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With everything moved and set up again, we drove a short way down the highway from the Park to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village<\/a>. It’s a period authentic village recreation depicting the lifestyle of Ukrainian immigrants from the 1892 until the 1930’s. The village is ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/P7140579a-300x225.jpg\")
populated by staff actors who dress and speak like people of the time. It’s admirable how seriously they take their roles as well. Every person has a simulated family and they all know their family tree, including the personal histories of family members. We asked many questions, but they always had a good answers. After a while, I just forgot that they were actors and accepted their characters as real people.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/P7140583a-300x225.jpg\")
I was tempted to offer advice from the future to help them out, but refrained in deference to the integrity of the space-time continuum. I couldn’t be sure that some seemingly innocuous piece of information wouldn’t negate my own existence or trap us in a time paradox. You just can’t mess around with that stuff.<\/p>\n
It was only a little after\u00a03 in the afternoon when we finished up at the UCHV, so we went into Edmonton to see the West Edmonton Mall. We had read about a big indoor water park that we wanted to take Those Johnston Kids to, and going\u00a0late in the day meant there was a natural stop not imposed by us. Never take your kids to anything fun first thing in the morning unless you’re prepared to do it all day. Take them as many hours as you want to spend, before closing. That way you’re not the bad guy when it’s time to go.<\/p>\n
The West Edmonton Mall is a really big freaking mall. As far as the shopping goes, if that’s your thing, that’s really all there is to be said about it. Seeming kilometers of hallways lined with shops you’ve seen a thousand times before but still can’t remember the names of. We honestly didn’t wander around shopping because that’s not anybody’s thing in this family. We were just passing through on our way to the World Waterpark.<\/p>\n
I will spare you the wet details of every slide we tried, which was all of them, but the first was special. You always remember your first. We climbed to the very top of the slide towers, looking for the launch for something called Crusher or Drowner or something like that. There were actually two slides launching from the same platform, but everybody – everybody – was lining up to the left, to get on the one the kids had picked. I didn’t want to wait, so I sidled over to the attendant on the right and asked why nobody was in his line. He shrugged and said, “I don’t know.” “I’ll go then,” I volunteered. His slide was called Cyclone, I think, which didn’t sound any more fearsome than the Gasper or Hyperventilator that Those Johnston Kids were lined up for. Come of think of it, all the slides had aggressive names like that for some reason. I don’t think it was marketing because we had already paid to get in. It’s not like they had to brand the slides to get your money. They could have called them anything they wanted, like The Wet One, or The Greasy Noodle. (Those names are now copyrighted, so don’t even think about stealing them.) Anyway, the attendant ushered me into what looked like a round phone booth and told me to cross my arms over my chest, vampire style. ‘I wonder why,’ I started to think and then the floor fell open<\/em>. \u00a0They say it’s not actually freefall, that you’re sliding down a tube that is just very steep, not actually vertical. Try telling that to my brain. Every proprioceptor in my body was screaming at me, “You stupid *******!” Somewhere, about 5 or 6 minutes into the fall, it started to level out and I\u00a0suspected that I\u00a0might survive and have to explain why my\u00a0shorts were\u00a0wet.\u00a0I started to open my eyes a crack to\u00a0look for escape hatches and I was hit in the face with a blast from a water cannon and blinded again. The slide\u00a0bent sharply upward and the G-force ground my body into the tube\u00a0so hard I could feel my bones clicking over each seam in the plastic. They should have called it The Flenser. I could feel the tube angling upward steeper and steeper as I lost speed quickly. I thought I would actually come to a stop and slide backwards down into the tube and be trapped, like the fat kid in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. I had nightmares about that when I was young. Mercifully, I had the few newtons of momentum\u00a0necessary to crest the loop. For a brief moment I was weightless and calm. I opened my eyes and saw a hazy light through the tunnel wall, the life and freedom I had abandoned by getting into a phone booth at the behest of a stranger. I thought I would make it out again and be happy. And then I fell again, down the other side of the loop. This side was worse. Maybe because without the evil trap door trick they thought they needed to add something more<\/em>. They added more water cannons, that pressure fired water straight up my\u00a0nose until my\u00a0brain mutated\u00a0gills in self-defense and I drank whatever didn’t fit in my nose.<\/p>\n I honestly had no idea that I could go without oxygen for 15 minutes at a time, but I didn’t take a breath from the time I dropped until I shot out of the tube\u00a0at relativistic speed. I hit the landing chute with enough force to wedgie myself biblically. When I literally staggered onto the deck I had to pull 2 or 3 inches of lycra out of my ass, and stood there gaping and blinking stupidly. I had survived. I felt the urge to cry and scream at the injustice and beauty of it all. I had been remade and suddenly everything, life, the meaning of things, was clear.<\/p>\n By the time I reached the exit though, my legs weren’t shaking so badly, and the truths that had been so apparent were fading and then gone. My altered state was over. I spent the next four hours with Mama and Those Johnston Kids looking for that clarity again, trying slide after slide, body surfing in the wave pool, and even being\u00a0sealed into a plastic ball filled with water and spun like laundry. I never found the same perfection, where fear and hope and love\u00a0all merged into one consuming emotion, but maybe some day I’ll go back.<\/p>\n We had rolled into Elk Island National Park the evening before, after the visitor centre and campground office were closed. So morning of the 14th, we puttered around camp until the office opened at the oddly late hour of 11 AM. I mean, it’s a campground, right? Everybody pretty much gets up with the birds. … Continue reading Not waving but drowning<\/span> ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/P7140586a-300x225.jpg\")
The West Edmonton Mall World Waterpark is a really big freaking waterpark, indoors. It’s the biggest indoor water park<\/a> in North America, built in the 80’s, and\u00a0still hella impressive. It looks like a giant greenhouse built around a swimming pool. At one end is clustered the labryinthine water slide complex, at the other a raft slide, with the wave pool in the middle. A zip line runs from end to end over the whole aquatic medley. The scale of the place is immediately striking as soon as you walk in.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/P7140589a-300x225.jpg\")
Those Johnston Kids kind of hopped and squeaked in place for a minute before picking out the slides they wanted to try first. We went straight to the top. The slides are all built in and around a set of massive steel towers and platforms with connecting stairways that are positively Escheresque in design. We found the launch platforms by following the slides upwards through the metal forest, choosing stairwells based on how close we were getting to the target. Several times we wished for a map, but I don’t know how they could have made a useful map. It would have to be in 3D, like a ball of tangled string. By the end of the day, we had learned to navigate to our favourites by landmarks.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/P7140591a-300x225.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/P7140607a-300x225.jpg\")
We literally closed the place down. It was us and the lifeguards. I had wondered whether the kids would have the stamina for 4 hours in the pool, but I needn’t have worried. Mama was a little green, I had a wrenched back from the spinning ball, but Those Johnston Kids were burning raw adrenaline and had to be pulled from the water. They were asleep before we left the parking lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"