“The cliff divers who jump near the Roaring Springs are simply customers jumping from rocks—not a diving board—into deep water. A bad landing and, well, it hurts.”
Asbury Park Press, September 15, 1984
A father and his son were passing by a bubbling grotto. The man was perhaps in his forties, his son no more than ten. In the heat of the summer, the water rippled and danced, reflecting the light of the sun. It was early, and no one else was around.
The man knelt beside the water, cupping his hand and letting the liquid pool into his palm. He brought it up to his lips and sipped it, smiling at his boy. “Mmmm,” he said. “That’s terrific. That’s nature, son.” He dipped his hand in again, this time offering some of the water to his child, who lapped it up. Satisfied, the two went on their way.
The water was not natural. It was full of chlorine. It was also not particularly healthy. Topher, who told me this story, had seen a turd floating in it some days prior. But the aesthetic of it—the waterfall, the clear pool, the atmosphere—made it easy to mistake for the real thing. The grotto was part of what my father called Roaring Springs, a massive installation on the side of the mountain meant to mimic the swimming holes of years gone by. Twin lanes carried guests in inner tubes along powerful water currents resembling the strong flow of a wild river. Their thrills, while considerable, paled in comparison to those on offer at the Colorado River Ride, which sent guests in rafts down a rushing water chute and through underground tunnels that carried them into darkness then back out into the sun. There were ledges to jump from and giant water slides leading into pools. Stone steps led people around the area. Water fell from above and ran across the landscape, immersing visitors in the oasis.
Roaring Springs was my father’s magnum opus. Instead of trying to beat nature at its own game, as he had with the Wave Pool, this would be an homage to its beauty and grandeur. It was his exclamation mark, a sprawling testimony to his imagination—like the Loop, he had doodled much of it on a napkin—and drive to offer something unique and different. Six Flags could have their roller coasters. We had a chunk of Americana. It was like an interactive Norman Rockwell painting.
Roaring Springs opened in the summer of 1984, just as the unresolved criminal charges delivered that spring were still looming large over my father’s head. The timing was not coincidental. He refused to shy away from his mission to see the park expand. He was introducing the biggest, most expensive, most elaborate addition to the property in its history. It was as if he wanted to tell his adversaries that not a single bead of sweat was forming on his brow. It was also a great distraction, a project so enormous that he couldn’t afford a moment to think about the possible consequences of his insurance missteps.
At the same time, the margin for error in our operation had narrowed to a tightrope’s width. Frenzied patrons acting foolishly would only give my father’s critics further ammunition against him. I was determined to navigate the introduction of this attraction, and its new set of perils, with an eagle eye, flushing out potential hazards and making sure people understood their responsibility to take care of themselves. The eight acres of Roaring Springs could be a statement announcing that people had finally begun to interpret the park as my father intended, as a place where one could assume risk, but only if they chose to embrace it.
I wanted to go the entire summer without a catastrophe. I believed it was possible. Yes, I did.
Roaring Springs was born out of my father’s days as a Boy Scout. When he was younger, his troop took frequent day trips to a spot just south of the Delaware Water Gap. An expanse of land sitting on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, it was known as Van Campens Glen, or, simply, the Glen. The Glen contained natural waterfalls with rock formations and all kinds of beautifully uneven terrain. Years later, he began taking us there. We would run and play and submerge ourselves in the refreshing, chilly water. It didn’t seem as though we were in New Jersey but a place and a time far removed from the trappings of modern life.
Although locals knew of it, the Glen still felt like a family secret. It was located off a bumpy back road and marked by an abandoned farmhouse. From there, a series of narrow paths ran through the woods and led to a river that had cut through the rock, leaving a gorge. We followed the river a few hundred yards downstream to the main event: a waterfall that cascaded down into a small pool about the size of a hot tub. From there, the water went down a rock slab, creating a natural slide that fed into a pond. Overhead, cliffs jutted out from the rock. Older kids would leap from them, though it was treacherous due to the pool being such a small target. Our mother never allowed such attempts. This was a place to commune with nature. We were not to risk paralysis.
When we got older, and the trips grew less frequent, my father kept his memory of his many visits there. He wanted his own version, one where there would always be a new family set to arrive. He would augment it with slides and other attractions, a perfect amalgamation of nature and modern design.
The idea was clear in his head, but a doodle on a paper napkin would not be enough. He needed an artist’s hand to execute it. That job fell to Roy Scovill, an engineer and mason who came recommended to him by mutual associates. When Roy came out to have a look, he saw that workers had already begun digging. Roy was confused. My father had told him there was not yet any finished design.
“What are you doing?” Roy asked.
“Figuring it out as we go,” my father said, too impatient to wait until he finalized his plans.
Roy measured the topography of the area and began drawing to Gene’s specifications. “A waterfall here, a slide here,” he’d say, peering over Roy’s shoulder. Roy drafted an enormous blueprint that married Gene’s desires with the logistics of carving a set of pools into the side of a mountain. The slides, waterfalls, and cliffs would all have to look organic despite being crafted and shaped by concrete.
Roy could do all of this because he was a master of gunite, a cement-based material that could be sculpted to form slides and pitted bowls for inner tubes to tumble into. It came out of a spray nozzle at incredible velocity, so Roy worked on the mountain’s face like an airbrush artist. He toiled in the expansive landscape of Gene’s Glen day in and day out. We would often see him walking through the park covered in gunite, clean only around his mouth where his ventilator had been strapped.
I did not visit the site often, as I was preoccupied with my duties on rides that were already operational. We had just opened the Speed Slide, which plunged guests down a one-hundred-foot, near-vertical drop at speeds of up to forty-five miles per hour. Rich Szuch agreed to test it for the one-hundred-dollar bounty and reported free-falling for the first twenty feet before his body made contact with the surface. In response, I installed a guard over the slide that prevented riders from bouncing off. This had its own problems. Instead of stripping them of their clothing, the water pressure rocketed into their ass with such force it effectively gave them an enema. Patrons would exit the slide and run to the nearest bathroom.
When I was finally able to break away to see Roaring Springs taking shape, it was a wonder. A platform called the Cliff Dive allowed for a freestyle fall into water twenty feet below, where crowds would cheer jumpers on as they plummeted into what resembled a sunken Colosseum. The twenty-foot cliff was called Big Mo. You could also jump from a less formidable height of fifteen feet from a cliff dubbed Little Mo. If you found that too imposing, you could reach the large communal pool on an air slide that started above the cliffs and ran along the right of Big Mo. We called it an air slide because it ended abruptly, allowing guests to briefly soar before hitting the water.
To the far left of the Dive, lined up in a row, were entrances to three Rapids attractions, two of which would be ready in time for opening. River Ride 1 sent guests on inner tubes down a roaring circular track before moving them through an underground tunnel in the middle, a crater the workers began calling the Toilet Bowl. River Ride 2 was tame in comparison, funneling visitors down a bumpy and twisty path. The Colorado River Ride, which would open later, was the crescendo, sending people on a simulated rapids excursion in sturdy, green rubber rafts, the water pressure creating a powerful current. The grotto, peaceful in comparison, let people wade through the water without any specific mission in mind. Two relatively calm and wide slides let families descend into the pool together. A more conventional water slide ran through the entire area and partly underground. If you didn’t want to be in motion, you could luxuriate among the waterfalls or on an island in the main pool that had a cave for privacy. All of it was fed by an elaborate water system designed by our pump man, Ron Dyno, who kept the plans for everything in his head. My father worried about Ron; without him, we’d never figure out how all the plumbing worked.
As the rides evolved, we needed to test them before a soft foam surface—courtesy of Dick Croul—could be applied. If the design wasn’t quite right, we didn’t want to have to tear the foam out. The rough gunite, however, would have ripped a rider’s bare skin off in chunks. Invited to test the Toilet Bowl, I retrieved my hockey equipment from storage—it still stunk—and geared up before repeatedly going down the literal drain and letting workers know where they needed to modify turns. Without trying, I had matured into our only expert ride consultant, instinctively knowing when a design might induce trauma.
When the Department of Labor asked to evaluate the area, no doubt concerned about the whole insurance company debacle, my father waved them off. He explained that Roaring Springs was not a ride but an enormous swimming pool. They could no more inspect it or approve it than they could the Glen. Eager not to share responsibility for anything that might happen there, they backed off.
The cost of labor and materials must have been enormous, easily the park’s biggest investment to date. My father visited the site more and more frequently, growing argumentative with Roy and interrupting his ranting only to pee from Little Mo. (My father could and would pee anywhere.) The prolonged planning and construction tested the limits of his patience. As the opening grew closer, he could no longer contain his excitement. As Roy applied the finishing coat of epoxy to areas needing to be waterproofed, my father ordered the pumps turned on. Water poured over the places that Roy had caulked before they had a chance to fully dry.
“Don’t do that!” Roy said.
“It’s open,” my father said. “It’s time.”
Opening day at Roaring Springs went well. Only two toes were broken.
That summer was my last before graduation, and my father had promoted me to all-rides operations manager, meaning Roaring Springs fell under my purview. No longer would Water World be my only concern. Now I could be blamed for almost anything that happened in the park.
For the Cliff Dive, I pulled some of the best lifeguards over from the Wave Pool. Smoke, who was by then a manager in Water World, helped me maintain a balance of competent guards between the two areas. The water at Roaring Springs was the deepest in the park, fifteen feet with a dark bottom that made it difficult to see what was going on beneath the surface. I needed workers with experience under pressure and the ability to navigate the pools like Navy SEALs, able to dive and swim to the appropriate depth in case someone went under.
The water was not the only area of concern. In his desire for a natural aesthetic, Gene refused to allow handrails along the paths. “No railings in nature,” he said. Only a few loose ropes strung along poles aided people in keeping their balance.
Thanks to promotional efforts in newspapers and on the radio, the line to get into Roaring Springs hugged the perimeter of the area, stretching hundreds of people long. Once they entered, the guests sprinted in all directions, not yet familiar with the terrain we had laid out. The steps were either rocks or poured concrete shaped to look like rocks—all slip hazards, particularly for people running from one attraction to the next in bare, wet feet. It was easy to stub a toe or stumble. One walkway had a stream running through it and a small hole that allowed light and water to drip down into one of the underground tunnels. Catching themselves in the hole, two people broke a toe. The EMTs dutifully weaved in between the crowds to assist the fallen and carry them away.
My hopes of a spotless record had evaporated on the opening weekend. It was one of the few times I can remember being uncontrollably livid with my father. Not confused, or frustrated, but boiling with anger at his stubborn insistence and myopia. I stormed into his office.
“You cannot leave a hole in the middle of a walkway!” I shouted. “People are getting hurt. What is wrong with you?”
“We’ll take care of it,” he said. From his office, he could see the throngs of people flocking toward the area. He saw only their joy.
“When?” I said.
“When things settle down.” To shut off the water and seal off areas on opening day was unthinkable.
I went back, picked up a rock, and wedged it into the hole.
From the main path, I could see people stepping to the precipice of the Cliff Dive for the first time. They sometimes leapt without looking, screaming as they plunged an unexpected twenty feet. Similar shrieks came from the air slide, where people tumbled down the snaking channels without knowing how far they’d go or how deep the water would be when they touched down. They were accustomed to slides emptying into shallow pools they could stand in, not the deep pools here. We put a sign up warning people the Dive was for “expert swimmers only,” an over-exaggeration we hoped would discourage people who could not swim at all. Unfortunately, we had many patrons who didn’t speak or read English. Although several of our radio spots targeted a Spanish-speaking audience, we had no Spanish-language signs, an inexplicable oversight. As a result, some guests didn’t understand the warnings. Others, like the gold-chain-bedecked teenagers, knew full well what they were doing, launching themselves off the Dive and trying to land directly on the bobbing heads of their friends.
Not everyone was so reckless. Some people would approach the edge and look down, hesitant. The hundreds of people gathered below would shout encouragement. You could see the potential diver’s courage ebb and flow as they shuffled back and forth, deciding whether to jump or not. When someone walked away, the heckling was unmerciful.
“Chickenshit!” they’d roar. “Pussy!” To show weakness in Action Park was to invite mass scorn and a sense of shame that followed you all the way out to the parking lot.
When the Colorado River Ride opened, crazed guests, unsuccessful in their attempt to maim a buddy at the Cliff Dive, opted to stuff three or four people in a raft. With their extra mass and a current fueled by three huge water pipes, they rocketed down into a cave, where water sprayers were waiting to douse them. Emerging from the darkness, a sharp turn nearly capsized them. As if this was somehow not perilous enough, people decided to begin jumping from one raft to another. They often missed, knocking their heads, elbows, or knees on the concrete. (We never covered it in foam, foolishly believing people would remain in the rafts.)
When vessels abandoned by their occupants spilled out at the end of the ride, they became bouncing projectiles, plunging down on top of people who had already been emptied into the water. Attendants who were supposed to collect the rafts would often be immersed in their portable radios or asleep, oblivious to the pileup until people began shouting profanities at them.
We had one incident that weekend which terrified all of us. In the Toilet Bowl, guests on inner tubes would descend into a hole in the middle and shoot through a tube underground. The tube was lined with the unpredictable foam, which soon began to rip, jutting out and creating a space big enough for a body to become lodged inside. The tear caused a human clog, the force of thousands of gallons of water wedging people in place between the foam and tube. We scrambled to turn the water off, then listened as the riders screamed at us, complaining they had nearly drowned in the congestion of bodies. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
I went back to the condo that weekend feeling pretty good about two broken toes.
That feeling wouldn’t last.
The season had started with a lot of rain. It affected attendance, particularly in Motor World, which we often had to close in inclement weather. Other parks suffered as well. But because of Roaring Springs, total attendance increased 15 percent over the previous year, setting another record. My father was right about people wanting to experience the simplicity of a swimming hole. It was both big and intimate at the same time, and the area played host to a constant flow of humanity that only kept growing. This was why, despite my optimism, I knew a call would come.
It happened late in August, weeks after Roaring Springs had opened. I was headed for lunch when the walkie-talkie on my hip crackled. “Code red at the Roaring Springs air slide,” a voice said. “Code red.” Code yellow was a broken bone or a rabid animal attacking guests. Code red was something worse. It meant a life-or-death situation.
I turned my bike around and gunned the engine until I reached the entrance to Roaring Springs. The pool under the air slide and Cliff Dive had been cleared, and lifeguards were in the water in a search-and-rescue formation. They would line up, dive down, then come back to the surface before lining up a little farther over and going down again. Two EMTs stood by, an empty backboard propped up between them. I climbed down and saw Smoke emerge from the water, shaking his head.
“Someone went down,” he said. “He came off the slide. We saw him go under, but we can’t find him.”
My hope was that it was yet another episode of a guy playing the rescue game, hitting the water and then swimming underneath the surface so he could emerge somewhere out of sight to fool the lifeguards into thinking he had drowned. That happened in the Wave Pool constantly. Yet the lifeguards didn’t seem convinced that was the case here. There was real concern in their eyes.
I pulled off my shirt and set down my radio. The water was murky, thick with body oil and suntan lotion. I plunged deep beneath the surface, the dark gunite on the bottom making it difficult to see anything. I skimmed along, letting my fingers trace the concrete and hoping I wouldn’t brush up against anything unexpected. I swam in a zigzag pattern, overlapping my own path. I wanted to be sure.
I looked to my left, where only a few feet remained before the wall.
He’s probably splashing around in one of the grottos right now, I thought, laughing at the panicking attendants.
I swam toward the wall. Nothing.
Kids do this all the time. This will turn out to be a joke.
Satisfied, I began to turn around. I would find the offender and banish him permanently. I would sit with the guys and drink beers, and we would all shake our heads at how hard our hearts had been beating. We’d tell the story at the mountaintop party, and it would be a good one.
Then I saw him.
He was curled up along the back wall. His body was listless but moving slightly, animated by the water current. I swam toward the figure, hoping I would notice some indication he was alive. Between the black bottom and the murky water, he was hard to see. Only the red of his bathing suit stood out. I reached for him, grabbing a forearm and propelling myself upward. Breaching the surface, his shoulder met mine, and I tucked my left arm under his armpits, signaling the lifeguards with my free arm.
“Here,” I said, spitting water as it sloshed against my chin. “Over here.”
They hit the water, freeing his weight from my arms. They rushed him toward the EMTs, who started CPR immediately, pumping his chest as they carried him out on the backboard. I was doubled over, exhausted, sucking gulps of air into my lungs that I felt guilty for taking. I kept hoping to see his chest rise, to see him coughing out water.
Come on, I mouthed. Come on.
The EMTs loaded him onto a stretcher and then placed him on one of the golf carts to be rushed away. I asked one of them if he had a pulse. She shook her head.
When something traumatic happens on a job with a potential for tragedy, workers are usually afforded some kind of counseling. In law enforcement, it’s mandated. You can’t go back out on the street without processing a life you either took or failed to save. No one thinks of these things for theme-park employees.
The lifeguards on duty that day were gutted, but no one asked for time off. The drowning happened late in the season, and they figured it was better to just stick it out through Labor Day. Plus, there weren’t any replacements. I could never simply hire a lifeguard who had been toiling at the community pool and expect them to last a day at either Roaring Springs or the Wave Pool. Setting aside time for grief could open up the potential for another tragedy, and everyone knew it.
I hovered around the lifeguards, offering reassurances that it wasn’t their fault. The press coverage made that difficult. It ran the usual gauntlet of criticism. The accusation that we were somehow flippant about safety in deep bodies of water was especially frustrating. There were lazy and lackadaisical employees at some of the rides—just like there are slothful, doughnut-eating cops—but our lifeguards were like a SWAT unit. The park spit out underperformers.
“Don’t read that stuff,” I told Smoke, who was uncharacteristically sullen. “They have no idea what it takes to do this job.”
He nodded his head. “Donald DePass,” he said. “That was his name. Donald DePass.”
Officials looking into the drowning believed the twenty-year-old DePass had inhaled water when he hit the pool. Guests fell ten feet from the lip of the air slide, and the impact could have taken him by surprise. It was just a theory, though. There was no more information available. In Smoke and the others, I saw the same agony over ambiguity that had upset my father with the Kayak accident. We needed to know the how and the why, but those questions were impossible to answer. As far as his family knew, Donald DePass could swim. Tens of thousands of people had gone down the air slide without incident. There was no reason he shouldn’t have been able to resurface. He just didn’t.
I kept waiting to have dreams of seeing his red shorts in the water, of touching his lifeless forearm and surfacing with him, bracing for the shocked faces of the people watching nearby, but I didn’t. I couldn’t take time off. I discussed it with no one aside from the guards. It felt as though someone else had retrieved him. I suppose it was necessary compartmentalization.
I told my father that we needed to drain the pool at the end of the air slide and the Cliff Dive and paint the bottom white instead of black to make people more visible to the lifeguards. I didn’t bother asking him to do it immediately, though I would have preferred that. It would take a week, at minimum, and there was no chance he would shutter the area for that long so close to the end of the season.
He didn’t challenge me as he normally would. He just nodded.
We braced for the inevitable lawsuit. Word eventually came down that the DePass family would not sue us for negligence. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. For them, Donald’s drowning had been God’s will.
We put up more warning signs around the park, hoping to dissuade people from taking uneducated risks. At the air slide in Roaring Springs, we tasked employees with broadcasting instructions to those in line. “You must know how to swim,” they blared. “This slide empties into a large, deep pool. You must use caution.”
At the Wave Pool, a banner read: WAVES CAN BE TIRING. For rides with long lines, we played safety notices on cassette tape or through megaphones.
The following week, I saw someone reading the EXPERT SWIMMERS ONLY notice near the Cliff Dive. He was wearing a tank top, sandals, and a bracelet with “CFS” scrawled on it. I watched as he stuck his gum on the sign and jumped off and out of sight.
“How deep is the water here?” someone else asked me at the Wave Pool.
“Ten feet on this end,” I said, pointing to the deeper portion.
The man looked at me for a moment. “How deep is ten feet?” he said.
I expected the newspapers to dwell on the DePass accident, but they quickly lost interest. That was probably because the state’s legal case against my father was growing more salacious. It now included more of the office staff, including his secretary, Mary Meyers, a bookkeeper named Debra Evers, and Michael Teschner, a German real estate broker from Aspen who had facilitated some land deals for my father. Evers and Teschner had signed documents presenting them as officers of London and World. Gene felt terrible that others had been caught up in his divisive insurance strategy and hired lawyers to represent them. I doubt any of them had a complete understanding of what was going on. As with many of his operations, he doled out information piecemeal.
Everyone pleaded innocent, including my father. Some members of the county legislature came to his defense, saying the attorney general was looking to make a name for himself. Eventually, Meyers, Evers, and Teschner entered what was known as New Jersey’s Pretrial Intervention Program, designed to save the state the cost of a trial for first-time offenders, and accepted supervised probation for their involvement. Prosecutors left Gene to dangle.
It was hard to conceptualize the possibility of my father going to prison. In some sense, I felt that what amounted to a foolish bit of hubris was probably deserving of a fine but not incarceration, particularly given the hall passes doled out for more serious white-collar crimes. His insurance scheme had not hurt anyone. There was grumbling that the state would not have permitted some of the rides to open had he not presented false proof of insurance, but that didn’t hold up to scrutiny. Had he not invented London and World, the park would have been exactly the same, only with my father begrudgingly enlisting an insurance company to oversee its potential liabilities.
My mother seemed unaffected by it all, though we knew she was troubled. I think she had to believe, as we all did, that if he had been clever enough to operate his own insurance company for six years, he was likely clever enough to escape any serious reprimand for it. We wanted to believe the rabbit was going to appear. What none of us wanted to say was that he had lit so many fires without getting burned that the law of averages could kick in at any moment. This seemed like a plausible time for that to happen.
I left for California and my senior year that fall having no idea whether I’d be called back to see him on trial. I woke up some days thinking Adam Tracy would shove a paper in front of my face, a sensational headline blaring across its front page:
EVIL DEVELOPER SENTENCED
TO 20 YEARS OF HARD LABOR
Glen Smocovich named new Action Park operator
There was no time to dwell. I focused on my classes. I wrote letters to Laurie, whom I continued to see on breaks, and who lifted my spirits by telling me that the state prison system wouldn’t want to deal with my father, either. Again dressed as an elite thug, the only costume I had, I celebrated Halloween by making a tremendous amount of noise with my friends during a party at a sorority house. The din prompted one student to open her dorm-room door and begin screaming for silence. She took one look at the prop pipe in my hand and vanished. Apparently, I was too convincing a criminal. Like father, like son.
One weekend, we rented a Winnebago so we could drive to the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles to watch Fred Buckley play his first game as Stanford’s starting quarterback in a big showdown against UCLA. Arriving on Friday, we parked the Winnebago at a friend’s house and split up, which proved problematic when I promptly got lost. At a bar, I spotted Jim Cohn, a friend from my freshman year who happened to be the Stanford band’s drum major and head baton-twirler. Confident Jim could get me to where he was staying, I proceeded to drink more beers. Oblivion followed.
When I woke up, I was staring at rafters. Sitting up, I realized I was on the bare, hardwood floor of a gymnasium. All around me were dozing bodies. Seeing Jim, I waved him over.
“Where are we?” I said.
“You drank a lot, huh?” Jim said.
This was apparently where the band was staying: UCLA’s basketball court. I had no money and my friends had my ticket to the game. I pondered what my father might do under such circumstances. Normally, I would do the opposite, but on this occasion, his brand of impulsive behavior seemed appropriate.
I asked Jim for a band uniform and a set of cymbals. After following the band out to the field and trying to march in formation, I managed to sprint for the bleachers and spent the entire first half looking for my friends. When I finally found them, I enthusiastically recounted my exploits, expecting them to be impressed.
“Haven’t you been here the whole time?” Adam said.
“You’re dressed like an idiot,” Eric said.
A few weeks later, I got a call from Julie. I started to tell her about the marching band, but she interrupted me.
“Well,” she said. “Things are pretty much finished.”
“That means what?” I said.
“He entered pretrial intervention,” Julie said. “He’s getting three years of probation.”
“That’s great news,” I said.
“But,” she said.
“But?”
“There’s a two-hundred-forty-thousand-dollar fine.”
Two hundred forty thousand dollars was a lot of money for a theme-park operator who constantly reinvested his profits in new rides and paid out guests who got mangled on them, but it still seemed like he had gotten off easy. My father pleaded guilty to a number of charges, including submitting false documents to the state, doing business as an unauthorized insurance company, and using a corporation for criminal activity. He refused to plead guilty to fraud because, he said, he did not defraud anyone. The state admitted that he hadn’t gained anything personally out of the scheme. The judge acknowledged that Gene had no prior criminal history and had not caused harm to anyone. My father emerged from the courtroom a happy man. “Someone tried to make a mountain out of a Mulvihill,” he said to the gathered throng of reporters. I wished his lawyer knew better than to let him near a microphone.
“So it’s all over,” I said.
“Yeah,” Julie said. “But.”
“But what?”
“One of the terms of the agreement is that he can’t operate the resort. He has to give it up.”
“What do you mean, give it up?”
“He cannot operate the resort. The state wants him out.”
“Can they do that?”
“They’re doing it,” she said.
The state owned much of the land the park was on. Like any landowner, they could oust a tenant for violating the terms of their agreement. It was not all of the park, but a crucial stretch that encompassed many of the ski slopes, the lift chairs, the Alpine, and the entire top of the mountain. They wanted an independent party to operate the resort and park, paying rent to both Gene and the state. If he refused, they would pull the lease entirely. Laurie was right. New Jersey simply did not want to deal with Gene Mulvihill anymore.
The state was effectively evicting Action Park.