Giant Dipper Dreams, Barf Cars, & Roaring Drunks
It's a model of engineering efficiency and human imagination, a reminder of a time before silicon slide-rules and polycarbon steel alloys. Nature provided all the materials and locomotion, save for one tiny nineteenth-century dynamo pulling us up to the apex, the highest manmade point as far as the eye can see. Last night I visited the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and experienced the Giant Dipper, a 1927 wood rollercoaster, the seventh oldest in the U.S. still in operation, the genuine article and the real McCoy. It wasn't my first time, but really, isn't every time your first when it comes to these grand old contraptions?
Before I continue with these sepia-toned cream-frosting musings, let me set the scene. We traveled over Highway 17 -- the Freeway of Perilous Death, as we call it around here -- to Santa Cruz, arriving around eight or so last night. The Boardwalk, if you've never seen it, is situated parallel to a genuine beach of wheat-colored sand and volleyball nets and lifeguards, a bit of a rarity in Northern California. At night, the flashing lights of the rides illuminates the beach out to the water where the world then turns dull green-gray, and then black. No matter. Spinning rides and carney games and fair food kept us feeling secure. The Boardwalk stays open late during the summer, and with the warm weather everyone had taken to it, like water finding its own level.
Beer is served freely, those porn-star-phallus 24-ounce cans being the delivery mechanism of choice. There was the usual share of celebratory drinking. I don't terribly mind drunks until they start acting rowdy, and then my guard goes up. As we waited in line for the Giant Dipper, a young man in a 60s British Mod outfit stood just behind us, drunk off his ass. The line stopped moving and he began leering at everyone, pulling up his shirt and slapping his belly. Humorous, creepy, sloven -- all adjectives work.
The line had stopped, it seems, because some drunk (another drunk) had puked in his or her seat during the ride. The attendants had to clean it up, which, of course, is a great production of rock-paper-scissors, antiseptic cleaner, snapped-on surgical gloves, and reams and reams of paper towels. Most of the line cleared out save for a few determined riders and the damn drunk behind us. He found the cleaning exercise hilarious, and took to leaning over the wood railing in the roundabout and screaming vowels at the station attendants. At first everyone laughed, which egged him on. Then people yelled for him to shut up, which encouraged him further.
I forgot about him once we were aboard. (There was a hole in the line to the cars, everyone avoiding the seats in the proximity of the Barf Car.) The Giant Dipper is, frankly, a helluva lot of fun, and its engineer had enough imagination to keep the ride exciting from the first second to the final. Most rollercoasters start with pulling the cars up to the summit. The Giant Dipper, using a little bit of gravity, drops from the roundabout (which is slightly elevated) into a long wood tunnel with sudden shifts left and right. During the day, sunlight filters in, but at night, it's pitch dark. By the time you reach the train, you're heart's going.
From the summit it's a straight drop, a banked turn, and some up-and-down dips with wood beams acting as headchoppers. That is, you seem to be heading straight for them when suddenly the track drops and they pass overhead. Another banked turn, another drop, and more headchoppers. Another turn, a few more dips and potential decapitation, and you're back in the roundabout. They say the ride's about two minutes long, but it feels like twenty intense seconds.
Roaring drunks, barf cars, bitch-get-on-ya-knees hip-hop blaring from cars; in-your-face people and their tactics of transgression -- sometimes I need to recede to simpler days to remind me life can be, and once was, a fun place to live.
