A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Attractions

I thought Kennewick was the ideal place to grow up. Of course, this was before I even saw anywhere else.

My favorite attraction was the Cable Bridge. I remember the kind of awe and joy that only an eleven-year-old can muster about such an object. When the bridge opened for traffic in 1978, it seemed almost unbelievable that this was the first cable-stayed bridge in the country. Dad drove our family across on the first day it opened. My other brother who still lived in the house, Mark, was with Matt and me in the backseat. We craned our necks to look out the back window and watched the cables slanting to the high columns in the middle of the bridge. We didn’t have any tall buildings or other interesting structures at all in the Tri-Cities and this first impression was breathtaking. It made me think of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which I knew only from pictures. I thought the Cable Bridge, which connects Kennewick to Pasco, was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in person. It was a majestic backdrop for the yearly hydroplane races, which were also a source of hometown pride, as they were supposedly the second most well-attended hydroplane events in the country.

The only other interesting creation in the area was the Wet ’n Wild water park, which opened up by the Columbia Center Mall when I was a teenager. It also had some important-sounding rank among national attractions. It supposedly had the third longest water slides in the country. Going down those slippery tubes rubbed the hair off my calves and made my body feel like it was full of static electricity. Then I had to wait in line for a long time, shivering and dripping, until I was back at the top. The lifeguards there were always too cool to look at anyone. They kept their eyes set on a particular curve of the slide and then waved their hand lazily, signaling the sliders to go. For some reason, it was closed down a few years later and then eventually demolished to make room for a car dealership.