Published: July 19, 2008 08:44 pm            

Shower surfing on memory lane

If you’re looking for an interesting vacation this year, I suggest taking a trip into the luxurious past, before political correctness invaded our homes.

I discovered the past in a motel bathroom in Booneville, Ark., over the long July Fourth weekend, which sounds kinky but isn’t.

In case you’re wondering, I’d gone to Booneville, which is just slightly southeast of Fort Smith, to check on an elderly aunt who’s in a nursing home there. It’s not the kind of place one visits just for grins.

However, in the town’s only motel, for all the world to see and use, was a regular, pre-low-flow, 1970s kind of shower-head. When you turned the faucet handle, the gush came at you like a water cannon, and if a person wasn’t standing in the shower, it would have peeled the tiles off the back wall.

It was fantastic.

I know I should feel bad about enjoying it. We’re constantly told to be happy saving the planet, and encouraged to feel smug about hoarding resources like clean water. However, in my defense, I was able to rinse my hair in about 30 seconds, compared with three or four minutes in my own shower at home.

It was the watery version of driving a Hummer limo, turning the a/c thermostat down to 60 degrees, or spreading real butter on a chocolate chip muffin — sheer decadence.

Being politically incorrect made me so happy that I briefly considered shooting something endangered, just to see if that felt great, too. Fortunately, I seldom take guns and endangered animals into the shower with me, and the euphoria passed as soon as I picked up the napkin-sized motel towel.

We used to have showers like that all over Texas, but they’ve gone the way of fins on cars and frozen dinners in aluminum trays. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the water-saving technology has improved, for which I’m grateful. The early versions were drippy, fizzy little things evidently developed for insane asylums to ensure job security for burly orderlies. Today’s shower heads at least propel the drops better, like when you put your thumb over the end of a garden hose to make it shoot farther. You don’t get more water, but it makes you feel like you’re accomplishing more.

But this Booneville marvel was the real deal, with gallons of water blasting from those old pipes. I was so happy that I tried to belt out a little Aretha Franklin and nearly drowned.

After that little trip down memory lane, I purposely sought out the older motels as I moseyed back south. None of your fancy Holiday Inns or TraveLodges for me. I was looking for the mom-and-pop joints, where shabby chic was a reality, not a pose, where I knew I’d find those lovely older shower heads waiting just for me.

When I couldn’t find one in Arkadelphia and had to stay at the Comfort Inn just off the interstate, it nearly broke my heart. Fortunately, I stumbled on the All Seasons Lodge in Hot Springs, which made up for it. The All Seasons doesn’t believe in those modern electronic key cards. Instead, the clerk handed me a large brass key attached to a plastic green key chain. The air conditioner roared like the space shuttle taking off, and the shower pummeled me into silliness.

Perhaps if I’d been in Las Vegas or Southern California, the guilt of all that waterborne luxury would have overwhelmed me. However, Arkansas seemed to have water everywhere, in lakes, rivers and falling from the sky.

When I got home and tried to tell people about my trip, they just looked at me funny when I described the showers in Arkansas. “What about DeGray Lake, or Mount Magazine?” and “What about tubing down the Caddo River?” they asked.

All of those things were lovely, and the people were very friendly, but those are only geography. A truly great vacation is one that takes you back 40 years.

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Janet Jacobs is a Daily Sun staff writer. Her column appears on Sundays. She may be reached by e-mail at jacobs@corsicanadailysun.com

        

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