Sand Roads & Waterslides
by Sandy Lang F rom the top of the manmade mountain paved in
concrete slides, I’d watch the clock. Before Water World opened each day with gushes of white water, one of my tasks in the summers of 1986 and 1987 was to sweep the grass clippings, snow cone cups and whatever else had blown into the flumes overnight. The waterslide was a Surfside Beach landmark for de- cades, with rocky, cave-like features that rose above Highway 17 near Fifth Avenue North. As one of the teenage lifeguards who lorded over the place in bath- ing suits and shorts, I’d often check the sign at Conway National Bank that alternately flashed the time and temperature. On some mornings before our 10 a.m. opening, it was already nearing 90 degrees. We wore mirrored sunglasses and learned to carelessly twirl lifeguard whistles one direction and then the other, al- ways watching the pool for stragglers or troublemak- ers. In the afternoons, distant lightning strikes would often force us to close the slide as the sky darkened and thunder boomed. A shrill blow of the whistle and we could clear the pool.
My family had moved to Surfside in 1980, when the
town was sixteen years old—a sleepy collection of beach houses on land once part of a 3,000 acre planta- tion for rice, timber and sweet potatoes. The first time I saw the long stretch of dunes and beach, and walked out on the wooden pier, I was twelve. My two older brothers and I moved as close as we could to the group of men cleaning king mackerel, and we leaned over the railing to see the snapping mouths of sharks grabbing at scraps of fish in the froth of water below.
Two miles from end to end and one-half mile wide- that’s Surfside Beach. I couldn’t believe my luck. I
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