After "Waterpark"
On Nostalgia and Trans Bodies in Water
Author’s Note: The following is an unpublished essay first drafted in the spring of 2021 and finalized for publication in the winter of 2022. I have chosen to publish it here with its original references to place and time intact, in order to preserve the moment in which it was written.
“Not everyone is granted their basic right to weightlessness.” (all stills taken from Waterpark, dir. Evan Prosofsky)
I grew up in an absurd city: a remote, Albertan oil town of urban sprawl pockmarked by industrial parks and refineries, the very caricature of colonial waste where our lone points of local pride-if-you-will were a hockey team that used to be great and what was, until 2004, the world’s largest mall. “Mall” being something of an understatement, here. Among the West Edmonton Mall’s network of art-deco fountains and boutiques, there were also a number of ludicrous attractions, including an amusement park, a hotel, a shooting range, a skating rink, two (!!) minigolf courses, an aquarium replete with submarine tours, and strangest of all, the World Water Park. In what I now recognize as a lack of common sense unique to childhood, I loved that waterpark. Part of me still does.
These attractions were all quite expensive, so being able to visit any one of them was a highlight of my family’s calendar. The at-best biannual trips to the waterpark—usually enabled by a school fundraiser or coupon booklet—weren’t just a day out, they were an occasion. One that I relished dearly, to the point where I still have playlists of songs I define as “waterpark music,” only because I listened to them on my discman during one of those days. These times conjure too many uncanny sense-memories to recount in full: the smell of chemicals and concession food, the rumble of waves echoing through the brightly painted locker rooms, being driven home to a chlorine-induced sleep, and so on. All this from somewhere that, I understand, must appear to non-Edmontonians (and probably my parents, god bless them), like the grotesque mutation of late-capitalist excess that it is.
Evan Prosofsky’s 2013 short documentary Waterpark astutely captures the attraction’s bizarre sights and sounds, with an irreverent fondness that at once plays into a collective nostalgia for this place while recognizing the innate silliness of having any kind of nostalgia for this place. It is a time capsule of all my comfortably-alien memories. But it also acts as a time capsule for something far more precise. I realized, on a recent viewing, that the waterpark is not just the site of my pre-cognitive chlorinated bliss. It is also a space that crystallizes the experience of my prepubescent, un-gendered self; a time before I had to concern myself with such constructs and the tiny violences my rejection of them could bring.
The last time I went to the waterpark was about six years ago, now. I was nineteen years old, months away from an inner reckoning that would reconfigure what I knew of myself, my body, and how both of these entities moved through the world. In fact, it might have been the last time I went swimming before I came out as trans, period.
In recent years, the fraught dynamics around trans bodies swimming in public has been relitigated in primarily-cisgender online spaces with bizarre frequency. I am not referring here to the perpetual bigoted discourse around transgender athletes—swimmers especially, of late—as a flashpoint in some imagined culture war on the part of those who take baseless issue with our presence in sport. Rather, I’m referring to a set of so-called “allies” who seem to relish in their performative dismay around the fact that a number of us have such legitimate concerns for our safety in swimming around cis people that we opt not to do so at all.
Whenever this point is raised, the response is often one of piteous astonishment. It’s as if this were the first time cis people have been made to confront this fact, or as if it is the lone context in which trans people face acute risk. Further, they seem to dislike being reminded of what it exposes about the social construction of cisnormativity, and their preconceived notions about which kinds of bodies ought to be allowed where. Such responses imply that, like cisnormative oppression itself, this is an immovable fact put in place by some other force, as opposed to an arbitrary imposition that they themselves hold the collective power to change.
Of course, such dynamics extend far beyond the lens of gender. Any body that does not adhere to the settler-colonial status quo—be it along the axioms of race, class, disability, or any other aspect of one’s self—is certain to be policed in public space, and swimming has become a contemporary flashpoint for this inequity. For many people, cis and trans/non-binary alike, it is no simple pastime. It is a turbulent notion, fraught with past traumas and potential danger. In the version of this world we’ve inherited, water is an exclusive space. Not everyone is granted their basic right to weightlessness.
I often find myself torn between my desire to resist this fact and the need to protect my own safety. It should not be like this, nor will it remain so. Yet still I struggle to contribute to this change in any meaningful way. Consider this essay, in part, an attempt to write myself towards my own praxis.
“How lovely it must be, to go unnoticed.”
At the height of my waterpark-going days, I didn’t have to worry about any of this. In fact, I had no sense of the disruptions that an unwanted puberty would soon enact on my body and heart. I unwittingly soaked in the last years left before I was made to worry about being perceived as a girlish boy—or now, a mannish woman.
Back then, I was anonymous, indistinct from any other child in the lineup for a slide. I wasn’t anything yet, and it made me feel beautiful. What the by-products of my age granted me was a particular kind of security that I ache for now. One that I have to imagine, for many able-bodied cis people, feels like such a given that they’d struggle to recognize it for the privilege that it is, never mind imagine it being taken from them.
The World Waterpark’s centrepiece, both in its layout and in my memories of it, is its enormous wave pool, still the largest in North America. This pool was the site of many pivotal experiences, real and imagined, for my young self. The earliest nightmare I can remember having is of me being trapped in it, alone, my small arms paddling in vain against the current as I cry out for my mother. Then, I am crushed by the massive pylons of the wave machine. I now recall a similar, later nightmare about being stuck overnight in the mall’s amusement park, Galaxyland. A theme, perhaps.
During one of those school fundraisers back in the day, I first experienced a not-uncommon terror for Edmontonian children: during a set of waves, I ventured into an area far deeper and more crowded than I could manage, and a large wave threw me under a cluster of the park’s chintzy banana-yellow inner tubes. I must have been trapped for no more than five seconds before orienting myself and lunging up to safety, taking in air as the next wave hit. It was brief, a dangerous-but-benign rite of passage. Still, the claustrophobic powerlessness of that moment spent trapped between several strangers’ shins was enough to engender in me a lifelong aversion to crowds.
I seldom think of these nostalgic war stories, though. Early on, I learned to only bother with the wave pool at its least-crowded, waiting for the faux-screams accompanying the air horn that signalled a new set of waves—an inexplicable local in-joke—to reach their lowest volume before I trundled into the mechanical surf. I even figured out the exact right spot in the pool where my ideal wave height and minimal crowding intersected (two-thirds in and slightly to the left, for the record). This was the happiest place.
Whenever the waves hit, ebbing and flowing in ten-minute on/off cycles, my whole self became liquid and light. Here were self-contained mountains, where I could rub up against the boundaries of my own fragility, a trial run for a more grown-up kind of danger. Each one, a life lesson: “It is possible to surrender to forces greater than yourself. You will be swept away, and you may not know where you’ll land, but trust that you will land on your feet.” So, I internalized this, every few seconds, ten minutes at a time, for hours.
I remember my cousin and I spending many evenings like this, being gleefully thrashed about. One of our favourite games was to dive headfirst into a wave, timing it just right so that we would emerge mid-air on the other side. We didn’t yet realize what this taught us. Part of me still thinks that split second from one side of a wave to the other might be the closest thing there is to heaven on earth.
In Waterpark’s standout sequence, an anonymous woman in a striking Baywatch-red swimsuit cuts her way through the people around her, into a series of oncoming waves. The camera follows her stride from behind until she, too, is engulfed by the water. As she walks, the crowd clears her path intuitively, as if brushed aside by her aura. Nobody acknowledges her presence, nor seems to even realize she is there. As anyone would, they are merely responding to the elements, of which she is but another. I watch this shot many times over, and think, “How lovely it must be to go unnoticed.” How lovely, the privilege of uncomplicated motion I once felt in that very pool.
Nobody is going to the waterpark right now. At time of writing, it sits empty, darkened and dry, another victim of the stasis COVID has thrust much of the world into. To watch Waterpark in the 2020s is to be reminded of several different before-times: mine, the world’s, even that of the mall itself.
The park as it appeared in Waterpark a near-decade ago was different from the one of my youth, and different from the one last used without reserve in early 2020. Like any modern corporate hologram, it is in a state of constant overhaul. The decrepit old Blue Bullet and Skyscreamer of my happiest days, or the now-decommissioned Raging Rapids, are long gone, replaced by the sight of days that now belong to someone else.
Still, when I watch Water Park, I see the traces of what that time meant to me. I feel the urge to take a palate knife to the screen and scrape away the present day, excavating the lightness of the past. And maybe, along with it, I can get back to the pure self that wandered that mess of staircases, freeing it of the many undesired interventions that have threatened my own light over these long, heavy years.
I consider this possibility often. Parts of me yearn for many kinds of waterpark, literal and otherwise. I dream of warm water. I consider how to foster a world that will allow the non-normative to move through it as they are, free of scrutiny and danger. I imagine hurtling through a slipstream in a dark, blue plastic tube. I see the frigid winter sun shining through that filthy glass roof and picture my body diffracting into the rays. I remember the awful, hot, scrape-inducing poolside grit meant to evoke beach sand. I think of the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s vox-pop figure Murray Ostril, as unknowable as Waterpark’s woman in red, lamenting, “they don’t sleep anymore, on the beach.”1 I laugh, imagining that this is the beach he’s referring to. Then I don’t laugh, at all. I put on a waterpark song and succumb to a crushing bittersweetness. I want to call my cousin. I grieve all that weightlessness I took for granted, that I have struggled to find within myself for so long. I make a tenuous vow that I will return to it again. It still has so much more to teach me.
They don’t sleep anymore, on that beach. Not now. But they will again. And I might, too.
Postscript: Two weeks prior to the publication of this essay here, I swam for the first time in ten years.
This line appears in a monologue attributed to Ostril at the beginning of the piece “Sleep” from the band’s 2000 album Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven