My Thoughtless Wonderland

Returning To Cedar Point Amusement Park, Where My Feet Work More Than My Head

The story goes that once I learned to walk, I ran. My friends joke that even when I’m sitting still, I’m bouncing in anticipation of the next sprint I’ll make to the bus stop or the Metro station.

My father gave me a craving for adrenaline. I was six when he first took me to the place I still consider the motherland of thrills, a spit of land off the coast of Lake Erie that remains Ohio’s only redeeming element: Cedar Point Amusement Park. Located in the northern Ohio city of Sandusky, about halfway between Toledo and Cleveland, Cedar Point is the second-oldest amusement park in the country. It plays host to over 3 million visitors per year. Most of them are high schoolers on field trips and couples who bond over their mutual hatred of long lines and expensive carnival food.

For my dad, Cedar Point meant something different. He’d worked his way through college at the park, counting money by day and riding coasters by night. Here, he became himself in the best way, using his systematic brain to analyze the crowds and predict whether the Millennium Force or Maverick would have longer lines. Although he now puts his skills to better use as an accountant at General Motors, I bet there are some days when he would trade it all to be back among the rides.

Even long after he’d stopped working at Cedar Point, my dad returned there–alone and with friends, then with me and my sister. While my friends left the Detroit suburbs to visit their grandparents in Florida or traveled up north to cottages in the redneck stretch of Michigan known as the UP, we bought season passes and spent as many as 10 weekends a summer on that little peninsula. It may seem mundane–to keep going back again and again to stand in the same lines and ride the same rides–but that was the beauty of it. Think less, do more.

I memorized the locations of the cameras that took pictures on all the rides (usually in the last tunnel or twist or flip of the track). If I was hungry, I knew the Oreo milkshakes at the 1950s-esque diner were the best value in the park. I could tell you that the blue car usually won on the twin-track Gemini rollercoaster, even though the red one led until the last second.

I lost sunglasses and cameras to the wind and destroyed shoes sprinting through a downpour to become one of the first 500 riders on the now-five-year-old Maverick. Yet the loss was never painful. I was glad to let little bits of myself become ingrained in this alternate universe.

After I left for college, Washington, D.C. took Cedar Point’s place as my second home. Two weeks ago, though, I took my coaster-loving engineer boyfriend back to Cedar Point. As we walked around, my memory as our map, I felt myself becoming defensive. Yes, the park is small, some of the rides are tame, and its parent company has declared bankruptcy. But for me, Cedar Point will always be the place where my mind slows down, even as my feet accelerate.

Mary Clare Fischer is an intern at Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo courtesy of Suzanne Fischer.


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