8:17 p.m. - 2007-10-01
flume
The floor of the little cave needed sweeping, a task he accomplished on his knees using his wool blazer as a sort of broom. Once this was done and the dust shaken from its tailored sleeves the blazer was rolled into a tight bundle and redesignated "pillow". It was upon this pillow and a smaller one fashioned from his socks and situated between his hipbone and the stone floor of the cave that he'd lay for the better part of the days that followed...just far enough inside the cave mouth to avoid rain when the always-humid skies decide to give. Those were great days, with the smell of the dampening dust and the drip-dripping of water joining the ever-present gurgle of the log-ride below. Sometimes, if the storm held long enough, they would close the ride and the yelling would stop...
...not that the yelling was that big a deal, really. The section of log-ride that passed near the cave was, by contemporary amusement-park standards, uneventful -- a gently inclined straightaway between steeper splash-and-scream-inducing descents. The ride's designer had probably envisioned this as an opportunity for the passengers to take in some of the park's natural beauty, to look beyond the aqua-painted fiberglass flume and appreciate the wooded hillsides and the limestone cliffs above it. All the real adrenaline-fueled yelling took place around the bend somewhere, a distant and predictable howl. His adopted stretch of log-channel was punctuated only by the exuberant prattle of the younger children, full of spun sugar and happy not to be standing in line. None of whom had taken the opportunity to look up and notice his cave, much less signal alarm at the reclining figure in its mouth.
Granted, it had taken him eleven rides to spot the opening; and at least two more laps to confirm visually what lay behind that stand of pines. Eleven rides to temper his enthusiasm. Enthusiasm for the shady, sneaker-polished queue of the rustic boathouse, for the way the fiberglass whirls and knots of the log-boats had been cast with an eye towards the authentic, for the decorative timbers supporting the fake sawmill, creaking as the logs escalated towards their climactic plummet...it was as if the frontier-fantasies of which he had been disillusioned in his youth had been re-illusioned. He couldn't seem to quit riding. If the log attendants had found it strange that a solitary grown man in an increasingly soaked business suit had passed through their line thirteen times in succession they didn't let on. And when, physically soaked and aesthetically sated, he slipped under the handrail and set out to find the cave nobody seemed to notice.
