There was a big slide, we may have even called it the giant slide, that attracted kids from all over town when I was growing up in Tyler. It was bright yellow and had a dozen or so chutes defined by ridges about six inches high, and we would climb stairs to the platform at the top and slide down it. It was far more thrilling than those short little slides attached to the swing sets that were in practically every other backyard, remembered today only for how hot the steel got sitting out in the Texas sun.
Somebody owned the slide and charged a fee to use it. I don’t remember the exact pricing structure, but it seems there was a ticket for one slide down or a day pass could be purchased providing limitless trips up the stairs and down the slide. Mothers would drop off their children and go about their business, having successfully gotten their offspring off their hands and out of their hair while they did whatever it was they needed to do.
So I, too, would be dropped off, sometimes with a couple of boys from the neighborhood whose mothers needed some breathing space, and we would embark on a couple of hours of fun on the giant slide. Boys and girls from our elementary school were likely to be there as well as others we didn’t know.
We’d pay with the money we’d been given, and we’d line up on the stairs to get to the platform to make our descent. The platform had two or three teenagers, slightly older, who provided all the supervision that was available, which considering what we were doing seems woefully inadequate by today’s standards.
You see, the problem with getting this thrill going down one of those chutes was those ridges on either side as we slid down. The two separate declines on the slide sent us hurtling downward so fast that our arms or legs would lose several layers of skin if they touched the sides. The teenagers would give us a piece of burlap on which to sit while making our descent, and we knew it was up to us to keep our body on the prayer rug sized fabric and away from the ridges.
Of course, going down the slide multiple times meant we only increased our chances of something going wrong on the way down, and I remember skin being torn off the side of my leg by my knee and elbows scraped of their epidermis more than once. But parents in those days expected that a day of play might include such minor injury.
Even today, when someone says something about sliding, this is what pops into my mind. With so much talk these days from some quarters about how the United States is sliding into fascism, authoritarianism, or both, that big yellow slide has been much in my thoughts recently.
If that’s what we’re doing or at least flirting with doing (and there’s some pretty compelling evidence to indicate that we’re at least teasing that age-old beast), I must admit I did not think this is how it would look. If we ever did anything like this, I thought we’d get a good dose of divine decadence first. You know, green nail polish and sleeping with some German baron. Maybe that happened while I wasn’t paying attention. I could have been down with the baron, but my nail polish is not going to be on the dark side–chartreuse would be more to my liking.
So those at the front of the line at the big yellow slide are viewing the descent as inevitable and positioning themselves on their burlap mats to make the ride down as painless as possible. Some arriving on the platform see the inherent danger to life and particularly limb. They admonish those in line that they don’t have to do this, all the while somewhat fearful that those teenagers will push them down the slide without any burlap or, worse yet, just throw them off the platform to the ground below. Some folks in line are in favor of just getting the thrill, not realizing that there won’t be enough burlap to go around by the time it’s their turn. Others in line want to get out of line, but there are so many folks on the stairs behind them that doing so is difficult at best and impossible at worst.
So what to do? I’m not sure, but I do know that everyone is going to be affected one way or the other, except the guy taking the money who owns the slide.
To quote Paul Simon, “The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away.”
