Don't Do It, Bodangit

Call it The Diving Board Phenomenon:

Communities aren't building pools with diving boards anymore, because insurancewise they're too "high risk." In fact, hardly any are building pools with real deep ends these days, because even without a diving board, people still might try to dive into eight feet of water, and we all know that's suicide on a stick.

(Seriously. It's true. And, yes, I know the obvious question this raises: "When one of our friends goes a little crazy, like we all do sometimes, how can we say he went off the deep end if there's no deep end to go off anymore?").

South Carolina has been going off the deep end for centuries (first to secede, first in violence against women, first in drunk driving deaths, etc.).

But it's looking like we, too, will have to find a new way to put it.

For the better. For the worse. Depends on what history you bring with you and whether you're comfortable with that history.

Two icons of our impetuous defiance of the safe, the demur, the sober, the progressive, the subtle, the ... so not redneck ... are soon to be no more.

The Pavilion in Myrtle Beach and The Rapids in Columbia (one razed and replaced to cater to a higher-end taste, the other turned into a state park with tighter rules to diffuse anarchy and cater to a higher-end taste).

These places and I have history, and they have a few things in common:

* You didn't know exactly why you were there.

I was taken to them as rites of passage in my formative years, consumed them as a careless teenager as they consumed me, reached a phase of asking myself "How can I be such a backwoods dipstick?" and, finally, came to embrace them as the peculiar cubic zirconia jewels of "Where I'm From" that they are.

And now, I take my children to these kinds of places, seemingly oblivious that when they get old enough to go there on their own, I'm not sure I'd want them to.

* Extra "Cops" style drama to burn.

You were always five seconds away from the fight that wasn't a fight because nobody actually wanted to fight but felt like they had to act like they wanted to fight but then, every now and then, some guy decided to keep it real and ...

... or five seconds away from making a new best friend who, after only fifteen minutes of knowing you, would would take a bullet for you because you both liked that "House of Pain" song -- until he decided to hook up with the girl you were with. Then you wanted to fight.

* Life is potentially perilous.

I watched a dead guy get pulled out of The Rapids. People always got pulled out of there, because 1.) many of them are drunk and out of shape, 2.) the water's ice cold (even in August), the current's strong and no one seemed to realize that when the extremely loud siren is sounded that means the power company's going to unleash tons and tons of water from the lake dam and drastically alter the water level.

I could handle the current easily, but a friend of mine -- who was stronger than me but who suffered asthma and let panic get to him -- almost drowned. Thank Allah for kayakers, who were there for more-conventional activities and always seemed to be available to pull some drunk redneck out of the rushing water.

In Myrtle Beach a couple of weeks ago vacationing, I picked up the newspaper. There was a story about the 15th anniversary of the worst accident to happen at The Pavilion, when a pair of teenage boys rocking a car on the ferris wheel fell when the safety bar failed. One of the boys died. A girl they had clipped on the way down fell out, too, and was stuck upside down in the metal framing for quite a while before rescue workers freed her.

I looked at the story, and specifically the date, and then realized ... just a week before that happened, my best friend, Tommy, and I were in that ferris wheel. He was rocking the car, and I told him I was scared of heights. He told me he did it all the time. Of course, he also once tapped my window one morning when we were barely out of high school and took me out on his father's motorcycle at 105 mph down country backroads, then the tire blew out the next day before his dad could even get it out of the driveway (note to self: call Tommy again soon).

* People who are most important to me in my life have shared my history in these places.

My wife and I went to The Rapids in the first days of dating back in Fall of 1996 when we were in college together. The air was cold, and the water was colder, but I still stripped to my boxers and went for a swim.

My two little boys -- a full-day Pavilion pass wristband strapped on each of their hands, their faces dark and cheeks red and hair turned blondish by the beach sun -- spun in the nauseating Tea Cups, sucked down Icees and fought over who gets to the throw the ski ball in the arcade.

* I hate that both icons are being castrated, controlled, superdupermajorplansintheworkingified at the altar of making people who are afraid to be afraid to not have to be afraid.

Of anything -- whether it be tackiness, impending death or just people in general.

Yes, we're moving forward here.

And, somehow, I realize how it happens.

How these old-timers get to the point where they look at a parking lot and tell you incessantly about a tire swing that used to hang from an oak tree and the good 'ole days of feeling like you owned that place and, by extension, the entire world.

And then how we always just waited for our turn to talk, so we could get on to doing bigger and better things, which were the same things the old-timers were doing back in the old days, just in different places that hadn't suffered the same fate as the diving board.