The Comal River in Drag
By Ryan Gossen
“You coming from Schlitterbahn?” the lady at Jack in the Box yelled from the drive-thru window with a blast of late afternoon parking lot heat. I must look pretty bad, I thought. Exhausted, smelly, sunburnt.
She saw my confusion. “The chlorine! I can smell the chlorine!”
It was impressive because the wind blew between our window and because she sat next to a vat of frying onion rings. I had ceased to smell the chlorine hours ago. All day I had wanted to smell the river, but I was ready to settle for the smell of onion rings.
Eliza, our fifteen-year-old daughter, had a headache and was lying in the back seat. She had been turned loose with her friends and, for one glorious day, no one had said anything to her as stupid as, “Drink some water.”
I felt defeated.
Reaching the park entrance that morning, we had found ourselves in a line of cars trying to park. We drove past empty parking lots with identical clapboard signs that read “Lot Full, Free Parking” with an arrow pointing up at the sky. I slowed down and squinted my eyes to better understand, but I didn't turn in because orange cones were spaced close enough to suggest that cars were not welcome. I felt the car behind me getting impatient and decided to stop trying to figure the place out and follow the person in front of me.
Group identity was settling in. We knew who we were. We knew, somehow, what the signs meant. We were going with the flow. The person in front of me slowed to obey a teenager wearing an orange vest, who waved us in. There were many teens with flags, hovering around the parking lot like living road cones. One was standing still in the center of the lot, waving a flag in a tight figure-eight pattern in front of his chest, his intentions unclear. Three more flag teens waved us to a specific spot where I could finally kill the engine. It felt like we’d just gotten off the bike in a triathlon and needed to transition quickly to running.
All around us, hatchbacks opened on pneumatic pistons and heavy plastic coolers hit the asphalt. A haze of aerosolized sunscreen filled my lungs. We trudged past massive vehicles. An angry-looking high-clearance jeep caught my eye, adorned with shovels and roll bars, snorkel, and a jack that could hold up scaffolding on a house. The jeep spoke of adventure in places where search and rescue would take days to find you. The license plate said “Badwulf”.
We were in the early crowd and came on a weekday, so the line was not too bad. There was a metal detector and a TSA-type person who confiscated my daughter’s pocket knife. I experienced a moment of nervousness as my bag was searched. I didn't have anything bad in there, but I've had bad things in my bag before. Eliza was bummed about the pocket knife, but it was a cheap one I kept in the car. She needed it to cut the medical tape she used to bandage her toe, which we didn't want getting an exotic waterpark infection. Laura and I estimated that Schlitterbahn was a blend of the Comal River, urine, staph, cholera, herpes, 50 SPF sunblock, juice box, and hot tub shock.
We found our friends at one of the picnic tables in the old part of the park.
The way it works here is you claim a table by putting down your towel, bags, and the cooler you dragged. You leave these things there to prevent other people from using the table, which is yours, so it will be available for you when you return. This practice feels like it evolved over time, rather than being part of the design of the park. The authority of the claim on the table feels like it’s based on the vulnerability of one’s abandoned property, which dares others to take it and see what happens. Very Texan.
As everything bustles around us, Eliza looks directly in my eyes with the focused attention of someone who understands that the more I feel she is listening to me, the sooner I will stop talking. The other kids drift off to find tubes and get in a line somewhere. None of us will be carrying our phones, it’s a big park, meet here at noon, bla, bla, bla, and then she is gone. I won’t see her again until it’s time to leave.
We were a group of friends who were close in our twenties and thirties, organic farmer hippie slacker types in Austin in the 90s. We met each other and made babies and got jobs and experimented with rootedness. Our babies were naked in the mud, subjected to various forms of radical parenting: co-sleeping, organic turnip purees, hundreds of miles towed behind bicycles. At our increasingly rare reunions, kids launched themselves from the car before it was fully stopped, disappearing into the cedar, instantly absorbed into their own social experiment that involved manufacturing, commerce, nerf-war, justice, and diplomacy as the adults concerned themselves with beer and food and fire.
The kids organized this outing, more or less.
They had to, since the adults were not into it. I would have loved this place as a kid, then when I got older it would have bored me, then horrified me. Now, with the life experience of Gandalf the Grey and Gatorade cut with Tito’s Vodka, I can tolerate it.
I lean into the complexities and the beautiful, if tragic, relationship here between man and nature. Most waterparks are artifacts, completely synthetic structures built to a purpose, but this place is, at its core, something else. Schlitterbahn is the Comal River, in drag.
Original artwork for this piece, painted by the author’s wife, Laura. Here the author’s young daughter, Eliza, wades (illegally) in the Comal River.
After ascending the line in the heat, I finally get my feet wet in the getting-in place and am a little shocked at the cold, as the water is still the same 72 degrees it was a few minutes ago, when it gushed out from some rocks in Landa Park. There is no time to gradually lower my ass into the inner tube when it's my turn. It happens in a gasping plop and I’m shoved down a ditch.
From the tube, it feels hastily designed. There are a dozen points in the journey where I get stuck in an eddy, flipper arms and legs flailing helplessly like a bug. I’d get out and push myself along, but it's against the rules. If people got out of the tube, maybe they would drown, or lie in wait for someone, or exit the culvert into the contrived landscaping to make a new life for themselves living off the land on the hillside island.
The park applies the same solution to the eddies it does to every logistical problem: hire more teenagers.
A teenager in a bathing suit stands in the water at each eddy. He or she grabs my tube and unceremoniously shoves me into the current or over the falls. It feels intimate. Each time, I thank the young person who is spending their summer in this way and sincerely hope that it is somehow developing their character, that they are learning things about people and nature and choices and, perhaps, free will. I’m concerned that the girls will be groped by drunk old pervs who feel anonymous in the current like a Tokyo subway.
Finally, I spill into the get-out place, maneuver my legs under me and transform back into a terrestrial biped. I’m beginning to feel helpless and passive. I don’t like it but I knew what I was in for, that’s why we prepared special Gatorade.
I roll my tube over to the edge of the sidewalk to wait, and there, just beyond the bushes, runs the actual Comal. It's like walking out of the Museum of Natural History and seeing a mastodon. It's cloudy, to be honest. Opaque with the sediment kicked up by pumping up and dumping out, lined with invasive elephant ear, but still majestic and wild and so so close.
Twenty years ago and a mile upstream from this point, Laura whipped off her summer dress and got in the Comal in Landa Park, in full view of the “No Swimming” sign. She had what I called “Hot Girl Privilege.” No one complained about her swimming anywhere.
I wasn't sure how much of her privilege I could coast on. Had we been nightclub people, I would have been trying to jump the line with her, hoping the bouncer wouldn't peel me off. I was something of a habitual trespasser myself, but my way was stealthy. Trying to keep up with Laura was a measurement of my courage and ethics.
When she marched across someone’s yard, I became an anxious entourage. “What’s the problem?” she’d ask, confused.
She was still figuring out how much talk I was.
We were at the pedestrian bridge in Landa Park, where the Comal becomes a canal, deep and fast. The bridge reaches a little gazebo where you can take a selfie or do a portrait to mark a graduation, engagement, or quinceanera. Once on the bridge though, you look down and see that perfect, clear coldness over boulders and wild rice flowing like dark green hair.
Some of us are tempted by such things.
Laura was not aware of the disapproving looks from families walking back from Wurstfest. I pushed through my self-consciousness and dove in while she waded.
Out in the current, I swam hard enough to keep from moving downstream, the cold changing everything about how I felt about anything, watching big blobby green and brown forms on the river bottom until I tired. No one yelled at us. We got back in our clothes and walked on to the festival, chilled, our limbs made of languid plastic that swung with slight resistance and sent signals of well-being.
I don't know why you're not supposed to swim there. Maybe it's dangerous. How do people who live there simply walk past it? We had the arrogance of young, healthy anarchists, exasperated at the infirmity around us.
A few years later, we parked at the end of the park, where the springs come out of the rocky escarpment, and spread a blanket on the St. Augustine grass that grows thick because it's right on the water table. Eliza had learned to stand up. She explored the area, uninhibited by the complete focus of two adults. The channel of water where it comes out of the rocks is gravel flecked with red and white. She passed her hand across its surface as she waded.
You are not supposed to get in there either and we thought we got away with it again. An older lady who I thought had been smiling at us (who wouldn't?) came over and let us know she had called the police, either because of the trespass or for the naked baby.
We rolled up our blanket and I realized that, though I felt a strong connection to this river, I truly didn't understand this place.
The new part of the park has monumental water slides with lines that stretch up Escher-like stairs, story upon story, into the hot Texas wind. The slide superstructure lives on an island surrounded by a moat that is a lazy river powered by a wave generator. Pulses send us around and lift us up and down. I have conversations with my friends that are interrupted from time to time as we drift, until I lose track of them. People can be close by but never see each other if they are traveling at the same speed in the same direction.
On one of the wave pulses, I reach for the top of the wall to hang there, but a lifeguard yells at me. These strangers are my companions now, passively caught in the same present moment. I witness their interpersonal dynamics and wonder how long we would have to circle here to become friends. There are inner tubes, but the “river” is deep enough to suspend a person, legs dangling like jellyfish tentacles that drag on the concrete in the ebb of the wave.
There is a thin but vast sense of community among all of us who are circling. It's like being involved in a natural disaster, and not at all incompatible with being shitfaced. The Comal is not present in this new part of the park. We are higher up on the escarpment, out of the shade of any tree. There are landscaping installations, they are well laid out, with wise native species selections. In three years, they will provide shade to sunburned humans, but they will always be nestled into artifice. The unintended, mostly invasive trees in the old park feel grounded, connected to the earth, in comparison.
When they announce the park is closing, we begin our slow evacuation.
I am tired and cranky, soaked in chlorine. It’s a dry and bitter end to the day, but I have an ace up my sleeve. If we can get to the actual river, all of this—the fatigue, the heat, the aches and irritability from getting buzzed in the middle of the day—all of it will be washed away. There is a balance between euphoria and dysphoria in my body that causes me to feel bad after feeling good, and cold water is a loophole in that contract. I have only to endure the initial shock.
Laura is on board with this plan, so we head to a trusty access point, but it’s locked behind a new chain link fence. A second choice location now charges $30 for public parking and appears to be closing for the day.
The rest of the river is elusive from the road. You can drive all over town, crossing back and forth over high bridges without finding a way in, as if the town were suspended above the actual earth.
The AC in the car blows at the highest setting. It makes a noise I have to yell over. We are not going to violate the forbidden places on the river this time, because we are trying to model adult behavior to our daughter and we are hungry. Jack in the Box and the AC on high will get us back to Austin, where we will lie down and sleep deeply.
This is my last visit to Schlitterbahn, I realize. Unless, perhaps, there is an expansion of the lazy river. I find that dangling my legs along a concrete track underwater is great knee rehab.
And maybe I’d have more stamina if I could catch a nap in the shade somewhere.
Ryan Gossen is a writer living in Austin, Texas, where he also pursues dance, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and climbing, and is an active member of Texas Search and Rescue. He has had many vocations, including user experience (UX) designer, experimental psychologist, construction worker, arborist, and ski bum. He writes mostly about man’s interaction with nature. More of his writing can be found on his website.
