SF 3 day vacation post

Seward Street Slides (part 1 of 2)

“I can’t believe this exists.”

“Well, it does, now help us with the cardboard.”

“No, I mean it doesn’t make any sense. Some city council had to get together and decide that ‘Yes, we will build this deathtrap…for the kids.’”

“Just hold it like this and make yourself into a cardboard taco,” Jean demoed the method a rider would take to make it down. “And make sure you keep your hands tucked in when you pull the sides up.”

We were enclosed in a valley between two lines of housing whose incline had so much more rise than run that a fall backwards while climbing up had been a seriously possibility.

I looked down the concrete slides. Their twisting paths ran parallel to each other and into a sand pit filled with all manner of discarded cardboard: pizza…Amazon…Office Depot. The wear and tear from the weight of a million asses wore off the original preschool green and smoothed the inside of the slides to a reflective grey. From up here they seemed to advance about 10 feet forward for a 40 foot drop.

“I mean, this wasn’t repurposed from being some sort of San Francisco garbage chute or something?” I implored the local residents for an answer as I heard the tentative scraping of one aligning himself before takeoff behind me. I turned around in time to see the top of Tony’s head disappear over the edge.

Halfway down, the slide flattened out for just long enough to launch him in the air as it dropped a final time.

“Uaah!”

Hmm…that was a sound we’ve never heard Tony make before.

He skidded to a stop and said with his usual composition, “Whoa, got air that time.” Tony climbed up the side of the slide with our white piece of cardboard from a microwave box. A large, smooth sticker on the bottom made it the “fast one” compared to another random brown piece we brought. He placed it back at the top of the slide.

I stared down the length of the concrete chute and said to no one in particular, “Can someone hold my cell?” I sat down on top of the cardboard and skidded forward, tentatively. I pictured bloodied knuckles trying impossibly to clutch each other to stop the bleeding. I toyed with the idea of the cardboard disintegrating going down and burning me in the fires of some impossible hyper-friction. In half a second I thought all the things diving boards, rooftops, and modified fireworks made me think. What was I doing? 24 and still putting myself in situations where physical damage was a possible consequence.