As summer marches on sweatily, and languid thoughts turn to relief, I am put in mind of the solution to all of our temperature-related troubles: the waterslide that kills you. Please send me down this slide immediately.
I am of course speaking of the Fly Over slide at the Duinrell amusement park in the Netherlands, the first and logically only waterslide that was entirely filled with water, forcing riders to hold their breath for the duration of the ride. Unlike boring, standard, "safe" waterslides, the water was not merely a lubricant to help riders go faster have "fun," but filled the tube to the brim and completely submerged anyone brave enough to ride it, and generated tangible anxiety in anyone who even heard about it.
I first heard about it this week from one of those viral accounts, and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Place me into the drowning tube posthaste, so that I may dance with death at an amusement park. It is why I have long obsessed over the long-closed Cannonball Loop at Action Park, and that never even killed anyone despite being obviously designed to do so.
The Fly Over slide has similarly been shut down, not out of safety concerns, but because, as Forgotten Lands, Places and Transit puts it, "it was met with little enthusiasm and fear from the general public." Open from 1994 to 2010, it met so little enthusiasm that just the one lone video of anyone riding it seems to exist.
You might have noticed in that video, if you weren't having a panic attack, that the Fly Over slide initially goes upward, making it less "slide" and more "getting sucked into a fatal maelstrom." This is actually a neat bit of fluid mechanics; it's taking advantage of the Communicating Vessels Principle, by which water will settle at the same level in connected containers. This would possibly be more enjoyable as a sixth-grade lab demonstration than as a ride that makes you go slowly while you can't breathe, but there's no accounting for what a Dutchman finds fun.
Shockingly, there were reportedly never any injuries or deaths on the Charybdis ride. I think that I could change this. The Fly Over must be rebuilt, and I must be sent on an all-expenses-paid trip to Duinrell, and I must drown in the drowning tube.
