I was walking home from work recently when I saw something I haven’t seen in quite a while. In fact, I thought such a thing had gone out of vogue. So much so, that it was like looking through a time portal. I wasn’t seeing what was happening now, but perhaps what had happened years ago on the spot where I was gazing.
There on the lawn of a small home were some equally small children dutifully following their mother as she dragged a hose and sprinkler to the center of the yard, their anticipation palpable as she hooked it up to the spigot. There were three of them. Two were in their swimsuits. The third clad simply in a diaper, sippy cup in one hand. This little guy was ready to party.
I tried not to stare. Face it, a strange man staring at scantily-clad children and their young mom could be seen as creepy and possibly have gotten the police involved. Out of the corner of my eye I caught glimpses of the scene as the manufactured rain began to fall. I must admit a strong temptation to join the fun, but that would definitely have gotten the police involve.
Instead, I strolled on through the hot summer sun remembering those days of cooling off in the poor man’s pool. We lived on the lake when I was little. Although we did swim in it, we could only do so with adult supervision. The sprinkler was a different matter. To my knowledge, no one has drowned running through a sprinkler, even without water wings.
Not just any sprinkler will do for such activity. Aquatic refreshment of this sort is best delivered by one of those sprinklers that produce a rainbow shaped spray. The tic-tic-tic kind just isn’t as much fun. It’s like the machine gun of sprinklers. Too harsh!
There have been several developments in the hydro seeding of one’s wild oats. The one that always captured the attention during Saturday morning cartoons was the Slip-N-Slide. This portable forerunner of waterslides looked great. Human hydroplaning, what a great idea! That is if you were doing it on a golf course green where everything is smooth and root free. Unfortunately, no one that I knew who had one of these gizmos had such a well-maintained lawn. Rocks, roots, and other yard undulations were rampant in my neighborhood. Sure, you were cooled by the water, but you came away with more bruises than an apple run through the clothes dryer. The only upside was telling your friends at school about protecting your family from a bear that wondered into the yard, a common hazard in suburbia.
This concept has been greatly improved upon. Many of those inflatable slides you can rent can be turned into water slides easily. My neighbor did this for her son’s birthday one year. It just happened to coincide with a neighborhood street party. We used to have them quite often when the kids were growing up. The result was great. The kids were occupied with the slide while the adults were occupied with grilling and chilling, as the saying goes. That is until…
Once the kids were waterlogged and hungry, the adults decided to give it a go. Everything was going along swimmingly when one of my neighbors decided to take things up a notch and added dishwashing liquid to the equation. The hydrostatic tension of the aquatic surface was greatly compromised. Or put another way, things quickly got slick. If you’ve seen these slides, you know there’s a wall at the bottom to keep kids from crash landing on the ground. We soon learned that a 150-pound adult flying down a two- story slide has enough force to push the inflatable wall down just enough so that it becomes a ramp.
Houston, the Eagle has landed…and bruised his tail feathers.
Squirt guns have also been taken up a notch. The super soaker is great for delivering a large amount of water to your target. The downside is it delivers a large amount of water quickly, meaning they need to be reloaded often. My aqua gun of choice has always been the squirt nozzle on the kitchen sink. You may not be able to run around the house with it, but it never needs reloading. However, their use is as equally unpopular with moms as it is with an unsuspecting brother.
Studies show that humans cannot live without water for more than three days. But those studies only looked at how long we can go without drinking it. It has nothing to do with how long we can go without frolicking in it. And when it comes to frolicking in water, we humans have gotten very creative. But no matter how creative—water slide or super soaker—simple is always best.
While I couldn’t join that family as they ran through the sprinkler on their front lawn, I can fire up my own poor man’s pool. But I think I’ll skip the running and just sit in my lawn chair with a drink in my hand and a rainbow sprinkler cooling my face.
Surf’s up!
