“Anyone waiting for a chance to hit the ski slopes might consider Vernon Valley’s new Alpine Slide as an alternative. It has all the excitement and thrills of a bobsled ride except that it takes place on a $500,000 asbestos chute. Fun for ages 6 to 60.”
Daily Record (Morris County, NJ), September 7, 1977
Flashes of my father’s life, before the mountain consumed and upended all of our lives—who he was, what he did—throb like a strobe light. I knew that he once worked on Wall Street and that, when I was around five, our family moved from a modest home in New Providence to a ten-acre lot next to the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in Harding Township, New Jersey. My mother helped design the sprawling house they built there—the result of my father’s successful mutual-fund brokerage business, Mayflower Securities. Years later, when Vanity Fair profiled him for allegedly swindling the US ambassador to France in a real estate deal that went south, they referred to him as a “rural schemer” and a “minor legend” on Wall Street.
He took offense to both labels. “Rural?” he said. “Minor?”
The house in Harding was large enough to accommodate his desire for a large family. It was also an outlet for my father’s appetite for movement and activity, broadcasting his distaste for sedentary loafing. He erected a gymnasium with an indoor basketball court. We had a pool and a tennis court, the latter of which was lit so he could play at night, striking balls with Bruce Lee–like groans—ki-yahh! Ay-yahh! There was enough land for impromptu baseball, football, and soccer games, and enough trees to get away with hiding Playboy magazines in hollow trunks. The dead-end road let us zip around on go-karts and dirt bikes without fear of being smeared by incoming traffic. A pond held two beautiful ducks that paddled across its surface until my father skipped a large rock across the water and accidentally killed one. It was years before he confessed.
He had met my mother, Gail, while she was out on a date with someone else. Relentless, he pursued her with the same single-minded determination that defined everything in his life. They were married while he was enlisted in the Marine Corps. When my mother was pregnant with their first child, he began selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door-to-door. He would barge into homes, launching into his sales patter and demonstrating how easy it was to assemble the cleaner. (It was not easy at all without practice, as customers soon found out.) Emboldened by his success, he started selling mutual funds on the belief that, if he could sell vacuums, he could sell anything. When he realized he was better at the stock market than his boss, he decided to go into business for himself. His staff ballooned, filling up multiple offices in New York and New Jersey.
The secret to his success, he said, was motivating his salesmen by stoking their egos. There were lavish parties with nine-hundred-pound ice sculptures and car giveaways, trips and flowing booze, competitions and trophies. Once he gave a six-foot award to a salesman less than five feet tall, the gathering erupting in laughter as the man tried to drag it back to his seat.
One of the stockbrokers, Joe Stone, came over for dinner one night. My father took the kids aside, a brood six strong that he often made march with military precision for guests. We had to salute him when we were done.
“You have to call him the Great . . . Joe Stone,” he said.
“What?” said my younger brother Jimmy.
“The Great . . . Joe Stone,” my father said.
“The Great Joe Stone,” I said, happy to help.
“No!” he snapped. “A pause! The Great . . . Joe Stone.”
We did as we were told. Joe Stone beamed the entire night.
My father was strict about schoolwork and chores. The Marine Corps instilled in him a love of militant structure. He wore a buzz cut for most of my early childhood, letting his hair grow out only when the culture of the ’70s demanded it. But, somehow, a mischievousness co-existed with all of this, one that always seemed at odds with his demand for domestic order. Once, on a family trip to Colorado, he visited a friend who raised organic, grass-fed lamb. We brought home metal suitcases full of frozen raw meat, our clothes shunted off to the side, the meat’s juices beginning to drip as it thawed on the drive back home. Our car smelled like a butcher shop for weeks. Another time, he came home late from work and scooped up my two sleeping older brothers, then just small boys, so he could take them to a carnival he had seen while driving. He barreled through things, rarely pausing to consider logistics. One February, he was playing a highly competitive game of tennis with a friend of his named Bob Brennan in New York City. With the score tied after two hours of play, the club closed. My father tried to persuade the staff to leave the lights on, but they refused. It was snowing, and no other indoor club was open.
“What we’ll do,” my father told Bob, “is we’ll go to Puerto Rico.”
The two of them drove to Kennedy Airport and flew to San Juan, where they continued playing on a hotel court until it was dark and they were again asked to move along. They found a second hotel with a court. Instead of checking in, they figured out how to turn on the lights by themselves. My father was able to secure the victory before they were chased off by the staff.
There never seemed to be a barrier between his impulses and his actions. The voice in our heads that says stop or wait or let’s think this over was silent for him.
Which explains the mountain.
The mountain was in Vernon, a lake and farming community in Sussex County, New Jersey, roughly an hour from our house. The town covered sixty-eight square miles, most of it connected by roads that wouldn’t allow vehicles to exceed forty miles per hour. No one seemed to mind. The atmosphere was relaxed and unhurried. There was one high school, one bank, and no fast-food restaurants. The residents had only recently started to outnumber the cows. Legend had it that when George Washington’s troops passed through hills thirty miles south during the Revolution, they began constructing a barricade at Washington’s behest to stave off the boredom that permeated the area. The sign read: FORT NONSENSE. It was a hint of things to come.
Vernon’s biggest industry had originally been mining. Then farming. Then an entrepreneur named Jack Kurlander visited and decided its undulating terrain would be perfect for skiing. He opened a resort called Great Gorge in 1965. The other resort, Vernon Valley, was erected a few years later by a small group of investors who believed there was untapped potential in a second slope within driving distance of New York City. Great Gorge appealed to serious skiers who wanted to get their practice in before heading out west. The new investors promised more novice and intermediate trails to accommodate beginners.
Vernon Valley was happy to pander to the casual crowd. They hired cute girls from the high school in nearby Sparta and had them load skiers on the chair lifts while sporting impossibly tight ski pants. Skiers went down the mountain in jeans and leather jackets. It was a quintessentially Jersey slope.
Fearing an exodus, Great Gorge countered by opening a petting zoo. It was a mistake. A worker fended off an attacking ostrich by stuffing a paintbrush in its mouth. It died of lead poisoning. At one point, someone brought in a kangaroo that would box the maintenance workers. The kangaroo went undefeated, a marsupial George Foreman.
Through a mutual friend, the Vernon Valley people approached my father for a loan. He had long held a variety of interests in other businesses, some wildly successful, some not. An attempt to raise giant shrimp in Florida resulted in mass casualties, with the survivors barely reaching two inches in length. He agreed to lend the resort $25,000 for improvements.
While my father looked forward to a return on his investment, he was almost as enthusiastic about getting free admission to the resort. Soon, we were all careening down the mountain, the entire family ebullient that this bastardized version of Vermont was so close to us. He sent us off to grade school with our pockets stuffed full of ski-lift tickets, lubricating our social lives. I’m certain that I avoided a handful of prepubescent beatings because I could produce a pass to a winter paradise.
We kept visiting, even after the resort’s operators began missing loan payments.
In the arms race to compete with Great Gorge, the Vernon Valley people overextended themselves. They had spent too much and endured too many warm winters. The banks commenced foreclosure, and my father, smelling blood, bought the resort for pennies on the dollar in 1972. (Though not all of it: A large chunk of land running through the top of the mountain was leased from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, a fact that would later come back to haunt him.) He had never, to anyone’s knowledge, exhibited any interest in owning a ski resort. Then again, he had never expressed a passion for giant shrimp, either.
“Guess what?” he told my mother. “We own Vernon Valley.” He might as well have said that we now owned a salvage-diving operation or a circus.
“Why?” she asked.
“I decided it might be fun,” he said. That was all the explanation she was going to get.
Wall Street had taught him to be bold and brash, to act quickly while others fretted and deliberated. He soon became a snow-caked P. T. Barnum, distancing himself from Great Gorge with an assortment of attractions. He offered night skiing, with trails illuminated by floodlights, and kept the slopes open twenty-four hours for all-night ski parties. He hired Suzy Chaffee, an Olympic alpine ski racer later known for her ChapStick commercials and made-for-TV movies like Ski Lift to Death, to perform demonstrations. During a fuel crisis and the resulting gas shortages, he partnered with the local pump station and bought tanks of fuel so no one would be stranded if the stations decided to close on the weekends. He marketed the fact that the snowmaking operation was the largest in the country, its air and water guns working overtime in the middle of the night, and set up a telephone hotline so people could call for the latest weather conditions.
“We’re taking the risk out of skiing,” he told the press. “Not the risk of personal injury, of course. The risk of the weather not cooperating.”
He mastered the weather. People came.
He kept the booze flowing in the Hexagon Lounge, a six-sided bar that allowed the unpolished locals to mingle with families from the Upper West Side. So many people came up and down the entrance stairs in heavy ski boots that the foot traffic rounded off the edges of the steps. If there was ice on the surface, Jimmy and I could surf over them in our shoes, toes pointed down.
Amid the increasing flow of customers, it was easy to get in the lift line without a ticket. During one busy Saturday, someone cut in line wearing an old pair of wooden skis. An employee asked where his lift pass was. When he didn’t produce it, the employee ran to a utility room and burst out wielding an ax, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
“Thief!” he yelled, hacking the skis off at the tips.
Guests screamed and fled the scene as best they could, their feet bolted to giant sticks. My father had put two of the maintenance workers up to it, both for his own amusement and as a cautionary tale for line cutters. The story spread. People paid.
The resort did well enough that my father eventually acquired Great Gorge from Kurlander, cementing his conquest of the region’s ski business. He had moved on from Mayflower, eager to get out from under the thumb of regulatory hassles. By the mid-1970s, more people were learning to ski at Vernon Valley than anywhere else in the country.
Despite the success of the resort, my father could never come to terms with the idea that he owned something he could monetize only a few months out of the year. Even at its zenith—with the ski parties and the corporate retreat specials—the best he could hope for was one hundred days of business, and even that was only by openly defying the laws of nature with snowmaking. A terrible winter could still ruin him, as it had countless other resorts. It gnawed at him.
And then he had an idea.
“Look at this,” he had said, waving a copy of Time in our faces during dinner, the pages slick with salad dressing. We all ate whenever he came home from work. Sometimes that was six o’clock. Sometimes it was nine.
He read from the article: “‘Americans will spend $960 million going to theme parks this year, more than they spend to attend all the major sporting events combined.’ Nine hundred and sixty million!”
“So that’s what we’re doing?” my older sister, Julie, said, a touch of wariness in her voice. “A theme park?”
He had raised us as skiers and campers, not roller-coaster devotees. Though we had made the requisite American pilgrimage to the Disney parks, the Ferris wheels of the Jersey Shore held little appeal. Theme parks outside of Walt’s dominion had not yet become grand spectacles. Some were ambitious. Others looked ramshackle, their creaky contraptions seemingly on the verge of causing cotton-candy-tinged tragedy.
“Not just a theme park, Rosebud,” he said, using his nickname for her. “A theme park where you control the action.”
“Like driving?” Topher said. Christopher, or Topher, was the youngest of the six kids. He was a cheerful optimist. The park would soon test that.
“Right.” He cited Time again. “‘People are tired of passive experiences. They want to be active participants in rides.’ How many times have I said that?”
He had said it many times. My father was a participant in life, a reveler who hosted family gatherings and employee bashes. He assumed everyone felt the same.
Time went on. The bicentennial was upon us. Vietnam was over. We weren’t in the throes of any political scandal. Americans, it said, had been bracing for disaster for too long. Now, they wanted to take the wheel.
In its infinite periodical wisdom, Time had encapsulated my father’s ambitions perfectly. Tired of relying on winter, he would bring the resort into the warmer months.
What Time didn’t—and couldn’t—anticipate was his methodology. He wouldn’t build his salute to autonomy in Anaheim, California, where Disneyland had sprung up two decades prior, nor over a flat parcel of land in Florida chosen for its convenient location and malleable landscape. He intended to build a theme park on the side of a mountain in the middle of New Jersey.
As a kid, he had made his way through Palisades Amusement Park, a cliffside destination in Bergen County across the Hudson River. Palisades loomed large for people, especially children, in the 1950s and ’60s, advertising in comic books and even leaving a small gap in the fence open for kids who couldn’t afford the admission. Its signature attraction was the Cyclone, a dizzying wooden roller coaster that originated in Coney Island and was popular enough to duplicate in several other territories. Cynical and distasteful journalists described it as “a cure for unwanted pregnancies.” Nurses were on hand to administer smelling salts to disoriented passengers.
I’m sure he saw the faces of the people who dared get on the Cyclone—expressions that mixed fear with excitement. It felt like a risk, a wager of thrills against your lunch or your consciousness. Seen at a formative age, those faces stay with you. I would know.
The Cyclone had one mark against it. Like virtually all amusement rides, the experience was predestined. My father’s rides, whatever they might be, had to put the rider in complete control.
He began a scouting mission. He visited the beachside parks at the Jersey Shore, like Seaside Heights. He went to Coney Island, which had fallen into disrepair and looked almost dystopian. In these places, he saw the familiar. Another collection of spinning, mechanical rides was not in his plans. (Not to imply he had plans. That would take long-term financing and patience, neither of which he possessed.)
He took fleeting, disinterested glances at Great Adventure, a park that had recently opened just two hours south of New York City in the Pine Barrens of Jackson, New Jersey. It had a safari, a mining ride, hot air balloons, and a log flume, which sent guests down a water-filled chute in a passenger sled. No one would mistake it for Disneyland, but it did a brisk business.
Where Great Adventure went awry, my father thought, was investing tens of millions of dollars in rides that didn’t provide half the excitement of attractions he could erect for a fraction of the price. He was convinced that increasing the thrill factor was the only way someone on a shoestring budget could compete with the giants of the amusement industry.
He decided to expand the search. A ski-trade publication made mention of a daring new contraption that sounded intriguing. Curious, he traveled all the way to West Germany, where superior foreign engineering had triumphed in creating new ways to accelerate the human body. There, he found a majestic fiberglass slide that undulated and curved down an incline. Riders mounted a small, sled-like plastic cart mounted on two wheels and plastic runners with brakes they could control with a joystick positioned flush against their crotch. Once seated, they plummeted down a half-mile-long chute made of durable, all-purpose asbestos. It took skill to know when to slow down around curves and when to plow forward. It was a “dry” ride that could monetize the property in the summer months, similar to a bobsled run without the snow. The manufacturer, DEMAG, called this monument to mesothelioma the Alpine Slide.
DEMAG referred my father to their North American dealer, a resort owner named Stig Albertsson. Albertsson operated the Bromley resort in Vermont and swore to my father that the Alpine, which he was in the process of installing at his own property, would transform both of their businesses. No longer would he be a slave to the seasons. No longer would the property sit, unused and unexploited, for most of the year. This would be the spark that lit the fuse. If the Alpine worked, my father told us, an amusement park would erupt all around it. There were only sketches in his head—motor rides, perhaps one of the water slides gaining in popularity around the country, maybe live shows. The specifics were vague, but the response he wanted to elicit was not. He wanted thrills and adventure. He wanted more of the faces he had seen at Palisades Park.
He was in the ideal place. Vernon was a sleepy town and presented few regulatory obstacles to building self-propelled attractions. It was as if someone had handed my father a blank canvas. He decided to call it the Vernon Valley Fun Farm, a mixed bit of alliteration that sounded to me like a place where people would come to pet goats.
How do you react when your father proclaims he wants to open a theme park? I imagined myself growing fat on free concession food and tumbling from one ride to the next, cutting in line and laughing all the way down. I would be Augustus Gloop, risking a combination overdose of sugar and fun. Jimmy and Topher were equally enraptured. Pete and Splinter, my two oldest brothers, spoke of a possible empire.
Julie remained cynical. “We’re going to become carnies,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. There couldn’t possibly be any downside.
“Dad,” I said to him one day. “Are Jimmy and I going to work at the park?”
My father was silent. He did this often, staring off into the middle distance, sifting through any of the dozen thoughts going through his head at any given time. Questions went ignored until they came up in his neurological queue.
“Of course,” he said, looking slightly amused, as though the idea that we wouldn’t was strange. “You all will.”
I was thirteen, Jimmy twelve. “Won’t we need working papers?” I said.
My father just laughed. Later, I’d understand why. I brought up a rule as though it were an obstacle, something to be concerned with and not merely a nuisance to cast aside. This was amusing to him, the idea of being restrained, of acknowledging an authority other than his own. He was building an amusement park on the side of a mountain. What rules was he supposed to be following?
That spring, I counted the days until school was over. Seventh grade had become a cursory responsibility, something that was getting in the way of helping out on the mountain, where construction crews had already broken ground. The ski-lift passes were old news. Soon, I would be doling out golden tickets to world-class rides. When I mentioned this to friends, I expected envy. Instead, I received puzzled looks.
“Here?” they would ask. “On the mountain?” Explaining what my father was up to and meeting confusion, if not outrage, would become a recurring element in my life.
At the kitchen table, as my mother helped me with my homework, I peppered her with questions. Would she work there? (No. She had six children to raise.) Does my father know how to build a theme park? (No, but that had never stopped him before.) Would there be goats? (Ask your father.)
When I was finally free for the summer, Jimmy and I hovered near him for instructions. “Wear old clothes,” he said. Then he paused. “Have you had your tetanus shots?”
The next day, we were covered, head to toe, in filth, shovels loosely gripped in our blistering adolescent hands. We threw clumps of dirt and mountain rock for hours, making a trench for the Alpine Slide. When our backs began to stiffen, we switched to raking and laying down rolls of sod layered with bright green grass and ink-black dirt, coughing and wheezing like authentic Vernon coal miners. Grown men with heaving muscles and missing teeth dug beside us, grunting their disapproval at our comparative inefficiency.
I looked up and saw Charlie O’Brien, the construction foreman and a former marine gunnery sergeant, coming toward us. Charlie had worked as head snowmaker at Great Gorge for years. My father had inherited him with the resort, along with the lift chairs and the Hexagon Lounge. He was an ornery man who wore his Irish heritage like a costume: red hair dotting his thick wrists and fingers, belly overlapping his belt. His glass eye sometimes caught the sun’s reflection.
Charlie never talked about what happened to his eye. Rumor had it he lost it in some kind of explosion on the mountain. He refused to sue, endearing him to both Jack Kurlander and my dad. Charlie was one of three people in my father’s employ who did not have two working eyeballs. Now that I was also working for him, this gave me pause.
Charlie examined our carefully arranged sod. “Get some water on that before it burns up and Gene has my ass,” he said. My father considered dry, brown grass an unpardonable sin. It would have to be nurtured around the clock so it wouldn’t wilt and perish in the summer heat.
I unfurled a garden hose and let the water wash over the sod, waiting for Charlie to turn his back so I could take a sip. “That’s some good work, college boy,” he said. Charlie called me “college boy” because he once saw me reading a book.
Charlie turned his attention to the men nearby, and the clouds of dirt erupted faster and faster. If Charlie caught you slacking, he would fire you, but experienced workers knew it rarely mattered. He kept a bottle of Dewar’s Scotch in his desk drawer and was often inebriated enough to forget what he had said by the following morning. The rumor was that he had totaled his car more than once. But Charlie was also a former soldier, stout and formidable, and commanded respect. He would work sixteen-hour shifts for days on end. A few pulls on a bottle to keep warm during the frigid snowmaking sessions was, my father thought, a small indiscretion to forgive.
I don’t know how the workers stood up to the grueling effort. One morning, I woke up sick to my stomach and walked downstairs, where my father was alone, drinking coffee. I told him I didn’t feel well and that Mom usually made me toast. He nodded and grabbed two pieces of bread. He turned on the electric stovetop and held the slices on the red-hot coils.
“Faster than a toaster,” he said.
The slices blackened. He doused them in sugar. I ate them. It made me feel better. I went to work.
At six o’clock each morning, we piled into a station wagon with Pete and Splinter, the car pausing every twenty feet or so to pick up more of the neighborhood kids my father had recruited for duty. Pete corralled them into the car, impatient. No one wore a seat belt.
Over time, Pete’s nickname became the Needle, because he enjoyed doing what older brothers are supposed to do: torment the smaller and weaker siblings. Jimmy and I bore the brunt of his wrath. Even as we grew bigger, he found new ways to maintain his dominance. Once, sleeping in my bed, I awoke to a massive stranger picking me up by my shirt and pinning me against the wall. I screamed out in terror.
“Ja!” he roared. “Ve are goink to kill you!”
In the darkness, I could hear Pete cackling. He turned on the lights and watched as I tried to regain my bearings. Nearby, one of his friends from college—a massive Norwegian from the Dartmouth ski jumping team whose head almost scraped the ceiling—laughed deeply from his belly.
“Pete, you dumb asshole,” I said as he headed for Jimmy’s room, muscle in tow.
Splinter, whose real name was Eugene Mulvihill III, considered such juvenile activity beneath him. Because some people knew our father as Chip, as in “chip off the old block,” people took to calling my brother Splinter, an increasingly complicated wood-based nomenclature. Splinter was slightly aloof and spoke in measured tones, as though he needed to pause and consider someone’s intelligence before responding. I noticed he spoke to Jimmy very slowly.
In their late teens, Pete and Splinter did not lay sod. They would drop us off, then drive on. Splinter worked with the adult laborers assembling the Alpine lanes. Pete headed for a separate section of the property, across Route 94, the main two-lane road threading through town.
“What are you doing over there, Pete?” I would ask.
“It’s top secret,” he said. “You can’t be trusted. You’d blow the whole operation. You and the little feral child there.”
He nodded at John Thornton, a neighborhood kid about my age who sometimes refused to wear shoes and spent the day working in his bare feet. “I’m protesting,” is all John would say by way of explanation. A contrarian, he argued with Charlie over the best way to rake rocks.
Jimmy rode in uncharacteristic silence, knowing that, if he didn’t piss Pete off, he could suck the backwash out of his used beer cans on the way home. “You want some?” Pete would sneer, tossing the near-empties at Jimmy’s head. “Here, you little punk.”
Meanwhile, I picked at my blisters but got no sympathy from Splinter. At my age, he toiled in the bowels of the resort, trying to organize the rented ski boots back into matching pairs while rats leapt out of the piles and scurried up his arms. Nearby, an old resort hand smeared cleaning solvent on the skis while a cigarette dangled from his lips, threatening to send the whole place up in flames. Because I was under no direct threat of immolation, my brother dismissed my complaints.
Arriving each day, we saw things taking shape, my father patrolling the grounds on his dirt bike, his mere presence enough to incite frenzied activity. Despite his motivational speeches, the work stretched well past the planned opening on the Fourth of July and into August, which drove my father from rah-rah addresses to regular paroxysms of screaming. Charlie protested that there was no precedent for what Gene wanted, comparing it to paving a roadway down a mountain. If you saw them arguing for the first time, you would expect it to end in violence. This was simply how they communicated, two boisterous marines lobbing orders and complaints at each other. It would stop just as suddenly as it started, their voices returning to normal volume.
“I need more fucking men here!” Charlie would say. Then, “How’s Gail?”
“She’s great,” my father would say. “How’s Rose?”
“Fantastic.”
My father had inherited an entire crew of snowmakers from the previous owners of Great Gorge. Charlie O’Brien was their leader, and his fleet consisted of men with names like Big Al, Indian, Bunk, and Wacky Joe, the lift mechanic. Wacky Joe once climbed from one chair lift to another on the cable that dangled dozens of feet in the air, scrambling down the line like a capuchin monkey. Big Al was a member of the Laziers, a family made up of roughly twenty people that lived near the resort in a cluster of blue-collar houses known as Lazierville. Big Al, their patriarch, could pull wooden fence posts from the ground with his bare hands. Some of the workers called him Sasquatch, a man so legendary he had earned two nicknames.
The men often piled into old army trucks the resort kept on hand, faces dirty and tools stacked up in the back, dispatched from one operational emergency to the next. In the years to come, they would be the hands that helped shape the park, like the workers who dynamite-blasted Mount Rushmore. No task was beyond their reach, from welding to painting to plumbing.
At times, they frightened me, these men with missing teeth who lived in ramshackle buildings dotting the margins of the resort. It took a special breed of human to be able to scale a mountain in the middle of the night, clothes soaked through with water in sub-zero temperatures, to shoot a blend of water and freezing air to overrule Mother Nature. My father grew to see them as a unit he could deploy no matter the season. Earning their loyalty was not easy, but my father trained them to fall into step. They wanted to please him, to get his approval, just as the men at Mayflower had. He treated these laborers no differently than he would affluent business partners or neighbors. He threw elaborate parties for them. He handed out Thanksgiving turkeys to their families. Once, he gave Charlie a car (which Charlie promptly wrecked, but that was beside the point). My father seemed to sense when his workers needed reinforcement and when they needed material goods. Managing and inspiring people was his specialty.
“I’m tired of digging,” I told him on several occasions.
“You’re part of the expansion,” he said, instantly elevating my mood and status. It was as good as a turkey.
As he argued with Charlie one afternoon, I gazed up at the mountain, this massive natural formation onto which he was projecting his imagination. It was ill-defined then, but we chipped and carved and dug, and soon an image began to form, one of a steep, twisting track that somehow managed to look both wildly out of place and completely appropriate. The sheer scope of the work was so impressive, the way he directed his workforce to create something out of nothing. Soon, he would be famous, and I would have to feign humility when people asked if my father was the Gene Mulvihill.
I looked back at my father. He was peeing into a ditch.
We kept digging.
In the days leading into the opening of the ride, just before Labor Day weekend of 1976, my father must have had some inkling of what poor Walt had endured more than twenty years earlier. Sensing his concerns, we kept our distance from him. He was never visibly nervous, but word traveled through the household that the Alpine Slide was a risky undertaking. It cost half a million dollars, money that was cobbled together from investors and resort capital. He had leveraged and balanced his assets as precariously as Vernon Valley’s previous owners had, a path that led them to financial ruin. The park’s protracted construction had consumed most of the summer. There was little time left to reap profits, if any were forthcoming. We would not be homeless if it failed, but the financial loss would be a blow. More important, it would dash my seemingly attainable dreams of a permanent adolescence.
The morning of the opening, we all watched as a stream of cars pulled off Route 94 and branched off to the resort entrance. Julie madly pressed a clicker for a head count.
“How many?” I asked her.
“Hundreds,” she said.
Heading for a ski resort in warm weather was a foreign concept for people, so my father took out newspaper ads that trumpeted live music, beer, and events like tobacco-spitting competitions to stir up the town’s rural demographic. In those early days, he hosted bluegrass festivals with hippies and hillbillies, a mountainside bash fueled by beer, weed, and skinny-dipping in the snowmaking ponds. People who owned homes nearby woke up to partygoers sleeping in their yards and, if their doors were unlocked, passed out on their couches.
The real attraction, though, would be the slide, which my father hyped up as not just a ride but a revolution in outdoor recreation. People had never seen anything like it. It was an amusement attraction you could control. His agreement with Stig Albertsson required that the Vernon Valley Fun Farm have the only one within a two-hundred-mile radius. Road-tripping teenagers and families from the tristate area looking for one last summer thrill veered toward us, intrigued by the promise of a new kind of adrenaline rush.
“I have investigated this sport thoroughly,” he told reporters, sounding like an Olympic committee member. They leaned forward, curious. No one had to “investigate” the Dumbo ride at Disneyland. They had come expecting a cheap carnival ride like the kind temporarily erected by transients at county fairs. The permanent tracks winding up the foot of the mountain promised something else. Later, he would tell us he thought he saw some spies from Great Adventure there, looking to see what the crazy mountain man was up to.
The guests stood in line for two hours to fork over two dollars and fifty cents (a dollar fifty for kids) and jump on the ski lift to be transported twenty-seven hundred feet up the mountain to the launch station. At the top, attendants, including Splinter, nudged them into motion. Seated on the carts, the riders rolled along the surface and banked into the curves, gaining confidence—and speed—with each subsequent trip down, their rear ends cradled by the carts’ molded plastic. Pushing the joystick forward raised the brakes and lowered the wheels, making them go faster. Pulling it back activated the brakes and retracted the wheels, slowing them down.
My father had settled on two lanes for visitors. One was designated the slow lane for overly cautious beginners with an iron grip on the brake (“scaredy cats,” he sniffed). The second was for the adventurous. A parent might be riding down with a ten-month-old on their lap on one track. Next to them, a teenager would be speeding like he was on the Autobahn and laughing maniacally. There was no seat belt, helmet, or pads.
“They don’t want helmets,” my father said, parrying questions from inquisitive reporters who noticed a lack of safety features. “They want the wind in their hair!”
As far as he was concerned, once they paid, people could do whatever they wanted. This was a basic tenet of his philosophy on life, which mandated minimal intervention from any kind of non-familial authority. “Let them have fun,” he said. “Let them do what they want to do.”
The transformative effect of the freedom was startling. People who stood listlessly in the hot sun waiting their turn grew excited as soon as they sat on the seat. They snatched up discount ticket books for repeat trips and wore digital watches so they could time their runs and brag to friends about their personal records. They stood at the foot of the ride watching others make the descent in a blur of denim and plastic, shouting instructions like cornermen in boxing.
As more riders piled on, the price of freedom began to reveal itself. The control granted by the Alpine was accompanied by a measure of risk, much of it self-imposed. Attendants would tell guests to go slow and mind the brake until they got used to it. The guests would nod, completely oblivious to the safety instructions, then proceed to make every mistake they were warned to avoid. If you stuck your arm or leg out to balance yourself, it was like holding your body against a sander. The surface of the track scraped off your flesh, leaving an oozing, blistering wound. For superficial injuries, we sprayed a pink iodine liquid that bubbled up like acid and made the tender skin flare with pain. The teenage boys took it stoically. Younger kids hissed through their teeth. On busy days, the area around the slide could look like a leper colony. We eventually put up photos of these ghastly wounds at the top of the ride, a visual reminder of the potential for carnage.
There were dangers beyond the track peeling people like potatoes. If you went down too slowly, someone behind you would smash into your cart, creating a brain-jarring collision of bone, plastic, and fiberglass. Dads, not realizing the consequences of their greater mass, playfully rammed into their kids, sending them tumbling into the air like rag dolls. We tried to space riders at least fifty yards apart, but attendants at the top had blind spots where the track dipped out of sight. Mischievous guests would wait until they were farther down and then stop, hoping their buddy would blindly ram into them. Others took note of slow patrons in the fast lane and punished their hesitation by spearing them from behind. The sound was like two enormous NFL players colliding with a crunch of equipment, the displaced bodies giggling or moaning depending on the force of impact.
If you were thrown clear, you’d skid on the grass with so much momentum that pollen would be injected into your skin. It never happened at the park, but a few people ejected from the Alpine at other places went into anaphylactic shock. Someone wrote a paper for a medical journal about it.
If you wiped out, the cart—which weighed twenty pounds—could come crashing back down on you like an anvil in a cartoon. Because of the slide’s proximity to the woods, people flying off the track could smash into a tree or find themselves falling into a pile of rocks. We quickly put in hay bales to cushion the falls, only to realize they created even more of a hazard. People flicked their used cigarette butts everywhere. We had two fires before we realized we had created a tinderbox.
The potential for a raging blaze aside, Time was right. People did want to be in control. Only a few stopped to consider what was actually happening—that unprotected bodies were traveling at thirty miles per hour and occasionally getting shot into the sky like they had been ejected from a fighter-plane cockpit. Those who did backed away, holding their children behind them in a protective posture. A few reporters showed up to file a participatory story, took one look, and refused to get on the slide. My father tried to assuage concerns over its potential for destruction. “My seventy-one-year-old mother loves it,” he told reporters. While this was technically true, he didn’t tell them my grandmother went down when the slide was closed, a few inches at a time.
He was giddy over the success of the Alpine, keeping it open through November. The only thing that would interfere with business was precipitation. If the track was wet, the carts would hydroplane when the brakes were applied, and the guests would skid across the water. A gathering storm meant we had to shut it down. My father could manipulate snow, but he could not control the rain. At the sight of crowds dispersing, he shook his fist at the skies.
I was good on the Alpine, but Jimmy was king. He learned all the finer points—where to brake, when to take off, how to balance your weight so you didn’t lean too far to the side. My father ushered Jimmy up to a newspaper reporter covering the ride, boasting of his son’s fifty-five-second record. (It normally took an average of three minutes to go down.) Charlie O’Brien’s son, Kelly, was in second place. My father tried to get them to race to settle it.
“I can’t believe Jimmy has the record,” he told Kelly. “You can beat that kid.”
Then he’d heckle Jimmy. “That Kelly kid has got some moves,” he said. “He’s coming after your record.” Instigating conflict gave him tremendous pleasure. He chuckled as the two sat in the chair lift, staring daggers into each other.
Kelly shot down the slide, his long, wavy brown hair flying behind him, but Jimmy was too slick. He remained champion.
Soon, I noticed Jimmy was taking fewer trips on the ride. Like a great athlete with a peerless record, I thought he wanted to leave on top. When I asked him, he looked at me with big, mournful eyes. “You didn’t hear?” he said.
An employee chasing Jimmy’s record streaked down the slide at such velocity that, when he was thrown clear, the momentum had caused the track to gouge the back of his legs and butt so badly that he needed two hundred stitches. Riding the asbestos lightning had scraped his ass almost completely off his body.
“Was he naked or something?” I asked.
“It was one of those pickle-smuggling bathing suits the Europeans wear,” Jimmy said, and we both frowned. If you went hard on the Alpine, you needed jeans at minimum. Motorcycle leathers were better. Light clothing would essentially disintegrate from the friction and had to be peeled off weeping flesh like a used bandage.
The boy’s detached rear end became legend, and the Alpine ended the season with something of a reputation. Nevertheless, it was a resounding success. My father spent that fall repeatedly handing Wacky Joe bags stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash. The money room at the ski resort was unstaffed in the summer, and he had nowhere to stash his profits. “In the trunk, Wacky Joe!” he whispered. Worried about being robbed, my father would lock the weekend’s profits in his car until there was no more room for them. He sold adrenaline, and people were buying.
Tired of blowing my nose and seeing black snot come out, I pleaded for a promotion from the ditch digging. I was climbing out of bed with the posture of a horseshoe, my back screaming for relief. I worried that I was on my way to becoming a snowmaker, perpetually inebriated and missing an eye, yelling at children for reading books.
“All right,” my father said. “You can unload the carts.”
When the chair lift stopped at the top of the mountain, the carts dangling from the back of the lift had to be pulled off and handed to the riders. It was less responsibility than I wanted but more than I had. I left a disgruntled Jimmy to toil in the shadow of Charlie O’Brien’s large belly.
Within the first half hour of unloading and retrieving carts, my back hurt worse than ever. Instead of digging rocks, I was moving plastic boulders. Riders discarded the equipment all over the slope, leaving them at the scene of a crash. Jimmy made periodic visits to heckle me. So did John Thornton. The first time John got on the Alpine, he tried to slow down using his bare feet, Fred Flintstone-style. He wept.
At lunch, Jimmy and I would jump in the carts and race down to the bottom of the hill, where any pain in my muscles disappeared. I cannot believe this is my job, I thought. The chill in the fall air made goosebumps rise on my arms and caused my eyes to tear. The sleeves of my T-shirt would billow as I picked up speed, a wide grin forming on my face. Hay bales and trees passed in a blur. Jimmy showed me how to tug on the strap that was mounted on the front of the carts and used to hang them on the lift, which put more weight on the wheels. It allowed us to go even faster, satisfying an inexplicable need to push our limits. The increased speed and the accompanying risk of injury was intoxicating. We went again and again, sometimes racing down the dual lanes, racing until dark, racing until our father waved us in because it was time to go home.
From across Route 94, I began to hear the din of motors, a hint of Pete’s mystery project. He was testing dune buggies, then putting them back into storage for next summer. Even Julie began to come around, talking about an outdoor roller-skating rink that she would supervise. My father was reinvesting the profits from the Alpine. The park, which would soon grow dormant to make room for the skiers, would explode once the ground thawed. Though he loved to ski, my father couldn’t reinvent slopes. The park was a place where he could shape everything to his exacting specifications.
One day, late into the season, I looked up and saw someone urinating from the chair lift, the stream arcing over the grass and across the surface of the slide. A woman going down on a cart screamed, swerving to avoid the pee. She tumbled off the track and swore at the man above her, who was laughing hysterically.
“You think that happens in Vermont?” Jimmy said.
“No,” I said.
Watching the man empty his bladder from seventy-five feet in the air, I started to feel a little disconcerted. The Vernon Valley Fun Farm was promising autonomy for all. I wondered if my father had considered that even though people craved control, not everyone could necessarily handle the responsibility.
Fort Nonsense, I thought, and watched as the stream slowed to a trickle.