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Coaster Connoisseur by Lance Carden Every time the coaster came to a precipice, they held their hands above their heads and shouted with joy. No one could have pried my hands from the lap bar! Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

Coaster Connoiseur
I may never set foot in one again, but I’m still boosterish about roller coasters.

When I grew up in southwest Oklahoma, my father wouldn’t let me on a coaster. It was a protective instinct. He had suffered a terrible experience up in Oklahoma City during the Depression. Someone succeeded in coaxing him onto a roller coaster without warning. Expecting it to be child’s play, he lost eyeglasses and an overcoat on the first plunge. When the car returned him to the loading zone, Dad was apparently so frozen with fear he couldn’t move or even speak. Attendants told him it was time to get off, but he just stared straight ahead. Giving up, they sent him off for another ride.

It was only this summer that I really learned about coasters. I came to understand that, beyond its "scream machine" dimension, a coaster ride can be enjoyed intellectually and aesthetically. And that’s why I went to ride Cyclone.

Most of the folks you hear screaming overhead at amusement parks don’t know what they’re experiencing. They don’t realize that the twentieth century has perfected an art form that began with relatively crude fifteenth and sixteenth century Russian ice slides. The modern coaster combines the simplicity of those rides with the technology of a trolley and the manipulation of a magician.

Once launched, the movement of a coaster is impelled solely by gravity and momentum. Only so much speed is possible, depending on the total "drop" of the coaster from its highest to its lowest point.

Coaster builders exact maximum excitement by anticipating the riders’ experience and taking full advantage of staged effects. For instance, it’s no coincidence that cars are usually cranked up from the starting platform to the first drop at a tantalizingly slow pace, giving passengers plenty of time to size up their seemingly precarious position.

You know how the cars in front of you disappear when they plunge? This makes you think the tracks go straight down. That is certainly not the case. The angle of the drop is usually forty-five to fifty degrees. The awesome first drop of Cyclone at Coney Island is reportedly fifty-three degrees.

You know how the cars whip back and forth next to those tinker toy structures that support the tracks? Seeing a coaster’s wooden ribs flash by your face makes you think you’re moving faster than you are.

Wind is important, too. Windshields wouldn’t greatly affect the actual speed of a coaster, but they could significantly reduce riders’ perceptions of speed. You know how a coaster never seems to slow down? It’s because designers create diversions—a sharp curve or a dark tunnel wherever the cars’ flagging momentum might be noticed. Even on a slow coaster, a tight curve can be hair raising.

I took my first coaster ride in August at Agawam Park outside Springfield, Massachusetts. The big Cyclone at Agawam doesn’t open until noon, but the relatively benign Thunderbolt accepts passengers at 11:00 am. To ride Cyclone, children have to be at least fifty-four inches tall. For Thunderbolt, a mere four feet will suffice.

I felt foolish, standing in line for twenty minutes with a group of giggling school kids. All the more so because it was a hot, humid day, and steam heat seemed to roll off the treeless tarmac. But my friends, a pair of coaster zealots, insisted on taking the very first ride.

They tried to hop on the last car—which offers the most thrills—but we were told to fill the cars from front to back, according to our place in line. To my relief, we wound up in the middle. As we fastened safety belts, there was a lot of nervous laughter. Someone shouted, "Raise your hands when you go over the top!"

To my consternation, Ian and Peter did exactly that. Every time the coaster came to a precipice, they held their hands above their heads and shouted with joy. No one could have pried my hands from the lap bar! The very first drop terrified me, and I started screaming bloody murder. Nonetheless, I still expected to recover my wits and enjoy the rest of the ride. But things only got worse. Fear turned to panic. I couldn’t stop screaming. I can’t describe the coaster’s rapid contortions; it was all a blur. But I do know that I wanted off that contraption more than anything in the world. When it finally stopped, I was exhausted.

"How was it?" Peter asked.

"Terrible," I replied. "Did you like it?"

"Not much, really."

"Oh?"

"Not much of a coaster—too tame."

"You’re kidding?"

"What’d you think?"

"It terrified me!"

After a quick conference, we decided that Peter and Ian would go for another ride on Thunderbolt, while I tried to recover. I cooled off with a giant ice cream cone, but I couldn’t calm down, in part because I was still determined to ride Cyclone.

The portion of the park dominated by Cyclone’s undulating latticework was blocked till noon by a miniature train. When it finally chugged away, most of the crowd sprinted the length of a football Weld to line up for tickets. I let Peter and Ian compete for the first ride. I was in no hurry.

When it was my turn to board Cyclone, I was grateful to be alone. I didn’t try to be nonchalant. This time, I was going to be psychologically prepared. And I think I was, until a young man on the public address system cautioned all passengers to secure any "loose objects." I felt for my spectacles. They seemed to Wt snugly, but I remembered my father’s ride.

As the cars began to slowly ratchet their way up to the first precipice, I took the glasses off and held them in my right fist. But I wanted my hand free to hold on to the bar. I couldn’t make up my mind what to do. There was no pocket in my T-shirt. My jeans were too tight.

Finally, just as the lead cars began to disappear from view, I thrust the glasses between my legs and forgot them. It was survival time!

A ride on Thunderbolt, I found out, does not prepare you for Cyclone. You might as well train for the Indy 500 by taking a ride on the swan boats in Boston Public Garden. Cyclone goes up much farther and down much faster than Thunderbolt. Even more discombobulating are the sudden hairpin turns, not so much because centrifugal forces fling you about—which they do, of course—but because the cars shake and rattle so furiously you think they’ll fly apart.

When Cyclone finally rattled to a stop, my glasses were gone, which was only a minor concern. I was glad to be alive.

Back on the steaming midway, Peter and Ian assured me that Cyclone was a dog compared to the truly great coasters. I didn’t care. I was in a daze, thinking of Dad—and suddenly grateful for the weather. At least I hadn’t lost an overcoat!

Profile
I got to know Lance Carden in November 1988. I was on an author tour but didn’t have a publicist and couldn’t get interviews scheduled very tightly. In Boston I got two good interviews but spent most of my time with Lance freewheeling through Boston and Cambridge. He arranged a reading for me at the Boston Forum, a social service center in the Back Bay, and later we crashed a Sunday afternoon soiree held by Mel King, the towering African-American politico and intellectual. While we ate Mel’s seafood stew, Mel held forth in his kitchen, every bit as regal as an African king.

In Cambridge, I looked up Brenda Walcott, the African-American poet and dramatist, who was living hard and poor but still had her dignity. She was getting ready to leave the city for Martha’s Vineyard and sold me a copy of her sixteen-page booklet of poems: Slave of a Slave. Brenda had three tickets to an underground theatre production, so Lance joined us for the play. Afterwards, we met the cast at a local diner and talked and ate until two in the morning. When Lance and I tried to find a way home: no subway cars, no buses, no cabs. At last we reached Boston, but how to get to Lance’s digs in Jamaica Plain? And what was the point? Lance had a key to the Boston Forum. We slept in our clothes on secondhand sofas.

The next time I got to Boston was December 1994. I had started Cune and was paying courtesy calls on book reviewers. Lance and I met in Davis Square, in Somerville, a stop or two up the line from Harvard Square. There we waited in the Someday Cafe, a Seattle-style coffee house that is divided into two storefront rooms a few feet apart—which is how we almost missed Lee Mintz, my old freshman roommate from Grove House at Stanford. Lee had been an expert on Haiti in his Stanford days and a practitioner of karate before it became popular. Lee was a Jew, and I think karate was his way of taking revenge on Hitler, so to speak.

Lance and Lee and I sat at a large table in the corner of room number two, the cafe’s living room, and we were talking but Lance didn’t say much, just his sly, tight grin. Lance doesn’t carry fat on his body, so his grin is very thin. Lee was filling us in on the history and philosophy of human culture and, every so often when he took a breath, I blurted out a few truisms about the need for writers to band together and form their own presses. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Then Katherine Powers arrived. I didn’t know her, but she was a friend of Paul Aaron’s. Paul is a guy from a Brandeis think tank who knows everyone from Jonathan Raban to Patrick Seale. So Katherine was new, but promised that we could recognize her because of her fierce, Irish eyes. Her eyes were fierce. She is a freelance writer, the daughter of a famous Irish novelist, and she reviews books for the Globe. She spends most of her waking hours reading literature: "I’m unbelievably lucky," she said. She and Lee sized each other up while I talked about book publishing. Lance kept his sly grin going, looking to me, then to Lee and Katherine when they stopped sizing and took hold of the publishing question. Both Lee and Katherine more or less liked my ideas. But they needed to rework them to make them palatable. Lee went off on a long, brilliant riff on the film industry, citing parallels to publishing.

Katherine excused herself, she was reading that evening. But Lance had hardly done more than give her his smile. I wanted to stop her for a minute and help her appreciate the ticking that I knew was going on in Lance’s mind but she was in a hurry and Lance wasn’t helping much. That’s Lance. Totally unconcerned about what people—even book reviewers—think of him. After Katherine left, Lance and Lee and I went down the block to the India restaurant, which had a big sign over the door. "Authentic Indian Cuisine," it announced in yellow, vaguely Sanskrit letters on a blazing red background. This place had tablecloths and no other guests. I ate curried chicken over rice and listened while Lance and Lee tussled with the question of African-American schools in Cincinnati just before and after the Civil War.

For several years now Lance has been writing a book about Boston’s African-American community—including some fascinating stuff on Malcolm X. He couldn’t care less about schmoozing and networking. He is a thinker and writer, attuned to the moment by moment emergence of ideas.

—Scott C. Davis

Bio
Lance Carden
Place of residence: Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
Birthplace: Oklahoma City.
Grew up in: Lawton, Oklahoma.
Day job: Monitor Radio.
Education: M.F.A. in creative writing, University of Oregon.
Book: Witness, an Oral History of Black Politics in Boston 1920–1960, Boston College (1989).
Serial publication: The Christian Science Monitor.
Current project: An interpretive history of blacks in Boston.
Favorite book: A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul.

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