This past Sunday, my fiancée and I went to Wild Waves Theme & Water Park on its final day. It was closing for good after nearly fifty years, and I wanted to experience a piece of her childhood before it disappeared.
We had a fantastic time. The rides were fun, the employees were wonderful, and the accessibility accommodations felt like a throwback to the 1990s, when arriving in a wheelchair often meant skipping the lines. We even avoided a two-hour wait for the zip line. Listen, I didn’t ask for this hand, but I’ll play it. If the occasional perk is skipping that line, I’ll take it.
One of my favorite moments happened on the Wild Thing. I was contorting myself into the seat and trying to figure out the restraint when a young employee came over, laughing and confident: “Don’t worry, man. I got you. I get paid thirty-five an hour for this. I got you.” He was proud of how ready he was to help, like my difficulty getting situated was simply the thing he was there to solve. A little later, another employee took a different approach.
I had settled into the driver’s seat of a bumper car with my fiancée beside me when the operator looked directly at her and announced, “He can’t drive.” We asked why. He couldn’t give us a policy, a safety concern, or any explanation beyond the fact that I apparently could not do it. I reassured him that my legs worked and that I wasn’t trying to drive the thing in my wheelchair. After several rounds of this, he finally shrugged and said, “You know what? It’s the last day. I don’t care.”
Just like that, I was cleared to drive. I’ve never had a driver’s license. Between my visual impairment and some personal history around vehicles, driving has never been part of my life, so I was excited to spend three minutes behind the wheel. I drove around, got bumped a couple of times, didn’t injure anyone, and had a great time. It was uneventful, other than the joy of being the driver for once.
We’ve spent the last couple of days laughing about the whole thing, especially the idea that whatever rule he thought he was enforcing stopped mattering because the park was closing. But I keep wondering what would have happened on any other day. Would I have switched seats and let the moment go, or turned a three-minute ride into an argument about my abilities? I spend plenty of time advocating for disability rights, but sometimes I really do just want to ride the damn bumper cars. I shouldn’t have to make a political statement out of every ordinary thing I want to try.
The park is closed now, so there’s no policy to change and no next visit where we find out whether anything improved. I’m left with the memory of a joyful day, one employee who was thrilled to have my back for thirty-five dollars an hour, and another who decided I could participate only because he no longer cared. At the same park on the same day, one saw helping me as his job while another treated my participation as a question he got to answer.