The Skydiver

Labor Day was big where I grew up in Central Washington. Every first weekend of September was the benchmark of not just the end of summer, but also the beginning of the new school year for the local education system. It was the time when everyone in the Kittitas Valley came together at the local fair and rodeo to share experiences, talk about the coming sports season and see whose canned goods would take home the blue ribbon for the least amount of Botulism.

I remember the fair fondly and loved its three-and-a-half days of unbridled kid action. All my friends would be there in new school clothes that we couldn’t wait to put holes in. Three months of summer can change a kid quite a bit, so it meant some of us were bigger and some of us watched our friends grow while we bided our time until our bodies told us it was time to sprout. Every inch counted at the fair, because each year we wanted to see if we met the height requirement for certain carnival rides… the good ones.

I don’t know how the local fair contracted out for the carnival that they brought in, but my first guess would be by “low bid”. I say this because the people that run the fair do an excellent job putting it on every year with a limited budget and every year the carnival looks sketchier than a police artist’s doodle pad. This meant that they could keep the prices down for everyone coming to enjoy the fair and if the carnival ever complained, the fair could say the carnival had more than enough safety violations to void their contract. (I seriously doubt if any of this is true, but I have to move the story along.)

My twelfth year brought me just enough vertical currency to start to ride the bigger rides at the carnival. I had my favorites of course. I enjoyed the Tip-Top, which I would now label as “The Spinning Bathtubs on a Catapulting Puke Platform”. The only reason it isn’t actually named the former is that it is too costly to spell it out with light bulbs, but that’s exactly what it is to me now. But when I was twelve, it was just called fun. I would ride anything at the carnival as long as I didn’t go upside down. Upside down was off limits and that should be all the reason anyone needs to keep me upright.

I knew I couldn’t go upside down because only a few years before when I was eight, I had been given permission to go on a small Ferris Wheel type ride that allowed one to push a lever out and flip the cage you were sitting in over. I was allowed to go in it with a girl about my age because two kids that don’t meet the height requirement equal one kid that does.

I had let the girl riding with me know that my preference was to not go upside down while in the metal cage, despite having the option to do so. My understanding of the ride was the same as the idea of riding in a convertible car. Just because the top CAN come off, it doesn’t necessarily have to come off. She agreed that once we were locked in to the mesh cage and hastily secured with a nylon strap, we could just keep the unit level as we went around in the big circle.

Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have bit her. I don’t know if it was the panic of being upside down, the pain of the betrayal of trust, or the rage I felt that she laughed at me about it, but I did what any eight-year-old would NOT have done and sank my teeth into the flesh of her small adolescent arm. You know, I think it was actually the rage, because I needed her to stop laughing and understand I was deadly serious about her keeping us level. She didn’t deserve the bite. She deserved to get to ride the ride with a kid that wouldn’t bite her. When people ask me if I have any regrets from my life, that’s one that comes to mind first. I’m sorry Jill. I’m happy to spring for a tattoo around any scarring to turn a sad memory into a regrettable choice.

At twelve I was in a much better place emotionally and I felt ready for bigger rides and bigger thrills. When it came to rides, none were bigger than the Skydiver. It was almost twice as tall as the Ferris Wheel the carnival lugged around and far more interesting. The Skydiver was a ride that was in production from 1965 to 1979 making the one at our carnival, at best, seven years old and at worst, 21. It’s a simple wheel design, equipped with the enclosed cabs of Soviet Eastern Block era economy cars that because of a coal shortage, had to be sold to a carnival ride manufacturer. The car bodies were mounted around the diameter of the giant wheel in the direction of the curvature. Each car had a big steering wheel in the center that allowed the riders to rotate the car around the axel a full 360 degrees. Looking back at the design and craftsmanship, I would bet that the one at our carnival was the one made just before the prototype.

This was the year my best friend Dave and I would conquer the Skydiver together. The two of us had the combined strength to turn the wheel just right to keep us from going upside down and we would have the thrill of a lifetime. Our logic and plan was sound, we needed to only get in line for the chance to slap fate across the face.

The carnival operator gave Dave and I the critical glare of any equipment engineer that held the precious lives of young people in their hands… or he was trying to determine which of the six of us he would seat first before sneaking another sip from the flask undoubtedly hidden in the one functioning pocket of his grease stained overalls. He loaded Dave and I into the cab of an Easter egg yellow buggy and slammed the mesh gate shut. The carnival worker then secured the door with a hairpin shaped clip the size of a slightly larger hairpin. I immediately realized my mistake.

Have you ever toured or walked through an abandoned prison or mental institution built before the 1930s? Have you ever stood in the rooms and just felt that bad things have happened in there and you just need to get out, whether you use a door, a window or non-load baring wall? Looking at the stains and claw marks inside the cracking fiberglass shell, I got the immediate feeling that this would be the last fair Dave and I would ever go to.

“So, this will be fun. Yeah! Are you ready buddy?!?!” said Dave. I don’t know if the encouraging words were for me or for him. His eyes betrayed him. He knew we were just as doomed as I did.

“Grab the wheel!” I said as the buggy moved up one to remove the remains of the last riders and make room for new victims. “If we keep control of this now, we can keep it from turning over.” Because the next time the wheel moved, our buggy would be free to turn on its own if we didn’t stop it.

Sure enough, on the next move, the buggy unlocked from the upright position and immediately swung upside down despite our best efforts to hold the wheel steady. The wheel was heavier than a diabetic elephant listening to Led Zeppelin.

Understand that the story that follows contains none of the details that the two gentlemen in the story have agreed never utter to another soul. No one will have ALL the details of what went on in the cab of that carnival ride. I will not break that vow here. We are bound by both honor…and shame.

Although I cannot share with you the interactions between Dave and myself, I can tell you that tears were shed, prayers were said, bargains were offered and refused. I can reveal that love, fear, anger and blissful joy all come from the same place, and if you find yourself in that place, you will find that visiting once is all you need. Lines were crossed and then backed over and crossed again. Madness exists on a paper thin plane that is accessible to even twelve-year-olds on an amusement park ride and that plane bisected the buggy Dave and I were trapped in. I saw the edge of Dave and Dave saw the edge of me in that tiny tireless car.

To this day I am convinced that the time spent on that ride rewired the neural pathways in my brain as to change my destiny. My adrenal response mechanism has been dulled permanently by my experience. Danger doesn’t make me run like it did before the Skydiver, it simply makes me welcome the possibility of death.

Dave and I started to bond with the inanimate buggy we were in. It was the only thing keeping us from plummeting 8 stories to our deaths and from the dented parts and creaking pieces, clearly our buggy was the abused one. The moving parts, visible from our window looked like they would come apart and send us speeding toward earth if someone so much as sneezed. The chicken wire covering the upper opening of the door was coming loose. It had been tacked on hastily and with poor craftsmanship, probably because they lost a “rube” out of the opening six towns over. That chicken wire wouldn’t even have slowed our descent if the strap clip holding us in were to come undone. As we hung upside down, the jerry-rigged lap strap and buckle clip looked like it was assembled in a factory before child labor laws. Part of the strap was leather, part was nylon and I could not determine how the two were connected. I could also not decide which of the materials I trusted less. The leather would be unrecognizable to an anthropologist and the nylon strapping was fraying with every sickening rotation of the Skydiver.

With every pass of the control panel we begged to be let out. Yet every pass, we continued on. At first, I thought that the man at the controls just couldn’t hear us. Then I thought he actually could hear us but was unclear as to what we were saying. But then, on a pass where Dave and I slowly yelled loud and clear to “STOP THE RIDE,” I looked into the eyes of the man in control of our lives and he looked into mine. He saw my weakness and his lips parted in a checkerboard grin as I realized this was no man, this was the Devil.

“Don’t bother yelling at the guy on the next pass Dave. I think he’s the Devil,” I said rather rationally, because the operator really was the fallen angel Lucifer back to claim the souls of two proud tweens.

“I thought so,” Dave said as he tried again in vain to turn the wheel and add some sanity to the terror box.

Carnies get a bad rap, because they should. All carnies are terrible people and if there are any carnies out there that are genuinely decent folk, don’t try prove it to me with an act of kindness. Simply find and murder the guy that did this to us. Light them on fire and bury the ashes in equal portions at the four corners of the globe and you will have earned my respect back.

Do you think I’m overreacting? Do you think that’s too much and I should just calm down? This happened 26 years ago and I should just tell this as a fun anecdote? No. No I’m not and no I will not. Here’s why.

He made us ride it again. That’s right. He delighted in the screams of horror of two boys not quite through the clutches of puberty. I don’t know if he was abused as a child, or if hearing the terrified screams of innocent victims gave him some level of arousal, but he clearly let everyone else off the ride and loaded car after car of new riders on board and made us endure the whole experience over again.

The sounds of the gears beginning to fail and the unwelcomed bumps of ill-fitting machinery didn’t get more comfortable over time. The fear didn’t lessen. The only thing that was different was my outlook on man’s inhumanity to man and how cruel and evil people could be. My innocence was taken from me by that man, for the cost of my Pay One Price admission ($8.50, not a bad value back then), I was shown the dark side I had read about, but never experienced. It was the cruelty of the early chapters of Jack London’s classic: The Call of the Wild and the calloused way Indiana Jones slapped Short Round in the Temple of Doom all in one instant, only this time it wasn’t a work of fiction. It was my life.

Finally, the time came when the bastard that ran the machine opened our cage door and let us out. We fooled him into doing it by being quiet long enough for him to bring our cart into the load position. By the time he realized it was us, it was too late, we had sprung out of the buggy like we both had kung-fu wire harnesses attached to us. Dave laid into the guy with minor swearing, as there were other children present, calling him a “butt head” and “poop for brains”. I just watched the guy for sudden moves with a dirty look on my face. Who knew if he still wanted to kill us? I wanted to punch the carny, but even I knew that if you touch the Devil, even when you punch him, you turn to stone or something.

The only thing good to come out of the Skydiver incident, was the tempering of the friendship between Dave and myself. We had many adventures together and still do sometimes, but that night in that buggy of death and destiny, Dave moved up from being my best friend, to my best man. He’s my best friend at least, other than Wendy…Hi honey. He’s my oldest and best GUY friend. I don’t think I’m his best friend though. I’m fine with it…really.

Oh, and here’s a little tip to the intelligence and counter terrorist agencies of our country. Forget waterboarding. Buy an old Skydiver ride. You won’t get any fuss from the Geneva Convention and you can interrogate detainees thirty at a time. You’ll get all the information you ever wanted and all you’ll have to do is put them on a carnival ride and that’s the Damm truth.