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It happens sometimes that, even though years have passed and we’ve gotten taller, fatter, or wiser, we continue to expect the world to grow with us, proportionally. In high school I was convinced that the artificial tree we used every Christmas was shrinking, because I remembered it being much bigger the year before. This weekend, Coyote, Pow and I thought adults could still have just as much fun at the water park as children. In fact, the world is not expanding at the same rate that we are...and waterslides made for munchkins are hard on a fully formed body.

The park was fairly empty—no signs of the gringo Labor Day last hurrah here. But the water, spring-fed, was not too cold and not too hot, and the pools were big, deep and blue, give or take a crack in the wall and a floating leaf or two. We owed our visit to the park, which was built in the 70s out of pure cement, to Coyote and Pow’s nostalgia for their summer trips there with aunts and cousins. They told me about Princess Atzimba of the Purupecha people, the park’s namesake. The manant pool that feeds the park is adorned with a statue of the princess, as well as a plaque recounting her legend. It turns out she, like so many other foolish Americans after her, fell in love with a Spaniard who had been imprisoned by her father. The plaque doesn’t elaborate, but explains that her father ordered both her and the Spaniard’s deaths. The plaque ends assuring the visitor that both of them died happy.

Our first challenge was a waterslide named “Caracol” that required a foam mat to descend its twisting tube. Coyote went down head first like the chubby 8-year-old before him, and ended up with a bleeding knee by the time he splashed into the tiny pool at the bottom. Pow ditched her mat and went down with me, but I lost her halfway along the track and she had to slide down with merely her frictionable bathing suit. That waterslide must have been for kids. We moved on to the “Kamikase”.

Kamikase is a slide that would have scared the daylights out of me as a child—one that looks like a giant playground slide,  short sidewalls the only thing keeping the daredevil from falling to their splattered-on-sidewalk death. We climbed up the iron-lattice stairs where a bored worker told us that we should ride sitting up. None of us believed him, and we all slid down with our legs and arms crossed like cadavers, flat on our backs and skidding into the pool at the bottom like skipped stones. Skipped stones with mega wedgies.

We rejected the idea of a repeat on either slide, and went for the final challenge: “El Tornado”. It wasn’t yet in service, so we dipped into the warm deep-pool while we waited. This was when the fun really began. A group of animadores who called themselves Los costeños had been holed up in a tent DJ-ing on an old Apple computer, and emerged to announce that it was time to join them for some games. The pool was basically empty at that point, but the few people who had been floating in it disappeared with the announcement. The costeños kept at the megaphone though, and finally Pow and I volunteered to paddle an inner tube in a down-and-back race against another team of three, whose average age was about thirteen. The whistle blew and we were off, paddling as slowly as possible toward the waterfall at the end of the pool, not wanting to beat the trunks off of our three-year-old competitor and his five-year-old sister. There were only two paddles per team at the start, so the little boy in goggles and floaties was just along for the ride. About three feet in his sister tossed her paddle, so it was all up to their dad. Pow and I did donuts waiting for them to pass us, provoking comments about alcoholímetros on the part of the costeños. The dad gave up about three-quarters of the way across, turned around and went back to the deck for the win. He winked at us as his son thrust his skinny white arms into the air growling, “GANAMOOOOOOOOOOOSSSS!!” and jumping about til he fell into the water, bobbing and gasping for breath.

The next game involved a costeño hanging from a cable above the pool and a bucket of water balloons. We were to try to hit him for a prize. While everyone had hidden themselves below umbrellas and beach towels to avoid the raft race, they were not shy about trying to peg a guy dangling 30 feet in the air for minimum wage. The line was long, and we all had multiple tries, but Coyote was the only one who managed to graze the costeño’s thigh. He won a beer from the snack bar, and Pow and I suddenly regretted our patronizing generosity in the raft race. The begoggled gremlin was still taunting me even after the second game, so I shut him up with a carefully aimed leftover water balloon.

The final game, to my disappointment, was a free throw shot in chest-deep water. Coyote went to the finals against some of his countrymen, who, as they were eliminated, displayed some of the English obscenities they’d picked up in California. He won, this time a burger, and the costeños decided to shut it down before the overgrown kid cleaned them out.

We decided to celebrate by trying out El Tornado. At the bottom of the path leading to the slide were two workers, one with a clipboard, the other guarding a pile of foam American Gladiator-style helmets. The clipboard contained waivers that we had to sign, releasing the park and its owner from responsibility should we suffer any injuries while riding El Tornado. My lawyer, Coyote, signed, so I followed suit and then shoved a foam headguard onto his noggin, disguising him as a Power Ranger. We carried a two-seater tube up the staircase to the top, and wedged ourselves into it with the help of an attendant. The slide, a sort of a V-shaped sluice, had a trickle of water running down it, but our tube was too wide to reach it. We were wedged between the concrete walls, our bums sticking out the raft, swaying above the stream, until the attendant pushed us hard enough to get us squeaking down the slide.

We screamed our way around the first couple of bends until we splashed into a deep pool, where we whizzed by a waiting attendant. Something told me that two hefty people going together down a slide meant for children might change something in the expected velocity. The hunch was right. Around the next hairpin curve we flipped, thankfully landing inside the slide rather than over its edge.

“Let’s go—someone’s going to come behind us and run us over!” I shouted, and Coyote and I started scooting on our bottoms, the raft trailing behind him. Entering a tunnel the water flow was so weak that we couldn’t even keep moving, so I hopped upon the now-upside-down tube and, trying to wait for Coyote to board, was washed away by a sudden surge in the stream, leaving him there in the tunnel to fend for himself.

I laughed hysterically when I saw the expression of the crowd in the pool at the bottom as I limped down the last part of the slide. Coyote, still looking like a Power Ranger, came slithering down behind me. We tossed the foam helmets and turned around to wait for Pow who, the smart one of the trio, had gone with a pot-bellied 10-year-old she’d just met. When we were reunited we started exchanging battle stories—Pow’s raft had flipped too—until a girl interrupted us, yelling at me, “Chava, you have blood on your shoulder!”

Sure enough, a hole in my upper arm, which looked more like the work of a BB gun than a waterslide, was flush with bright red, and my elbow was seeping too. Coyote had another couple of gashes to match the one Caracol had given him, and we admitted that maybe we were too big for the water park. The hole in my shoulder filled up with a tar-black scab, to my satisfaction. When we had signed the releases I’d expected nothing less than paralysis, so the Atzimba sniper was actually a relief.

We healed up with a beer and a burger, compliments of Coyote and the costeños, and spent the rest of the afternoon, until the daily electrical storm hit, lying in the sun or splashing in the wave pool, trying to ignore the fact that Neverland had shrunk.