A DAY IN THE ABUSEMENT PARK  (UNABRIDGED)

                                                               by Neville Raymond

            It was D-Day - the Thursday before Memorial Day, 2014.  Thinking to beat the summer rush, we piled the kids into the car and set out to storm the Magic Kingdom.  Our sons had never been and we looked forward to basking in their pleasure as first-timers.

            A heads up on the parking lot tram.  Its roof seems to have been built for the Seven Dwarves.  Even my wife (who is barely taller than my 12-year old) had to work at not bumping her head.

           

            At the park entrance, we decided to start with California Adventure.  
            Our first choice, Soaring Over California, did not disappoint.  Swooping through majestic panoramas, like the Golden Gate Bridge, snow-covered slopes, and canopies of redwood forests, was a thrill that probably would never be equaled unless we took up hang gliding.  Even then we couldn't cram so many landscapes into a few minutes. 

            Next was Radiators Springs Racers, but within minutes of lining up we got the bad news.  It had suffered a mechanical breakdown – apparently one in a notorious string of such breakdowns.  Deciding not to wait we headed for Disneyland proper.

            Inside the park, our hope of escaping the Memorial weekend crush was dashed. Turns out we had timed our attendance for Grad Day!  The park was swarming with thousands of teens, converging from all sides, laughing and chatting without a care.  Before noon lines for major attractions had ballooned to interminable lengths and even minor attractions had unusually long wait times. 

           

            Suddenly the calculus of pain-pleasure was flipped on its head.  If the average time for inching through lines for major rides is conservatively estimated from 60 to 90 minutes, our day was consumed by at least six hours of doing nothing but twiddling our thumbs and making idle chitchat.  The payoff was a fleeting series of thrills lasting a sum total of 10 minutes, if that!             

            

             600 seconds of thrills to show for 6 hours of wait time!  And that’s on a good day!  Who in their right mind puts up with a cost-benefit ratio this skewed?              

             At intervals along the lines winding in and out of endless roped mazes were trashcans labeled “Waste”.  I fantasized that cans throughout the park were labeled “Wasted Time”.  If visitors dumped their precious hours there, they would overflow with tens of thousands of hours each and every day! 

            If time is money, as they say, what shall we say of a corporation that keeps relentlessly raising ticket prices while lowering the amount of time we can actually spend on enjoying its big-ticket rides?

            But hey, let’s remember we are there for the rides - and forget about how a corporate policy of packing ‘em in takes us for a ride.  If Soaring Over California had been a graceful glider ride on a sunny day, Disneyland's big attractions pride themselves on their ear-splitting stomach-churning bone-jarring bouts of turbulence. 

            As rough-and-tumble rides go Indiana Jones wasn't that bad.  The kids loved it and clamored for more.  Next came Splash Mountain.  My eldest found it a blast.  From a picture taken of us at the moment of the critical drop, my younger son didn’t fare as well.  The camera caught him with his cheeks puffed up.  He was attempting to breathe at the dreaded moment when the coaster goes over the precipice, but only succeeded in filling his cheeks with air!  

            We then switched gears and went for gentler rides.  Jungle Cruise (which showed its age), the twirling teacups at Mad Tea Party, and Snow White’s Scary Adventures.  Peter Pan was a letdown.   I remembered the unforgettable scene from my childhood when the boat sails over a panorama of moonlit London, with the Thames and Big Ben clearly delineated.  This time around the whole scene was virtually blacked out.  It was like being transported back to London during the Blitz!

            At Autopia the kids got a kick out of acting all grow-up, steering cars around an enclosed track.  They insisted on going back a second time. 

            At Matterhorn the line was like a serpent that had swallowed its tail.  Leaving my wife to hold our place, we headed for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.  By now it was dark, so we didn’t see how overcrowded it was.  After inch-worming around in lines for close to two hours, we were seated on a runaway train that took us through the bowels of a mine at breakneck speed, with special audio and lighting effects that had been upgraded over the years.  My oldest couldn’t get over the mock cave-in and pyrotechnic explosions.  We sat side-by-side and survived the experience exhilarated.

            So far it was just another day at Disneyland.  The mob scene wasn't ideal, the long lines intolerable, but what else is new?  Nothing in all this led me to revise my opinion of amusement parks.  Then something happened that jolted me awake.  And I got to thinking that while theme parks like Disneyland have much to offer in the way of innocuous fun, there is something about them – some Dumbo of an elephant flying around the room - that we avoid talking about.  It was an ah-ha moment that shifted my perception and led me to think that perhaps that “m” in “amusement” park should be replaced with a “b”.  Then we might just see them for what they are – “abusement" parks.  

            As concerned parents, we want to keep our children safe.  Safe from toxic toys.  Safe from street criminals.  Safe from schoolyard bullies.  But then we suffer a momentary lapse in judgment.  We take them to a place where they are grabbed by an enraged giant and shaken like a victim of Shaken Baby Syndrome.  They are hurled into a grudge match with gravity that flattens their young bodies with more G forces than even astronauts endure.  They are jerked and spun around, bounced and twisted as if caught up in the tumble-dry cycle of a mammoth dryer.  They suffer hundred-foot drops and precipitous plunges that leave even adults with the bottom falling out of their stomachs.   

            Most of us wouldn’t treat a dog that way.  And here we are treating our children - who just a few short years ago were babies in arms - in this unhinged, deranged, almost berserk way which, if it were done to a family pet, would be grounds for animal cruelty.   

            We call it a day at Disneyland.  Magic Mountain.  Knott’s Berry Farm.  A socially accepted way of having harmless fun.  Am I the only one that finds this a little crazy, or what?  Parents pride themselves on being sensitive to a child’s feelings.  We practice nonviolent communication with their budding spirits.  And their growing bodies?  Those we allow to be shaken, rattled, jolted and jerked around, hurled and accelerated through 4-Gs, subjected to bone-jarring stresses, head-whipsawing forces and stomach-churning 100-foot drops!

            How can we be conscious parents in so many areas of our children’s lives and yet be so unconscious when it comes to this?  How can we be responsible custodians of young lives and yet allow their bodies to be treated with such shocking disregard?  The human body is an exquisitely sensitive organism.  Trillions of cells intricately organized into muscles, nerves, heart, and brain. Only now are we fathoming the brain injuries that children and adults sustain by recklessly colliding on the football field.  Perhaps it is time to take stock of the bone-jarring, nerve-wracking, brain-crunching violence that children encounter at a place billed as the happiest on earth.   
            Splash Mountain.  Space Mountain.  Matterhorn.

            Matterhorn?  Yes, Matterhorn.  I am a grown man in good health, with no preexisting conditions.  I was stunned by this ride and appalled by how it left me feeling.  

            It seems we had saved the worst for last.  After my wife had spent two hours holding our place, we had to go on Matterhorn.  As a teenager I remembered it as a rather pleasant simulation of a bobsled ride.  Repeated upgrades turned it into a ride I hadn't bargained for.  First there was the off-the-charts bouncing and jouncing from the wheels, scrambling the brains and slamming the spine.  The engineers skimped on the shock absorbers for either sadistic reasons or to save a measly buck.  Then there was a madcap careening through cavernous darkness.  Many times it looked we were going to fly off the mountain only to be jerked around at the last moment and whipsawed back on track.  What had we let ourselves in for?  With mounting dread my heart went out to my youngest.  I couldn’t reach back to comfort him and my voice was lost in the thunderous din.   By the time the ride screeched to a halt, I didn’t just feel upset.  I felt violated.  Vowing to never go again, I wondered how a body could hope to escape unscathed after repeatedly going through something like that.

           

            Attention-grabbing headlines on roller coasters are reserved for accidental deaths from ride malfunctions.  At issue here is something more insidious.  It is the harm done to children’s fragile bodies when a ride functions perfectly, just the way it is supposed to.  It may not be damage visible to the naked eye.  But it is the thousand neurological disturbances that occur when the human organism is strapped into a mechanical device whose sole purpose seems to be to push it to the limits of endurance.  Are we aware of the subtle damage done to brain stems, spines, vital organs?  Forget about obvious symptoms like nausea, headaches and dizzy spells.  Do we test for sub-clinical tears and lesions?  Is anyone monitoring the arrhythmic pattern into which the heart lapses, or the microscopic vessels in the brain that rupture and hemorrhage? 

            No, no one is.  The amusement park industry sees to that.  Its unspoken mission is to foil all legislative efforts at federal oversight.  Even accidents that make the 6 ‘o clock news - of bodies catapulted from seats through a failure of restraint mechanisms or crushed by colliding cars – can't seem to mobilize public opinion in favor of regulation.  Fixed-ride amusement operators have lobbied Congress to remain masters of their domain.  There are no federal guidelines to say that 4-Gs of force is too much – though even trained astronauts are spared that much – or that this accelerative stress point or that level of decelerative strain is pushing it.  It's literally the wild blue sky out there. 

             Yet the body has its own organic limits, even if fixed-ride park operators refuse to abide by any federal ones.  With their eye on boosting attendance, park operators vie to come up with the tallest, fastest, meanest, scariest ride experiences.  Meanwhile, the Annals of Emergency reported that amusement ride-related brain injury had risen substantially since 1990.  Tears notably develop in the inner layers of the carotid and vertebral artery from indirect trauma or torsion of the neck.  Blood surging through these tears can cause the inner and middle layers to separate or dissect.  “The acceleration and abrupt changes in direction on a roller coaster may induce uncontrolled rotation of the head with stretching of the cervical vessels and aorta similar to that observed with acute deceleration in a motor vehicle crash.”   
             From 1996 to 200 injuries on amusement park rides jumped 60 percent.  More than 10,000 injuries needed emergency room treatment, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.  And then there is the anecdotal evidence.  The National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke in Bethesda, MD, reported that almost 60 people suffered brain trauma after being on thrill rides that operated normally.  Eight died.

            And that was back in 2002!  Did it shame park owners into quitting their insane race to come up with action rides that launch even more ferocious assaults on the human body?  Were they guilted into commissioning real-time scientific studies to determine what these thrill rides do to growing bodies?  The New York Times reported that ten years prior to 2002, “there was no such thing as a hypercoaster, a roller coaster that reaches 200 feet or higher. Now, the record is 400 feet. Until a few years ago, roller coasters gained momentum purely by gravity. Now many are catapulted from zero to 70 miles an hour in less than four seconds by motors originally designed to launch rockets.” 

            

           And here we are, twelve years down the road, and the much-hyped changes in rollercoaster design keep on coming.  What about the corresponding changes in heart rate, blood flow, brain chemistry?  They may pose short and long term harm, but they remain out of sight, out of mind.  We don’t know the incidence of memory loss.  We don’t count the many mini-strokes occur.  We don’t calculate the chances of microscopic bleeding in the brain.  Sure we can speculate.  We can draw reasoned inferences that the body – especially of a child – can only take so much abuse without suffering a predictable toll.  But who is there to measure it?   Who tracks the long-range wear and tear on the human organism from being put through the wringer on these rides?  We will never get hard data on the invisible dangers – not until the industry allows medics to be positioned at entrances and exits to thrill rides, scanning people's brains before they get on, then once again after they get off. 

           

          Without before-and-after examinations of brain and body scans, there is no way to detect the internal harm wreaked on the millions who mindlessly queue up hour after hour for a few seconds of thrills.  Only by running a controlled series of neurological tests on site is it possible to quantify the memory loss…brain hemorrhage…arrhythmia of the heart.  Only then can we say with certainty that two rides a month – or a year or ten years or never - is a safe level of exposure on Mind Eraser or Drop of Doom.

            Don’t hold your breath for that to happen anytime soon.  An industry that insists on investigating its own accidents is not about to throw open the doors to men in white coats to come in and rain on its parade.  Next to nothing is known about the prevalence of roller coaster injuries and deaths because the industry - acting on the principle that ignorance is bliss - quashes every bill that would allow the feds to come in and enforce safety inspections and investigations.  And there is no doubt that if they are left to their ever-scarier devices, they will push the envelope until the aneurism bursts. 

            

            So until the science catches up with our concerns – and until we have a national database that keeps statistical tabs on the neurological risks posed by various thrill rides, along with a list of the side effects of habitually or occasionally using them to get an adrenaline fix - what can we do as parents?  

            The first thing is to trust our instincts – our own and those of our children.  If a young child is scared or reluctant to go on a ride, don’t force him.  As children grow older, their peers may be contemptuous of their partiality for kiddie rides.  They may urge them to graduate to the big-boy rides – you know, the ones with G forces that make you weak at the knees and knock you into the middle of next week.  This is our cue as parents to step up to the plate.  Children must be taught that bullies don’t always do their work by directly assaulting us with words and blows – they sometimes do it by pushing us into dangerous situations where we are assaulted by overwhelming forces which no body (let alone a child’s) is equipped to handle – at least, not without traumatizing itself on some level.

            Some people use putdowns like fraidy-cat, which is ironic because if we treated a cat in this way we would have to answer charges of animal cruelty.  They label us killjoys and party-poopers because we get cold feet at the sight of a 400-foot drop or the prospect of 10 inversions.  Let’s remember that a bully doesn’t have to push a child around to hurt him.  He can just push him to jump off the roof on a dare and let gravity do the job.  

            Above all, let’s not forget that counting a newborn baby’s fingers and toes is just for starters.  It is up to us as parents to teach our children to be in awe of our bodies and the intricate, beautiful way they are put together.  As we learn to cherish our bodies, we no longer take for granted the many conventional ways in which we assault them.  Rock concerts are billed as high-energy fun - but high decibel assaults on eardrums cause rapid hearing loss in rock musicians under thirty.  Is the thrill of being blasted at rock and roll concerts worth a lifetime of progressive deafness? 

           

            So the next time we plan on getting our jollies by going through the latest thrill mill, the question to ask ourselves is this.  Are we really so bankrupt of natural ways of having fun that we have to put ourselves through the unnatural strains and stresses of amusement park rides with names like Colossus and Goliath?  Are we so deadened physically that the only way we can enjoy ourselves is to become adrenaline junkies and ritualistically offer up our bodies to be slung around and swung upside down hundreds of feet in the sky at record-breaking rates of acceleration and deceleration? 

           

            Why not make our awareness of the intrinsic dangers of white-knuckle thrills a jumping-off point to return to the innocuous joys of childhood?  Nobody has to buy ever-higher-priced tickets for the delight of squelching their toes in the mud or racing paper boats on a mountain stream.  Or the thrill of toasting marshmallows or watching meteor showers on a summer night.  Or the giggles and guffaws from a game of charades.  

             Isn’t the joy of flying a kite enough?  Must we hold out for the thrill of being buffeted around like a kite in a windstorm?  If children were free to let their imaginations run wild, couldn’t they find ways of feeling at the top of the world without being catapulted hundreds of feet into the air?  Couldn’t they figure out ways to laugh, sing, and be merry without being pinned against their seats by giant machines and spun around inside a metal centrifuge?  When it comes right down to it, don’t children already have everything it takes to come fully 100% alive without testing themselves in one death-defying action ride after another?           

            There is a whole world out there ready to bring a smile to our faces – a squeal of delight to our lips – a light-hearted skip to our steps.  There are natural wonders and mysteries aplenty to make the hairs on the back of our necks stand up.   All we have to do is to raise our sensitivity to the little things in life – and we can make big happy memories indelible enough to last a lifetime!   

            In the end, the only thing that limits our capacity for joy and pleasure is our own imaginations – and our infallible instincts for knowing what is in harmony with our psychobiology - and what stands to do it violence under the guise of having fun.