Sometimes we’re a little bit arrogant here at Duffy’s Creek regarding how we spend our free time vs. how other people spend their free time. It’s a really obnoxious and pointless way to be and we’re trying to get over it. While we can’t fathom why anybody would go near any shopping mall unless they had to, or why anybody would want to go to a casino, or on a cruise ship, or to the state of Florida, or spend one minute watching 95% of the movies and TV shows that get thrown at us, the fact is you’ve got to live and let live. As I’m writing this, I’m watching grown men in matching pajamas playing with balls and bats. Who’s to say what’s a waste of time?
I guess for us it’s mostly about avoiding the crowd. We feel so packed in just living on Long Island that the idea of subjecting ourselves to a large crowd of people (that isn’t chanting “Let’s Go Mets!” or staring at the ocean) is just not something that seems like fun.
And then there’s Splish Splash.
If you’re not familiar with it, Splish Splash is a 95-acre water park at the end of the Long Island Expressway off the Calverton / Riverhead exit. It’s a good hour and a half from here in Sunday morning traffic. For four of the last five years, we have willingly made that trip once a summer to wade through crowds of half naked people, wait on really long lines for really fast rides and inhale chlorine fumes for five hours or so. And we’ll do it again next year. I think I can speak for Mrs. Duffy here when I say that for me to go to Great Adventure or Dorney Park would require kidnapping me and throwing me in the trunk of your car. And I guess if you did, I’d probably end up having fun if I survived the trip. But I won’t go on my own. Why? I’m not sure. Why do we love Splish Splash? I have my theories.
When they first opened in 1991, I remember hearing about it and thinking that it sounded like a fun place – if you weren’t a 28 year-old hipster doofus who had a seemingly cool job working at a magazine in the city and who hung out with people who never came out in the daylight. Those were days when my circumstances were very far from my true essence. I was trying to live a life that other people thought was cool, and deep down I wanted to be just another grinning idiot flying down a water slide. But I didn’t see myself going to Riverhead with a bunch of friends to ride the Giant Twister, ’cause I didn’t have a bunch of friends to go with, or with which to go. Many of my high school friends were already taking their own little kids to places like Splish Splash while I was hanging out in places with too much mascara. Then, in the fall of ’99, I met the woman I would marry, who likes the sun, and trees and birds and things like that. Our first two dates involved the Long Beach Boardwalk and flying a kite on the beach, so I knew I was on the right track. I’m happy to say that I left all vestiges of hipster city-guy life, and all the pallid people who go with it, back in the 20th Century. For the last 16 years, I’ve just been a happy doofus. So as soon as The Dude was old enough, I said the words to my wife that I had wanted to say to somebody for 12 years: “Hey! Let’s Go to Splish Splash!” And she liked everything about that idea.
The Dude was six the first year we went. The first thing I noticed when we got there is there were actually shade trees lining all the paths around the park, and lots of trees between the rides and pools. For some reason I hadn’t expected any trees at all. It’s really a beautiful place. It’s a park with a giant pool infrastructure built into it. The second thing I noticed is that no matter how big it gets, and what sort of insane rides they add, Splish Splash aims for a sort of “Land That Time Forgot” vibe, from the goofy parrot show to the dippin’ dots and carnival games, right down to the typefaces they use on the signs and the music soundtrack where everything is either from the 70’s or sounds like it is. I was instantly charmed. And I knew it was going to be crowded, so I prepared myself for that. And Lord it was crowded.
But I noticed something else right away. Many subsets in this huge crowd were big, extended families: Grandmas and aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters, all making a day of it, and all of whom required a ticket between $30 and $40 to get in. And many of these families, whatever color or flavor they were, didn’t look like the most prosperous members of the general population of Suffolk County or the surrounding area. To the uninitiated, “Out East” is the land of Hamptons Horse Shows and Writer and Artist Softball Games and Rock Star Mansions. But if you’re from Long Island, you know that there are a lot of pretty hardscrabble corners you can get to on the LIE. And you’ll find people with white, black or caramel mocha latte skin in these towns, but since the county at large is still pretty segregated, not necessarily in the same neighborhoods. But the fact is, there are people from parts of Suffolk like North Bellport and Central Islip and Mastic Beach who are all in the same economic boat, the one that sinks shortly after it misses a paycheck. It’s the same situation that millions of people in the outer boroughs of NYC find themselves in, and lots of them escape their cages for a day in the summertime to bring the whole family to Splish Splash. And for a family of ten people to spend over $500 to spend a day at a water park, when it’s entirely possible that the breadwinners of those families are making the minimum wage, is no small thing.
And I don’t think they’re being overcharged. I’m sure the owners of Splish Splash are making a nice healthy profit, but they deserve it, because they run a good business. It’s sparkling clean, fully-staffed, totally safe, and amazingly well-run for a place of it’s size. You get your money’s worth. It cost my little family of three $148, plus $24 for lunch, probably about $7 of gas and $3.50 for Daddy’s to go coffee on the way out. But we drove home with the feeling a euphoria that you get when you have a really, really fun day, and judging by the smiles that pass by you in waves as you walk through Splish Splash, I’m sure those big families had the time of their lives and made some great memories. (By the way, if there’s no line, that’s because the food is terrible. Stay away from the burgers on the boardwalk and go to Johnny Rockets Diner up by the Kahuna Bay Wave Pool. This is not a service article or a review, but you needed to know that).
But here’s the best part: If you factor out the recent “pay us more and cut the line” incentives that amusement parks are now pushing (the one at Splish Splash is called the “H2Go Pass” and costs between $40 and $60 – and I’ve never seen that many people using them) once you have bought that ticket and passed through that turnstile, you are an equal citizen of Splish Splash, with the same rights and privileges to jump around and woot and holler as every person you see. Even with the silly cabanas that they try to get you to rent, Splish Splash is a Democratic Socialist state. And like all Democratic Socialist States, it’s a great place to be a kid. Even a kid with sensory processing issues. And even if it takes a little while to warm up to it.
Our first stop in our first year was the Lazy River. First of all, holy crap what a great idea! You get in an inflatable tube and you float for twenty minutes, the water carries you forward and you end up where you started. You also have the option of going under periodic showers of water or steering around them. It is Trisha Duffy’s ultimate amusement park ride. She was all like this is the best thing ever. (She admires sloths). I don’t remember who rode the two-person tube with the Six-Year-Old Dude, but he loved it as well, as long as no one said the word “inflatable” (he was afraid of it at the time) and his head was never completely submerged in the water (which at the time would cause a meltdown as quick as you can say, “inflatable”). We spent the rest of the day doing what you can do at Splish Splash if you’re happily shackled to a six year-old boy. We watched him go down the nice easy water slides and run around around in the kids area, then we made our way over to the wave pool, where he got to wear a life preserver and was therefore in heaven for a good hour or more. We left already planning to come back the next year.
And we did. And we headed right for the Lazy River, which is, as I mentioned, my wife’s whole Splish Splash raison d’etre. And then the wheels came off. Trisha made a wrong move getting The Dude into the two-person raft and he was submerged over his head in two and a half feet of water for approximately three quarters of a second. And he threw a wicked meltdown and yelled and screamed and cried and carried on. I was already floating away at this point, and was ready to come back, but Trisha told me to keep on going. I told her that I’d get him when I came back and she would get her turn, but she was so pissed at the whole situation that she just didn’t want to. So she never got to go on the Lazy River that day. The Dude calmed down and we sat bored out of our minds at the kiddie area and the wave pool for the rest of the day.
The “Holland” story about acceptance of kids on the Spectrum has been around long enough that lots of people have heard it, but I’ll run you through it anyway in case you haven’t. It was written by a woman named Emily Perl Kingsley. I looked that up. The deacon at my church said once that he’d kill the next person who told it to him when he mentioned autism, and it is an oversimplification, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Here it is in a nutshell: When you find out you’re going to have a baby, it’s like you’re going on a fabulous trip to Italy. You’re going to see the Sistine Chapel, The Mona Lisa, The Tower, The Vatican, all that stuff. You’re stoked. You buy guide books and you try to pick up a little Italian. You get on the plane and six hours later the pilot announces that you’ll be landing in Holland instead, and you have to stay there. At first you don’t know what the hell to do, and you’re trying not to be pissed but you are. And then you have your breakthrough. Holland is really nice. There’s windmills and tulips and friendly helpful people. It’s a different place, but it’s a beautiful place just the same. You buy new guidebooks and learn some Dutch and you forget you ever wanted to go to Italy.
I’ve said it before and It’s time to say it again: The Dude may or may not be autistic. He’s been classified as such because school has been really difficult for him. And he exhibits some of the tendencies of an “Aspergian”: The monologue, the awkwardness, the sensory processing issues, the social cluelessness, the obsessions and compulsions.
We love him and wouldn’t change him. But we’re humans. There have been times, and the aborted Lazy River Trip of 2011 was one of those times, where we felt like saying fuck Holland, We hate it here. Be normal for Christ’s sake. Just stop.
We always come out of it, mostly because it’s an awful way to be, and we’re humans. But we also come out of it because The Dude keeps learning from his meltdowns. He’s still has them, but their frequency and duration have been decreasing every year. He keeps on getting better. He keeps on learning about himself and making adjustments. He keeps surprising us to the point where it’s hard to surprise us anymore, and it’s been the most beautiful experience of our life together to not only watch him grow up, but to watch him rise up.
And what have we done to help him? Everything we could think of, as much of it as possible. And If it worked, we kept doing it, and if it didn’t we stopped doing it and did something else. Our pediatrician, who may or may not know that he and I were in the same graduating class of Valley Stream South, ’cause neither one of us has ever mentioned it, suggested to us that kids like The Dude sometimes “grow out” of some of the symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome, but what they’re really doing is learning how to ameliorate those symptoms, learning how to put them aside or rationalize them, or see the irrationality of them by developing a higher self that looks down. He ‘s starting to understand that his “condition” is a gift. A unique way of seeing the world and a unique set of skills to bring to that world. Teenage angst will come, and we’ll deal with it together. But right now, he’s cool with being a little weird. And this is what we’ve been trying to instill in The Dude for eleven and a half years. Look at yourself, then look around. Figure out what’s real and what’s in your head. Celebrate your strengths and fight like hell against your weaknesses.
For the last two years, The Dude has been a magnificent fish in the water, and we get to the pool and the beach as much as we can. We even keep it going with the indoor pool at Echo Park, where Daddy can sit in the sauna with the old Russian guys on cold winter afternoons. The boy who wouldn’t let his head get wet jumps off the diving board, swims out to the deep end, does summersaults underwater, even lets me throw him backwards in the Valley Stream Pool. He’s overcome his demons and is a much happier person for it.
And for the last three years at Splish Splash, we all floated solo on the Lazy River, then scared the hell out of the sloth enthusiast with a trip down the Mammoth River in the big raft. Then she watched as The Dude and I did a couple of trips down Dinosaur Falls. The whole dinosaur aspect of it is so Splish Splash Cheesy, which is why I love it. They put a couple of dinosaurs along the big twisting water slide because calling it “The Big Twisting Water Slide” didn’t have the mythology they were going for. Although the big slide in the center of the park, which we’re doing next year, is called “The Giant Twister”. Go figure.
This year we overcame the demons of Shotgun Falls. It’s a simple water slide that sends you down twenty feet in two seconds, whereupon you are catapulted through a waterfall and a geyser and dropped five feet off the slide into a ten-foot deep pool at about sixty miles an hour. Then you swim out. Nothing to it. I was trying to get him to do it last year and he was absolutely adamant that he was not going near it. And I didn’t push it. Because you don’t push it in Holland if you know what’s good for you. This year I suggested it again. And he was adamantly against it, until he decided to force himself to do it. I went down two times. May I suggest having the common sense my son has and holding your nose when you hit the water. Just as a heads up. He went down three times, right along with a bunch of young jock kids his age, who all looked like they’d been flying down this thing since they were three. They never suspected. And The Dude was on top of the world when he hit the bottom of that slide.
After the pretty bad lunch which we’ll improve on next year, we got to sit around the beloved Monsoon Lagoon for the better part of an hour. It’s impossible to really explain the Monsoon Lagoon so I will refer you to the accompanying picture, which of course I took without permission. (I didn’t tell them to post it on the Internet).
You will notice that there’s a big ship-like structure on the top of the Monsoon Lagoon. Every fifteen minutes or so, it dumps a large volume of water on whoever is lucky enough to be standing under it. The life guard on duty at the Monsoon Lagoon very well may have been working his last shift at Splish Splash before he left for SUNY Oneota, because he was letting The Dude and the other kids go down the slide backwards head first. Usually you don’t see a lot of civil disobedience in the Socialist Democratic Republic of Splish Splash. People are treated with equality and respect. It’s clean, you get to spend quality time with your family and there are opportunities to have fun, maybe take a risk or two. Not to mention plenty of bathrooms. Why would anybody act up? Give ’em a country like that and watch how well people would co-exist.
And that’s what Trisha and I were watching and thinking about as we relaxed at the Monsoon Lagoon, while our young maniac romped and played and created a good childhood memory for himself. We were watching a young couple, part of a larger extended family, introducing their very small baby girl to the wonders of a kiddie pool. The young daddy in particular made a striking impression on me. I didn’t get to be a daddy until I was forty. This kid was maybe twenty-two and he was enraptured by his beautiful baby daughter. His smile literally sparkled in the sunshine. He was so damn happy. They sat in the water together, and pretty soon the mommy sat down, and some older cousins sat down and they all sat there in the water watching this little girl explore this wonderful place that they had taken her. In her world and in our son’s world, this place is perfect. There’s nothing wrong here.
And outside the gates of The Socialist Democratic Republic of Splish Splash, buffoons in suits spewed more hate to capitalize on the lowest common denominator in people’s souls. They talked about building walls and rounding people up, or tracking them like Fed Ex packages. And people whose jobs suck and are broke all the time start to believe that the problem is immigration, when the real problem is the greedy bloodsuckers who bankroll the buffoons in the suits.
I am a second-generation American. My paternal grandparents emigrated here from Ireland a hundred years ago. I’m sure they took some crap, but they came anyway, because this country was worth sacrifice, worth risks. And let’s say my guess is right, and that young daddy at Splish Splash is a first-generation American, like my father, who also had a little baby when he was twenty-two as a matter fact, and probably smiled just as brightly. Or maybe this young man and others in his family snuck in to this country, and his daughter is the first-generation American.
Well if that’s the case, young feller, as far as I’m concerned, you’re doing it right.
It’s not your fault that the laws regarding your legal status have been outdated for years because no group of politicians has had the will or power or cajones to do anything about it. And if they call your little daughter an “anchor baby” or the next awful thing they think of, don’t worry about it. All their talk about immigration is nothing but coded racism, and anyone who thinks America was better when it was whiter better start swimmin’ or they’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’. Their outdated ideas will drown in a Lazy River of ignorance.
You and I will keep coming back here with our kids every summer, young feller, and we’ll watch them grow up. And better yet, we’ll watch them rise up.
A Creek Runs Through It 