Seven Peaks Summer

One of my favorite summers ever was when I was 14 years old. I had just passed freshman year in high school and my best friend was Bryan. Seven peaks is a water park here in Utah that got its name from the original 7 different water slides that were the main attraction. Neither of us had much money. In fact, it took us each about a month and a half before summer started to save up for the season passes. After all of the hard work, we were reluctant to blow all of the money on just 1 item. It just so happened to be a free day at the park for any high school student on the last day of school. You only needed to bring a student ID. It's almost like a drug dealer giving away a little bit at first in order to hook you, then they take all of your money. Which is exactly what happened to us. We had such a blast that we got the passes the next day.

It wasn't as if we were penniless for the rest of the summer. We had jobs. Well the kind of jobs that a 14 year old kid can get. I mowed lawns and Bryan did a paper route. It was actually pretty good money. It would take about an hour to mow and the job would pay $25. Not an abundance of cash, but it was plenty. We had very few expenses. The park was free to us, so most of it got blown on junk food and video game rentals. For some reason we never brought food to the park. Instead we opted to buy food there. About 90% of the time it was the Super Nachos. We never got sick of those.

We didn't get the season passes because of the slides, or the food, or the relaxation of basking in the sun. The one thing on our minds, if you couldn't guess, was the girls of course. Seven Peaks never let us down when it came to the ladies. So many hotties, so little time. That's not to say that we would hit on every girl in the park. No, we would scope out the scenery and only hit on the hottest of the hot. At first confidence was not on our side, but after awhile it came natural. It didn't take long to get super tan since we never used sun screen, and those were probably the best abs that we've ever had. We never went to the gym, but walking around with our shirts off all day made us flex and hold for the entire afternoon. We got pretty dang cocky actually. No girl ever turned us down the entire summer I don't think. Of course, we didn't have much for competition. I remember talking with one of the girls saying, "So how old are you girls anyway?" then she said "Oh we're freshman at college, you guys too?" Then truthfully I answered "Yeah we're freshman too." Only she didn't know that I meant high school. Which is all the better for her I suppose. It felt cool at the time, but looking back there's no way we looked like college students. They just needed to believe that minor delusion in order to have a good time. It's not that we would find a corner and make out with them all day. If we would have suggested it, we probably could have gotten lots of action. Since we were only immature 14 year olds, hanging out was all that came to mind. It was the thrill of the hunt that was the most fun part of it anyway.

I remember walking around looking for hotties. Bryan would say "Dude, check out 8 o'clock.", and it would be this gorgeous girl rubbing lotion on herself. Then I would say "Dude, your 5 o'clock.", and it would be some hairy fat guy exposing his crack while he tried to straighten out his towel on the ground. Nasty stuff. In fact, 9 times out of 10 it was a gross sight. We could never resist looking though, just in case it turned out to be the other 1 out of 10.

Every so often, huge buses of japanese tourists would expand the park to its limits. They were actually some pretty dangerous times. There was a big pool in the middle of the park that would create fake waves. Since it cost extra money to rent tubes, we were always out in the middle of the wave pool just swimming around. On busy days it got bad. If your head went under the water, the tubes would close in together above you leaving no escape. I damn near drowned a few times. It was during one of these occasions that Bryan and I got separated. Desparate for my life I wanted to get to the side so that I could rest for a minute, but there was a mass of those tourists in my way. I tried to swim under them only to get caught in a tangle of legs. I turned towards Bryan and said "Man, it's like the Great Wall of China over here!", but when I looked in that direction it wasn't Bryan at all. It was another tourist. "Oh no offense dude.", I said as I swam away. I finally found Bryan a while later. He had been looking for me as well, and thought that he saw the back of my head. He dove down behind me and pulled me under by my foot. When he came up laughing, it turned out to be some random guy drowning. He didn't even stick around to say sorry.

We did have good times outside of the park as well. Neither one of us had bikes, so we ended up walking everywhere. We put in a lot of mileage that summer. The park was a good 30 blocks or so away. We walked to and from there every day unless we could bum a ride off of a girl we met. Going through the downtown area, we ran into a lot of interesting characters. One of them was this crazy native american dude. We were walking out of the grocery store with our six pack when he first approached us. "Hey, you got some beer for me?", he asked. "No man, it's only cream soda." "Oh Okay. Well let me tell you a story." Then he spent the next 20 minutes explaining about the "Rainbow rollercoaster of life". Boy was he intense. He didn't let us go until he saw some other poor fool come out of the store with cans in his bag. "You got a beer for me buddy?" We only saw him one other time. We were walking past a pavillion at the city park when he stopped us again. "Hey, you guys want to buy a watermelon?" "No thanks dude. We don't have any money anyway." Which was true enough at any given time. Then a lady comes running up to us yelling "Hey that's ours!" He just gave it to her, said "I thought you didn't want it", and walked away. He wasn't as weird as some of the other ones. One guy would walk at full speed past us while talking to himself at full volume. "No, the brownie covered the trampoline!" Another one had a blow dryer in the middle of the city park. After he rolled up his pants, he plugged in the dryer and started to blow dry his legs! In the middle of summer! I wonder what was going through his mind. I think that our favorite was the Missing Link. It's kind of messed up to call him that, but with his patchy beard and protruding chin it was the name we came up with. He always had on this really shiny Jazz basketball jacket. Well, it would have been shiny if it wasn't so dirty. Anyway, we were outside of the grocery store again and Bryan was trying to buy a 25 cent soda from the machine. "Ah, it stole my money man!" Then he came up behind us. "I've got a quarter.", and Bryan took it! He looked like he was homeless, but Bryan still took the money from him. We saw him the most over the next few years. Most of the time in the mall eating at McDonald's.

It doesn't sound like much, but I often reminisce about those good old days. Since we heard it multiple times a day, New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle became the theme song of the time. To this day that song still takes me back. It was a time of no responsibilty. A time of eating junk food and staying up all night playing video games from the sugar high. (Mostly Mallow Pies) But most of all, a time when 2 two hot girls would come out of the tube slide in slow motion. Water spraying though their lucious blonde hair. Being blinded by the shining of their perfectly white smiles. Then realizing "Hey those chicks are with us!"