second before your stomach catches up to you. Then,
through a miracle of engineering (or a nightmarish trial and error period), you
slide back down, directly into another cavernous tube that takes you around a
360-degree turn and into a huge pool of water, where lifeguards await to accept
your deepest gratitude for being alive. It is awesome!
We finally reached the top of the stairs and made it onto
the platform high above the park. After I had managed to get my heart rate back
under four hundred and my blurry vision cleared up, I saw him. The man with the
most dangerous job in America. Just a scrawny kid with a whistle around his
neck and zinc oxide on his nose. He wasn’t the one who was directing traffic at
the entrance to the slide, so it wasn’t immediately clear what purpose he
served.
He welcomed us to The Riptide and then asked me and the boys
to all step up onto the four-foot-square industrial scale located on the corner
of the platform.
Apparently, in order to keep groups of fun-loving patrons from
shooting straight up off the top of the vertical wall and into orbit, or
missing the exit tube and dying a horrible death under a nine hundred-pound
quad tube, The Riptide has a weight range. Your group's total weight has to be
between two hundred and seven hundred pounds in order to ride. This kid’s job
was to enforce the minimum and maximum weight limits.
Let me get this straight, kid. They've got you stationed up
here on a platform, seventy feet off the ground, with no safety harness or
anything, and your job is to ask groups of women in bathing suits to step on a
scale so you can weigh them?
I’m not sure $8.50 an hour constitutes hazard pay. Good
luck, kid. You’re a braver man than me.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen
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