Just One Small Step

Each year around this time I am reminded that I would have made a terrible astronaut. Like many American boys and children in general, I had tremendous ideas about my eventual career choice. I went through a professional baseball phase, for example, inspired in large part by Ozzie Smith and the 1982 St. Louis Cardinals. Around the same time I also considered archeology due to the misconception that running and jumping and swinging around on bullwhips was something an archeologist often did. Then later, like countless children before me, I dreamed of being an astronaut. After all, how else would I end up in space? What hope was there that I would ever have the chance to help the rebels in their struggle against the evil galactic empire? I had to be an astronaut. They needed me.

So, what happened?

Math. Math always had a way of spoiling so many of my great ideas. I did not like math and it did not like me, and, to this day, when a student comes up to me in study hall and asks me to help them with their Pre-Algebra, I have to offer this disclaimer: “You’re really rolling the dice on this one, you know that, right?”

Yes, math happened. So, I steered away from any career that relied heavily on numbers or scientific facts, and instead focused my time on words and ideas. Which is just as well, because, even without the math issue, I wouldn’t have made it far in astronaut school. How do I know this? Very simple. My nephews have inadvertently forced me to acknowledge this fact every May for the last three or four years when they convince me to ride The Avalanche.

The Avalanche is one of their favorite rides at Cumberland County’s annual Springfest, held each May in Toledo, Illinois. Like most carnival rides, The Avalanche is loud, bright, and therefore immensely appealing to anyone too young to drive a car. It is composed of a large platform, probably thirty to forty feet wide, with a single row of seats lined across its length. This platform is attached to an arm that lifts the ride into the air and back down, spinning it while the platform itself, thank God, stays relatively parallel to the earth.

Sounds reasonable so far? Allow me to continue.

Shrill, multigenerational rock music blares from giant speakers positioned directly in front of the rider’s faces. Once seated and appropriately dazed by the intense sound, an automatic harness descends onto the chest cavity with a cruel clacking noise, thus making it almost impossible to hear the cracking of anyone’s ribs. Any hope of escape, along with the opportunity for normal breathing, is, at this point, gone. The rider is now entirely at the whim of the smirking workers running the decade’s old controls. Thus secure, a person cannot help but begin to shuffle back through their high school junior year for the correct pronunciation for the Spanish phrase, “Please don’t forget we’re up here spinning.”

Then the “fun” part begins.

Patrons are soon lifted a good thirty feet into the sky. Then they’re basically dropped. Then lifted again. And dropped. Lifted. And dropped.

Most children and adolescents are screaming in delight by this point, enthralled by this sensation, of being squeezed into a seat and then lifted, and dropped, quickly and without mercy, while AC/DC tells everyone in the vicinity about their highway to hell.

No wonder my six-year-old nephew asked me to ride it with him twice.

It occurred to me later on that about the only difference between all this “fun” we were having and what the CIA refers to as “enhanced interrogation techniques” is about three and a half minutes. What makes the ride actually enjoyable, even for the non-adults who signed up, is that it eventually stops. After all, it’s a large, expensive machine designed to make money, but it can only be profitable if it stops lifting and dropping people long enough to let another group with dozens of dollars worth of tickets onto the platform.

Now, imagine (and I did, constantly, throughout the ride) if the machine did not stop. What if it malfunctioned? What if the operators decided to just walk away for a smoke break with the controls switched to “eventual psychosis?” Or, worse, what if they weren’t workers at all, but instead members of a vast Al Qaeda sleeper cell, synchronized to leave all carnival rides running full blast throughout America until their demands were met?

These terrible ideas, then, led me to consider a more practical use for The Avalanche: interrogation device. We don’t need water boarding, or barking dogs, or guards who actually take pictures of themselves breaking numerous international agreements all at the same time. We merely need The Avalanche.

The Geneva Convention says absolutely nothing about carnival rides. Nothing. Imagine how many terrorist plots might be thwarted if our CIA and military had access to a smaller version of this contraption.

“Wow, Lieutenant. I’m impressed. You convinced him to disclose the whereabouts of the rocket launchers and to also admit he has a secret crush on Kate Gosselin. How in the world did you do that?”

“The Avalanche, sir.”

“Ooh. The Avalanche, huh? Sounds top secret. Is that some new technique they’re teaching over at Langley?”

“No, sir. It’s a miniature version of a small-town carnival ride that lifts you up in the air and drops you in a rapid, circular motion until you want to kill yourself, sir.”

“All right, Lieutenant, all right. Whatever. At ease.”

That’s how we win the war on terror, folks. Small town carnival rides. Which may beg the question, “If you’re too big of a baby for The Avalanche, why do you keep riding it time after time, year after year, even after you’ve eaten a corndog and know better?”

Part of me, I guess, still wants to prove I can do it without getting sick. And another part of me does it because it’s fun. Not the ride so much, but the look on my nephew’s face when that harness starts clacking down? That’s fun. His laughter and excitement, and his glorious eagerness to do it again? That’s fun. He’s six, and I was six once, and it makes me wonder what extravagant career choices he’ll make and remake as he grows up. Maybe he’ll want to be an astronaut some day, too. It might not be a rocket, but The Avalanche isn’t a bad place to start.