Some water slides and a lazy river I didn’t get to go on last night.

If you saw me last week, you already knew I was going to Adult Night at Splash Montana water park. It was the last Adult Night of the summer, and my friend Kelly organized an outing. “I’m going to Splash Montana,” I told several disinterested people in my yoga class. “I’m going to eat pizza.” I also planned to walk on those logs that are soft and inflatable but still easy to fall off of. I would of course go down the water slides, and probably I would take a turn around the lazy river. It was a whole experience I had laid out in my head, and as the weather got hotter and Sunday night drew nearer, I began to think of it as the centerpiece of my week. Which is too bad, since when I got there I joined another 35 people who were denied admission because the park had been rented to a private party.

Here is a screenshot of the Splash Montana Facebook page I took this morning. This status was posted Sunday afternoon around 1pm:

As late as yesterday afternoon, the administrators of Splash Montana had made no announcement that Adult Night was cancelled. It is still on the schedule at the time of this writing. Note that the Facebook status above says the park will be open until 6pm, which is normally when Adult Night begins—so that almost counts as an announcement, although given the calendar it only seems conclusive after the fact. Essentially, Splash Montana canceled the last Adult Night of the summer without telling anyone. They did so not because of any unexpected mechanical or logistics issues, but because they had rented out the park to a private party.

Several people outside the gates said Splash Montana had continued to advertise Sunday’s adult night all week, but I have not found any evidence confirming that. A lot of rumors went around in the hour or so that we waited outside, periodically sending delegates to negotiate with park employees.

According to those employees, no one knew about the change until they arrived at work that day. The online schedule had not been updated, they said, because the web guy was out of town for the weekend. This reason seemed preposterous: surely the rental had been arranged more than one day in advance, and surely the website could be updated remotely. The web guy does not need to come into the Splash Montana offices and adjust the online calendar with a screwdriver.

We marveled at the incompetence of both this system and the excuses made for it while we waited for the manager to call back. In the meantime, a park employee told us that it wasn’t a big deal, because no one ever shows up for Adult Night anyway. The three dozen of us wedged into the shade along the wall met this argument with skepticism. Was she implying that we weren’t here? Did the management of Splash Montana regard Adult Night as a nuisance program no one wanted, perhaps offered to fulfill the conditions of a grant?

Mostly, we wondered who had rented out the park. We pictured a rich person who lived up in the hills—someone who didn’t even like water slides, probably, and only wanted to sun himself without having to look at the plebes. As our resentment deepened, however, we also nursed the hope that he would let us join his party. It was a multi-acre water park, after all. Surely, when this plutocrat arrived, he would suffer a few dozen childless adults to go down the water slide with him.

Then the manager called back and told us who had rented the park: Opportunity Resources of Missoula, a vocational and support service for developmentally disabled adults.

“Oh,” we said, pretty much with one voice. Then we left, politely. What else could we do?

Obviously, we were not wrong. The schedule said Adult Night. The Facebook feed said nothing of any private parties. There wasn’t even a sign at the gate. But developmentally disabled adults were obviously not wrong, either. After an hour guessing what kind of monster would use his money to cancel public fun, our culprit was pretty much the only unimpeachable party you could imagine. So if it wasn’t our fault, and it wasn’t the fault of Opportunity Resources, whose fault was it?

It was the city’s fault. The City of Missoula rented out the park on one of two nights in August that already had a scheduled event. The city canceled the last Adult Night of the season without telling anyone—neither the public nor its own employees. The city had no plan in case people showed up to this canceled, advertised event, and it responded to its screwup by waiting an hour before doing nothing.

Obviously, me not getting to go on a water slide falls somewhere between hangnail and Armenian genocide on the spectrum of human tragedy. It is not a big deal. But now that the city of Missoula has spent millions of dollars on a water park, maybe it could run it with as much skill as, say, a community theater box office.

Surely there is someone in this town who can manage a schedule and update a website. Possibly the municipal water park should not operate on an open-unless-we-can-rent-it basis. Probably, this is the kind of thing that makes voters and taxpayers think that the people running the City of Missoula do not know what they’re doing. This town could work better. I know three dozen hot, dry adults who are mad about it.

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