Last week I heard that Indiana Beach is closing down after 100 years. I was really sad but not for the reasons that others might be. I only visited Indiana Beach once as a teenager but I grew up watching a lot of TV, and that jingle performed by an animated crow from the Indiana Beach summer commercial would stay in my head far into the new school year. “There’s more than corn in Indiana…Indiana Beach.”
My family took vacations every summer starting when I was a small child but even though Indiana Beach was located on Lake Shafer just a couple hours over the border from where I grew up in Central Illinois, we never vacationed there. Our first family trip was to Bemidji, Minnesota where my dad used to take fishing vacations without us. The year he took us with him was a disaster but that’s a story for another day. I don’t think my dad took another vacation without his family after that year. We went to see relatives and made educational stops like the U.S. Space and Aeronautical Museum and even took some short pit stops at smaller amusement parks. One year we went to both King’s Island and King’s Dominion on our way to Richmond, VA to see my grandma’s relatives. I’m sure that was not a fun trip for my parents. One year, my dad wanted to stop at Gulf Shores, Alabama because the only time he had visited the ocean had been there when he was in college. After that day my dad decided the rest of our vacations would be spent on the beach, lounging and reading and riding the surf on our inflatable rafts in Florida, but we never went to Indiana Beach together as a family.
But the memory that I have of Indiana Beach still includes my dad. I was probably 17 years old and outside of seeing my dad at the school where I attended and where he taught English, our time spent together at home was fairly limited. My dad was the sort of guy who was uncomfortable with emotion and filled the quiet and awkward spaces with jokes and laughter. If my sister or I started crying, his eyes got big and he went quiet and just walked out of the room leaving my mom to handle things. He once pretended to be sleeping after I threw up on my parents’ bedroom carpet while my mom cleaned it up in the dark. When I cried after falling down, he would tell me not to be such a baby while he dabbed my skinned knees with peroxide. He knew how to work a room full of people but just didn’t do well one on one with his family.
Fast forward to the summer I went to Indiana Beach for the day with my high school best friend. Indiana Beach originally started as a man-made lake beachfront with waterskiing and wading. By the time I was a teenager, it had morphed into a small amusement and water park. It was the first time I had seen a Lazy River ride and I thought it was the greatest thing ever invented. As a small town kid who grew up with farm kids riding tractor inner tubes down creeks, the Lazy River ride provided hours of sunning and lazing about without the dangers of creek life, and without having to walk all the way back to the house when you were tired. I spent that day riding rides and lying in the sun and eating all the junk food I could get my hands on. And then I went home feeling really sick. My parents were already in bed when I got home and I was downstairs reeling with one of the worst stomachaches I’d ever had with no relief in sight. My dad came down to the kitchen and heated up a mug of water in the microwave. He put a teabag in and added some honey and sat with me while I drank it, telling me it would make me feel better. He acted as if he had invented hot tea with honey and was trying to market it to the masses. The drink didn’t work but that moment was one of the most touching and meaningful gestures that my dad ever made toward me. The fact that he was able to sit there in silence, not cracking jokes and not feeling awkward in the silence and not being uncomfortable in my pain and sickness. It was a real dad moment.
When places like Indiana Beach close down, it not only affects the people who spent every summer there or the local economy. Its reaches are far beyond that. The ripples of that lazy river ride reached out over the border, through the cornfields and into the kitchens of families who don’t know how to communicate with each other.
A couple years after my dad died I took a group of teenagers to Indiana Beach for the day as part of a court ordered supervision program that I managed through the local probation office. We rode rides and ate junk food. I specifically remember riding one of those large Viking boats that goes back and forth and I remember screaming the whole time and trying not to vomit. At 26 years old, my center of gravity had changed and I couldn’t keep up with the teenagers around me. I don’t know if any of those kids remember that day. I don’t know if they remember how funny they thought it was to see me lose it on that Viking boat. I don’t know what their lives were like when they went back home that night. I’m guessing many of them didn’t have a moment with their parents like I had experienced with my dad. But just maybe one of them did. And maybe if that memory lingers with them until they’re as old as I am, just maybe there is still more than corn in Indiana.