For my birthday Josh Lewis got me a gift to pacify my dreams of being shot out of a cannon:
This summer, early June, I found myself having a hard time getting to sleep. This is very rare. I generally can sleep anytime anywhere. It wasn’t coffee that was keeping me awake. What was brewing were clear visions of being a human cannonball! It made sense. It’s the only thing I could think of that would closely imitate superhero flight(superheroes without wings, that is.). I pictured the long cannon aimed to shoot slightly over a small forest alongside a sandy beach. I, of course, would be shot out of the cannon at about 70 mph, glide over the tops of the trees(trees to maximize the feeling of speed), overshoot the beach and, like a flat stone, skip over the water until I slip into the water like a knife sliding under the skin of a fish. I often feel that if I can visualize it, I can do it.
Anyway, Josh caught wind of my lofty reverie and probably following the same path of research I trod he found that there are no weekend human cannonball retreats! No human cannonball classes! No human cannonball kits or Human Cannonball Guide for Idiots!! Nothing!!! Any possibility would involve extensive training and I’d probably have to follow around a circus for a few years before they’d let me near a barrel. Also and sadly, human cannonballs don’t really make their bang for their buck. Waka waka waka!
So. Josh looked elsewhere. He looked for a solution where I wouldn’t have to sell the home and car for the Big Top. Where he found it was right here in the Twin Cities (Well, actually, it was in Shakopee, but close enough; at least wouldn’t have to drive to Sarasota, Florida). His discovery was hiding in the not unlikeliest of places…Valley Fair!!! The ride: The Ripcord!!!!!!!
*scream in Doppler effect*
It can hold up to three people (I went it alone) and is basically an 18-story swing. It is situated as such:
Poles A and B both have wires permanently(one hopes) connected to a midpoint. This midpoint has some connecting gadgets that hook up to the harness. The harness is a big canvass diaper of sorts with a foot bar, which tightens all the straps when you step on it and keeps you from flailing your feet around. When you are strapped into your harness the operators lead you to a hydraulic lift. They bring you up to the midpoint hookup, attach you to the wires, then suddenly drop the floor out from under you. The operators seems to enjoy the shock produced from nearly smashing your face into the metal platform. At this point one might considering the idiocy of putting ones life into the hands of highschoolers. Only, before you can express change of heart a wire from behind yanks you up to the top of Pole C. In less than a minute you are facing 18 stories of atmosphere. Looking down your eyes see chain-linked fence. A concrete sidewalk. Some grass. Your girlfriend with her phone camera pointed at you. Awed faces of children not yet 48″ tall. Go-karts. While your mind fills in bits of guts and blood trailing the pathway your are about swing over.
Somewhere behind you a loud speaker jolts, “Onetwothree.” This is where you are supposed to pull the ripcord, the ride’s namesake. Near your right armpit there’s a little red handle, not unlike something you’d find on a lawnmower. This, you pull. And it really does feel a little like suicide. The image of your body hanging over the chain-linked fence is still floating in your retina. Your brain is not so sure you won’t die: wasn’t there a horrible accident earlier this summer where a snapped wire sliced off the feet of a teenage girl on some thrill ride down South? But that’s why you’re up here, right? To tease Death? To dive into his rank expiration and come up again reborn, so to speak? You pull; you choose flight.
The first few seconds feel like when you are swinging too high on a swing set and the tension in the chains slackens. You are actually free falling those first moments. When you finally do feel your weight you experience one of the best underdogs of your life. It doesn’t quite feel like flying, or a least flying on your own. It’s more like what Samwise and Frodo must have felt soaring in the talons of the great eagles; you have no control really, but it’s still a great ride. Butterflies!!!
You aren’t supposed to spread your arms until you pass over the metal platform (I’m sure to minimize the severing of limbs). At this point, if you can ignore the feeling of gravity across your chest and crotch, there is that soundless sensation of soaring, much like an albatross catching thermals. It’s fairly calm after you reach zero-velocity in your first swing and your body is slowed by the air. I kind of felt like a caterpillar hanging.
I rode the Ripcord twice that night and got the chance to be more present during the first few moments. During my second descending swoop I understood that this super-swing experience must be fairly parrallel to the experience of getting shot out of a cannon. They’re just reversed arcs really. There’s the same taste of flight, but without the control. The inevitable return to a bottom. My desire to get shot out of a canon dissolved with the waning swing.
In it’s place grew a new fantasy, one only slightly less realistic and indubitably aeronautic: jet-packs!
