“The diesel-driven engine that powers Action Park’s ‘Fabulous Flying Machine,’ a ride from West Germany with winds that can lift people in the air, will be turned on tonight—but not for thrill-seekers. Instead . . . the township planning board will be there to determine what effects the ride might have on a nearby neighborhood in the form of noise, vibration, or pollution.”
Daily Record, July 17, 1987
My father beckoned me into his office.
“What’s going on, Dad?” I asked. I expected he would want to discuss a contract or zoning issue. Now out of college in 1986, I was working for him in a far more mature capacity, navigating the labyrinth of his condominium business at the resort. I was a grown man with a grown-up job. I knew this because I was wearing pants.
“I’m thinking about something new,” he said, picking up what looked to me like a water gun. I braced for a light spritz of water.
“Come on,” I said. “I don’t want to have to dry—”
Kuh-tunk. The paintball pellet whizzed past my head, leaving a gelatinous purple splatter on the wall.
“Dad, what the hell is—” Kuh-tunk, kuh-tunk. Another paintball pellet slammed into the door. One got me in the thigh. I gasped, and zoning permits flew out of my hands.
“Does it hurt?” he asked, with real sincerity.
“Yes!” I bellowed, running out of the room. “Yes! Why ask me that! Of course it hurts!”
I could hear him laughing, long and loud, all the way down the hallway. “We needed to see how much!” he said.
For much of the 1980s, paintball had been illegal in the state, the victim of language in the New Jersey Gun Control Act prohibiting any kind of design that too closely resembled an actual firearm. You needed a permit to own one, making a recreational paintball area a logistical nightmare. When the state finally eased regulations, courses began popping up everywhere. My father brought in a paintball advisor along with a small armory of weapons to test out. Apparently, the salesman told him that it wouldn’t hurt to get hit by a pellet, which the two of them decided to test at my expense. This was what it was like to be in my father’s orbit. Supervising real estate deals did not prevent me from getting shot with paint.
The paintball attraction eventually became a reality. Unfortunately, as with the beauty pageants, it was too easy for participants to group themselves into factions and declare war on one another. A promoted Bronx vs. Brooklyn face-off began as a tame contest and devolved into a melee, with guests pistol-whipping each other once they had run out of pellets. One participant aimed his gun at a fallen foe and put two in the back of his head—pew, pew—like a mob hit.
Despite its surging popularity elsewhere, paintball joined the list of attractions that wore out their welcome very quickly. Examining the splattered obstacle course, I was again confronted with the question of why people behaved the way they did—why they would be well behaved on rides elsewhere, but would wreak havoc on our grounds. When my father installed another Alpine Slide in Colorado, it didn’t produce injuries at nearly the same rate as the one in Vernon. Nor did a second Motor World location he operated in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. It was inexplicable. We seemed to be ground zero for aberrant behavior with no discernible reason why.
I began to ponder this mystery at a distance, because I was now a former employee of Action Park.
While the park remained a family enterprise—Julie still running marketing, my father still in charge—not all of us wound up a permanent part of the operation. After graduating, Jimmy got into the night-club and record businesses in New York City before settling into a successful career in real estate. (Adulthood did not completely eliminate his wild streak. I once watched as he was thrown through a glass door in Manhattan, having angered a bar patron.) Splinter was an electrical engineer. Pete’s adolescent sadism belied a sharp mind—he was able to retire at thirty-eight after a successful career in private equity. Topher, the youngest, was still milling about the grounds in management. He would eventually follow in our father’s footsteps as an entrepreneur involved in several start-ups before coming back into the fold.
There did not appear to be a long-term role for me. Like my father, I wanted to manipulate landscapes and bring a personal touch to real estate, selling and eventually developing properties. But the park was immutable to everyone but him, shifting in design only under his watch. If I stayed within its borders, I risked a kind of inertia. Being trapped on the mountain in a perpetual state of adolescence, once my foremost desire, became a concern. I thought it was better to be apart from it, at least for a bit, and find my own footing without chlorine stinging my eyes and throat.
The separation did not last long. For one thing, I was still working for my father, making normalcy impossible. For another, I was working out of his offices near the grounds. The proximity meant that I often found myself fielding questions about operations from managers who knew I was well versed in the finer details.
“I don’t work here,” I would say. “I work over there,” pointing to the office.
“Just come and look at this foam situation,” they’d say.
During the week, I behaved like an adult, sifting through sales contracts and learning the real-estate business. On weekends, I would patrol the park grounds, scouting for operational gaps. I existed in a weirdly ethereal space between consultant and nonemployee—between the child I was and the adult I was trying to become.
Part of that separation anxiety may have been a feeling that the park wouldn’t be around much longer. As part of his plea deal, my father was supposed to hire an outside financial advisor to run the resort. This person would also be responsible for handling the cash flow, making Gene little more than a silent partner.
Somehow, no one stopped to consider what it would mean to usher him away from the property like a drunken uncle at a wedding. Even without the state land, he still owned significant parts of the area, including the ski lodge, the brewery, Motor World, and the parking lots. It would be impossible to run the business without giving people a place to drink or park their cars, both luxuries he could refuse to host on his portion of the land. The state couldn’t do anything to force the issue, either. The notion of a fiscal agent appointed to oversee the resort and its accounting was ridiculous—my father’s byzantine bookkeeping would look like a dead language to outside eyes. And shuttering things entirely was out of the question. It would have a devastating effect on the local economy.
The two sides were in a stalemate, and Gene knew it. Even though there was a court order to oust him from the grounds, he kept building attractions and working on construction of a sports club called the Spa, as though nothing had happened. People found it mystifying. He behaved like a man with a fifty-year lease, not a man who had received his notice to vacate the premises.
This was because he had a plan to win. It involved outsmarting everyone. And it also involved major appliances.
The plot began with Robert Littell, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly. A political ally of my father’s in Sussex County, Littell agreed to sponsor a bill that offered an alternative solution. Instead of kicking Gene off the state-owned land, the bill proposed that the state allow him to buy the nearly thirteen hundred acres outright. The state would normally balk at such a deal, but it was so desperate to sever its ongoing business relationship with my father that it was open to the idea.
After a few months of haggling, and with the help of a lobbyist my father hired, the bill passed the State Assembly and was approved by the State House Commission. Governor Tom Kean signed it under protest, realizing there was no other solution. The DEP, which owned the land, was equally annoyed. The bill rendered them powerless. Now the land would be his in totality.
Thinking they were clever, Kean and the DEP built a provision into the deed mandating that the portion of the land considered environmentally protected only be used for conservation, recreation, or fish-and-game purposes. One would think they would have realized that it never paid to try to outmaneuver my father. He agreed, but insisted that if the commercial prospects of the land were limited, he should get a discount. Instead of paying well over $1.6 million, he bought it for $837,667.
In a blink, Gene’s opponents went from celebrating his imminent removal from Vernon to agonizing over headlines that he would now own and control even more of it than before—at 50 percent off. As he built camping cabins—technically “recreational”—on the property, they bemoaned the possible erasure of the barred owl, a species that lived on the land. They pointed fingers at Littell, who had come in at a crucial time to mediate a deal between the parties. It smacked of cronyism.
It was soon discovered that, in addition to being a politician, Littell was also an appliance salesman. Gene had bought a stove, refrigerator, and microwave for every one of his hundreds of condo units from him.
“The man’s got every right to be in business,” my father said. “What, he’s not allowed? It’s all legal.”
While my father’s definition of legal could often be debatable, this time he was right. It was all legal, which made his enemies steam even more.
It wasn’t the Maytags that angered them. It was that there were supposed to be repercussions for Gene. Instead, he now had it all: the slope, the park, the top of the mountain. I expected to read of spontaneous human combustion within the town’s limits. The anger and resentment were palpable.
Going out for a drink at a bar called the Hay Loft, I noticed a local eyeing me with a mixture of suspicion and malice. He bumped into me once, which I could have written off as an accident. Then he did it again, which I could not. When he did it a third time, we came to blows. He blasted me in the face with a punch that nearly broke my nose. We exchanged no words. I could only infer that my bloodline was offensive to him.
After the scuffle was broken up, I drove home, careful not to leak blood on my car seat. As my nose continued to swell, I wondered how Gene and Vernon could somehow heal the divide. They were in a kind of codependent relationship. Gene needed land. Vernon needed industry and jobs. There had to be common ground.
I was soon proven right, though I didn’t expect the common ground to be thousands of pounds of radioactive dirt.
In April 1986, the world was aghast at the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, where human error had allowed for a catastrophic power plant disaster. At roughly the same time that people were literally melting in Russia, the state of New Jersey quietly and discreetly decided to rectify a radiation problem of its own. Several tons of contaminated soil had been found by the Environmental Protection Agency in a residential development in nearby Essex County. The contamination was left over from an old watch manufacturing company. It was enough to fill five thousand drums. The soil was lousy with radium, a naturally occurring product of uranium. As radium decays, it emits radon, a radioactive gas toxic to humans that can cause lung cancer and other terminal unpleasantness.
This dirt—which officials described as “mildly radioactive,” in the same way one can be mildly pregnant—needed to be disposed of, and quickly. Without consulting anyone in Vernon, the state decided it was best to ship it to a ninety-five-acre area off Route 94 that consisted of an abandoned quarry and an old dairy farm. The DEP said it would all be perfectly safe, the dirt transported and dumped with the utmost care. Vernon, they said, had nothing to worry about.
Upon hearing this news, the town began to worry plenty, assailing the head of the DEP, Richard Dewling, as well as Governor Kean. If this corrupted soil was so safe, they reasoned, there was no reason for the DEP to sneak it in without holding any public hearings on the matter.
Vernon’s residents had good reason to be wary. The communications antennas erected between the nearby mountain ridges had been a perpetual source of concern since the 1960s. Townsfolk believed that the radio frequencies given off by the powerful dishes and antennas—which were owned by RCA and represented the town’s only significant industry outside of the ski areas—caused a host of health issues that plagued the area, from cancer to neurological disorders. Medical and environmental professionals largely dismissed this theory, though state research into the concern revealed Vernon had a much higher rate of birth defects than surrounding communities in the state. This was all anyone needed to hear to confirm their suspicions. They believed the dishes were fundamentally altering the population.
Though the theory was tenuous, I thought it could explain much about the behavior at Action Park. Perhaps people careened into trees because satellite dishes were messing with their brains.
At any rate, the antenna concern meant Vernon was already on edge. They did not want this radioactive dirt contaminating their drinking water by leaching into the aquifer located just below the quarry. Consequently, they redirected all the energy they normally reserved to combat Gene toward this new, even more sinister threat.
First, they marched to the house of Governor Kean, who wisely refused to come out and confront citizens screaming for his head on a pike. They made plans to form a human chain across the road, blocking the trucks driving in with the soil. Residents said they would simply “forget how to walk” and go limp in the middle of the street. We began to brace for a civil war.
One day, on one of my regular patrols at the park, I noticed a number of people lying on the ground in Roaring Springs near the Colorado River Ride. Having heard of the plan to create a human speed bump, I thought perhaps some protestors were practicing. Upon closer inspection, I realized they were not moving. Quickly, medics and ambulances arrived and roused more than two dozen glassy-eyed people from the ground. We discovered that an ozone generator used to keep the water clear had been turned off so attendants could remove a woman who had injured her shoulder. Turning the machine back on—normally done before the park opened—released a toxic cloud of built-up ozone gas, felling twenty-eight people who were idling nearby.
“The thing about that,” Smoke said, watching the last of the medics leave, “is that we’re now putting people down nice and easy. No pain. They just go to sleep.”
“Stop it,” I said.
No one was seriously hurt—a few passed out, and some were nauseated—but the DEP was not happy. It fined the park $10,000 for the accident and criticized us for failing to report it. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined my father another $960. He grumbled over this amount.
We did gas twenty-eight people. To me, $960 seemed like a steal.
The soil issue was so all consuming that Vernon barely batted an eye over the mass sedation. The controversy had transformed the town. After the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled the soil could be transferred, residents made good on their promise and began standing in front of the entrance to the quarry. Some spoke openly about arming themselves with rifles and shooting any DEP-manned transport that dared to come into the community, a plan met with shockingly broad approval from locals. Some of the townspeople who didn’t endorse such drastic measures looked to Vernon’s mayor, Vic Marotta, to quell the uprising. Marotta addressed Kean and the assembling militia, telling the Governor that Vernon’s faithful would be nonviolent unless the state made a false move. At that point, any blood shed would be on Kean’s hands. This rural oasis was now floating the possibility of violent retribution and doing it with the endorsement of public officials. The theory of antenna-induced derangement was starting to make a lot of sense.
My father seized the moment. He stood with the townspeople, sharing their outrage. When activists needed a place to rally, he opened the gates of the park. Thousands of people streamed in, brandishing shirts and signs emblazoned with their slogan of choice: HELL NO, WE WON’T GLOW. In the heat of summer, he offered them water, soda, beer fresh from the Brauhaus, and shelter under the massive Oktoberfest tent. More than eight thousand people were in attendance, almost half the town’s population of 18,561. He also hosted Vernon Aid, a Live Aid–esque concert down near Great Gorge with proceeds going toward the cause. Naturally, Jimmy Sturr headlined.
“We will not allow this travesty to occur!” my father shouted to the gathered throngs like William Wallace on horseback, a polka tune playing in the background. “This soil could harm us for generations to come!”
Vernon was livid, and Gene was livid right alongside them. He did not want his customers irradiated. They did not want to grow a third eye. The two warring parties had finally found their common goal.
After months of gatherings and threats of civil war, Kean and the DEP finally relented. The state would not send the soil to Vernon but would instead ship it to a remote part of Nevada, where it would be diluted with “clean” dirt and dumped.
For a time, it seemed as though the controversy would be a way for Gene and Vernon to understand they were not so different after all. I think my father respected Vernon for finding its backbone. They had taken a stand against the steamrolling. It seemed a truce had been declared.
Years later, I asked Vic Marotta, the former mayor, why the DEP was so intent on dumping the contaminated dirt in Vernon despite knowing it would cause a revolt and quite possibly generational illness. He asked me to remember the timing of the news. It was right after the agency had been forced into the land deal with Gene against its own wishes.
“You’re saying,” I said, “that they tried to send five thousand drums of radioactive dirt to contaminate the entire area just to spite him?”
“Correct,” he said.
In the DEP’s eyes, nothing less than a nuclear disaster would even the ledger against Gene Mulvihill.
The spring of the soil controversy, I decided to do some traveling. If the dirt wound up in Vernon, this would at least buy me enough time to purchase a Geiger counter, or possibly to convert one of the buried skate-park bowls into a fallout shelter.
I headed for Ios, an island in Greece. Ios was hedonism unchecked, attracting young men and women with an opportunity to live out the remainder of their juvenile inclinations before adulthood took full hold. It was like the park but without the responsibility. Also, a hotel room could be had for four dollars a night.
I went with Benji Bressler and Andy Buckley, Fred Buckley’s brother, who later became an actor and played David Wallace, Steve Carell’s supervisor, on The Office. (His first job was in a commercial for the park, which somehow ran for years despite its unauthorized use of a Bob Marley song.) We flew into Santorini and awaited a ferry to take us to our primary destination the following day. That night I went on a small bender that put my brain through the booze equivalent of the Cannonball Loop.
A day or two later, we were firmly entrenched in Ios and had found the hotel’s restaurant. Benji was elsewhere, sleeping one off. Midway through breakfast, I looked up. Sauntering down the hotel stairs was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She walked with poise and self-assurance, deeply tanned legs carrying her down the steps, a bright yellow dress making her impossible to ignore. She began walking toward me, smiling. It was not the smile of a stranger being polite. It was the smile of someone who appeared to recognize me. I had never seen this woman before. I would have remembered.
“Hello, Andy,” she said.
“Hi,” I said, thoroughly confused. “Hello, there.”
“Where is Benji?” she asked.
She knew Benji, too? “Uh, sleeping in,” I said.
We talked for a few minutes and then we went to get Benji, who acted like he had known her forever. I got her name—Katrina—as Benji made arrangements to meet up later on that night. When she left, I collapsed in a heap of confused infatuation. “I do not know this woman,” I said. “How does she know me?”
“You do know her, dummy,” Benji said. “You were just too hung over to remember. We met her on the beach the other day. I told her we’d meet up when we got to Ios.”
Benji went on to explain that Katrina was from Austria, had caught his eye, and that I was not to interfere with their courtship. Benji was one of my absolute best friends, which is why I felt I owed him the respect of telling him I categorically did not give a shit who met whom first. I was totally infatuated.
“What about Laurie?” he said.
After four years of bicoastal living, Laurie and I had recently broken up. I wanted to see a little more of the world, while Laurie was intent on making her mark in education, eventually becoming a superintendent. We later became friends. Her scooper’s wrist persisted, however.
Though it’s no source of pride, Katrina and I didn’t get a chance to know each other all that well before my pants disappeared. We went out to a bar called the Red Lion, the same place our group had been the evening before and where we had made fast friends with a band of Irish guys who had labeled me The Generous American for buying them unlimited beers—easy enough when beers cost twenty-five cents a pop. As I chatted with Katrina, they burst in, spotted me, and proceeded to drag me away so they could once again drink on my tab. While I liked these guys, their timing was awful.
They began to hoist me in the air like I had just won an Olympic medal. As I dodged lighting fixtures with my head, they started warbling an Irish tune. The lyrics are lost to time, but one line in particular proved fateful. It went something like, “And off comes pants.” The Irish took this as stage direction and proceeded to try to pull my pants down in full view of the bar, including Katrina.
I resisted, but there were too many of them, and Benji was too busy laughing and being spiteful to be of any help. They succeeded in tearing off most of the fabric, leaving only tatters. The bartender took pity on me and gave me a towel, which I pinned to my torn crotch with a clothespin like a cloth diaper.
To avoid further disruption, Katrina and I headed for the beach. We talked until morning. She told me she was a graduate of the University of Vienna, had interned for a bank, and had taken a job there. I tried to explain what my father did and why people were trying to give him radiation poisoning.
Katrina narrowed her eyebrows. “So, like a fun park?”
“Yes,” I said. “An amusement park.” I drew the Alpine Slide track in the sand, explaining how people sailed down and sometimes flew into the woods.
She paused. “You are a Gypsy?”
“No, no,” I said. “We’re a normal family.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Carnies.”
I tried to change the subject. “I think we should get married,” I said.
“I think you are a drunken idiot,” she said.
I managed to convince Katrina I was neither a transient nor an alcoholic. We spent three days entirely by ourselves, though it was not entirely romantic. I soon came down with a mystery illness that left me bedridden, but she cared for me while my friends remained too drunk to tie their own shoes. By the time we were both ready to depart, we decided it would not be goodbye. Back in our respective homelands, we called each other frequently and spoke for hours until I got my first phone bill and discovered it was five dollars a minute to reach her in Austria. I persuaded her to come see me.
She arrived in New Jersey, and at the sight of the park, her eyes widened. “This is spectacular,” she said. Coming from a culture so reserved, the histrionics on display there were the stuff of alien planets to her.
One night, I took her out to a bar with Chuckie Baby. Some drunk pushed her. Before I could even react, Chuckie Baby had broken a bottle over the man’s head. And not just any bottle, but a large Sapporo beer bottle the size of a bowling pin. He was, if nothing else, a loyal friend.
Katrina was not amused. “I am not sure,” she said, “I could live here all the time.” I wasn’t sure if she meant New Jersey or the country.
My father, always so fascinated by different cultures, was intrigued by the fact that Katrina was from German-adjacent Austria and took to her immediately. He wanted to know everything about Austria: its customs, its traditions, how its citizens spent their free time. He told her about his other, non-carnival businesses, like the condos and a wine cellar he was thinking of starting.
“You know,” my father said. “If you decide to stay, that would make me very happy.”
“Thank you, Gene,” Katrina said.
“We’re a little short in the quality-control department,” he said.
“Dad,” I said.
“I’m kidding,” he said, but he actually wasn’t.
I visited Katrina in Vienna, and she soon told me she would be coming to live in America.
“I think I will take the job in quality control,” she said.
I was over the moon. “You are going to love it here,” I said.
Within a few days of starting work at the park, she came back to me, her hands filled with packets of ketchup picked up off the ground. “Quality in Austria is very different than it is in America,” she said. “This place is run by children.”
Katrina’s arrival at the park came just in time for her to witness my father destroying all the goodwill he had generated with Vernon. He was now driving them to the brink of madness with the help of airplane equipment.
He called it the Aerodium, and it was literally a propeller—the same type used in DC-3 planes—situated in the middle of a vertical wind tunnel twenty feet high and eighty feet in diameter. Powered by a 700-horsepower engine, it screamed with enough force to take a multi-ton aircraft to cruising altitude in the sky. My father used it to simulate skydiving, the gust from the propeller able to blast people wearing special suits sixty feet in the air. The propeller was covered by a steel netting so guests would not be pureed if they came crashing down. Pads surrounded the bottom to catch wayward aerialists.
As with many of the newer rides, my father had seen it at an amusement convention. Because he considered it a temporary structure, he didn’t ask for any site approvals. Initially, he put it up near the Alpine Center. That’s when the noise complaints came rolling in. Condo owners living just twelve hundred feet from the site were aghast at this throbbing machine that could make the dishes in their kitchen cabinets rattle. They complained, at which point my father pointed out the sales contracts they signed prohibited them from making any issue over noise coming from the park. This led to even more wailing.
To placate them, my father hired a sound engineer and had him design a makeshift noise buffer for the engine. Following the engineer’s instructions with economy, the snowmakers stacked up a series of trailers on four sides of the unit. It acted as a muffler for the din, turning it from a throaty and china-rattling nuisance to a low growl.
His ingenuity impressed Katrina. “He finds solutions,” she said. “Almost like he does not need to obey any rules.”
The townspeople were not fully mollified. They continued to inquire about this strange device and begged for its removal. When pressed by a reporter, my father said the mayor had given him permission to install it. Vic Marotta had, in fact, done no such thing. Vic stormed into Gene’s office and threatened to punch him in the nose for dragging him into the controversy. My father set the record straight, and the town approved the Aerodium with a temporary permit good through Labor Day.
The Aerodium brought with it the newest character in his menagerie. He was leasing it for $40,000 a month from Scott Albuschkat, a German inventor and flight enthusiast who had built the Aerodium and painstakingly disassembled it into three large segments for international transport. Scott had a handlebar mustache and hooded, sunken eyes that appeared to glare at you even if he was in a good mood.
My indifference toward Scott upon our first meeting quickly turned to suspicion. Scouting the park in the winter during a snowstorm, he borrowed my expensive winter boots and then claimed they had gone missing.
“The boots, they have disappeared,” he said.
“Where would they go?” I said. “Can you please look for them?”
“The boots, they are no more,” he said, like we were in an Ingmar Bergman movie.
Scott often stood by as Gene attempted to explain the Aerodium to bewildered state inspectors. At most parks, they could check for loose bolts on roller coasters. Here, my father explained, we would be blasting people up to nearly twice the height of a telephone pole with a giant plane propeller. The inspectors wondered if they needed to get the Federal Aviation Administration involved.
“No, no, Gene,” Scott said, after the confused inspectors had left. “Cannot do sixty feet. Too dangerous.”
“Come on,” my father said. If the machine could blast people sixty feet in the air, then that’s exactly how high up he wanted them to go.
“Much less,” Scott said. “Ten feet is safe.”
“Thirty,” Gene said.
“Ten,” Scott said.
Gene wavered when he saw Scott’s crew in action. Clad in wind suits that acted as sails, they spread their arms and legs out to be lifted, then collapsed their limbs when they wanted to come down. They performed all kinds of aerial maneuvers, including flips and rolls. Their expertise made it safe to throttle the engine all the way up. It was an incredible sight, their bodies hovering just outside of the wind tunnel and in full view of people passing by. At those altitudes, even the mandatory helmet wouldn’t do much good if things went south. Seeing this changed his mind.
“Okay, ten,” Gene said.
As spectacular as they were, the aerialists had little choice but to perform. Scott had brought over several Germans to help operate and demonstrate the Aerodium. To guarantee their loyalty, he seized their passports and refused to allow them to leave until the season was over. Soon, I began to hear of an alternative pronunciation of his name: Scott Albershitter.
One of Scott’s employees was nicknamed Chickenhawk. He had the skill of a circus acrobat, effortlessly moving between routines while suspended in the air. He was also prone to excessive drinking, stumbling around at night in a daze.
“The guy can fly,” Chuck Kilby said, “but he can’t walk.”
Despite being indentured servants for Scott, the Germans maintained a sense of humor. One night, Chuck was patrolling the grounds after the park had closed. Nearing the Aerodium, he heard the engine growling and then saw a man come shooting out of the exposed top and fly off into the woods.
“Holy shit!” Chuck said. He gave chase. When he got to the victim, it was nothing more than an empty wind suit. The Germans appeared behind him, laughing their brains out.
The Aerodium posed no real danger for Scott’s experienced men, but the general public was another matter entirely. Without some modest training, they would not know how to react to the current. As Scott explained, “It is like throwing people into the water who cannot swim.”
Since we literally did exactly that every day, my father was unmoved. Still, he decided it was best to have riders sign a waiver absolving us of any liability. Even at a reasonable ten feet, we logged a broken arm and a dislocated shoulder barely two weeks after opening.
Despite the mishaps, the Aerodium drew crowds, due in part to people spending their summer close to home. A rash of terrorist attacks—TWA Flight 840 had suffered four casualties after a bomb was detonated over Greece, of all places—had put many off air travel, making destinations within driving distance preferable to flying across the country. Like Surf Hill, the ride attracted more spectators than participants, which was good. Capacity was low, with just one person being able to go in at a time. My father built a five-hundred-seat spectator platform so people could watch. Curious kids would wander over, fascinated by this display of humans in flight. They watched in awe, but they always clasped their tiny hands over their ears to try to drown out the terrible scream of the engine.
“Try owning a condo here, kid,” I wanted to say.
I went up in the Aerodium several times, hovering a few feet off the ground before getting the hang of it and going up a little farther with each attempt. The feeling of being completely detached from the ground—from anything—was sensational. Soon, Katrina wanted to give it a try. She put on the suit and spread her limbs, letting the air current carry her upward. The German controlling the propeller was supposed to throttle the airstream according to a person’s weight. Katrina, being light and tall, required far less air pressure than someone heavier, but the attendant wasn’t paying attention. He increased the force instead. Katrina shot up like a bingo ball being siphoned through a tube. At the same time the worker eased up on the throttle, she instinctively tucked her arms and legs in. She plummeted, landing on her head over the net covering the propeller, missing the crash pads completely.
“Unngghhh,” Katrina said.
I wailed in horror. I had grown numb to seeing my friends rendered unconscious, but now the park had killed the love of my life. We summoned medics, who took her to the first-aid station. Luckily, she was alive, though her neck throbbed with pain.
“Now I suppose I am a carnival person, too,” she said.