Scientists say that our ancestors, in the very dim distance of time, left a swinging existence (not jazz, but something literally arboreal) to take up walking, running and sometimes marching in rank.
I have had a lifelong uneasiness with amusement park rides which involve height and which could lead to vertigo, of the severe Hitchcock variety.
My parents took me to Tweetsie Railroad not long after it opened in 1957, but I found nothing frightening about Tweetsie that day. The train remained horizontal (not like the inclined railway at Maggie Valley) and went around ěRoundhouse Mountain.î Looking back, riding Tweetsie was much like riding a terrestrial public conveyance. Failure to master Tweetsie would have equaled failure to master the schoolbus ride to Granite Quarry School, East Rowan, and in college, some weekend trips to and from Salisbury on Trailways.
I enjoyed the side shows and agricultural exhibits of the Rowan County Fair, but not the rides. The one time that I accumulated enough courage to ride the Ferris wheel, the riding of it just confirmed my well-founded fear. Even riding it then in the early 1960s with my friend Ronnie, his friendship wasnít enough to overcome my symptoms of panic. I remember Ronnieís face registering smiles and enjoyment, while I was glad that there wasnít a mirror around to reflect what was registering on my face. I did better when we rode the ěscrambler.î It went around, but instead of transcribing a vertical circle like the Ferris wheel, its transcription was horizontal.
The merry-go-round was fine, but if an older boy were to make a habit of riding it, he would have endured a great deal of ribbing from his friends.
Itís funny how things can be interpreted differently at different times in oneís life. If I were to drive down to the Rowan County Fair this fall and ride the merry-go-round, someone might say: ěWhat a special moment, an old man reliving his youth,î but if they were to inquire of me, I would totally burst their bubble of an ěold manís reverieî by answering:îYou donít understand; the reason that Iím riding the merry-go-round is because when it comes to rides, this is just about my speed.î
Later on, during the East Rowan band trip to Washington, D.C., in 1966, when egged on by fellow band members, I tried something new again (the encouragement of peers is sometimes a dangerous thing; it makes one forget what his true nature is).
My friend Howard and I rode a roller coaster together. When we finished, I think that Howard offered a prayer of thanks that we had survived, and I kissed the ground, as the Pontif is often seen to do when his plane has landed safely on the tarmac.
I conquered my fear of the height of the Washington Monument in my ascent of its steps, since I was doing that for which I was adapted as a creature ěwalking.î
While in college at Appalachian, I rode the Tweetsie chairlift with my late wife (with eyes closed and arms numb) up to what was then called ěMagic Mountain,î where an animatronic giant slept in a pink castle. Just why the castle was pink, I donít know. In Norse mythology there are giants and castles, as there are in some of the music dramas of Richard Wagner, but none of those castles happen to be pink.
I did conquer the ěsky bucketsî at Kingís Dominion theme park in Virginia with my late wife, Diane, and children, Rachel and Jeremy, but its traversal of the park, although at some height, was primarily horizontal in nature, qualifying it in my mind as a mostly horizontal ride, at just a different level in its relation to the ground.
There was, however, one exception to rides of a horizontal and terrestrial nature inspiring no fear in me. That was the time that I caught a ride home from Appalachian with my friend Randy, in which his traversal of the distance from Boone to Salisbury seemed to take just short of an hour and a quarter. My uneasiness on that trip wasnít due to vertigo, but just garden-variety abject fear.
I did manage to collect enough courage to fly in a plane when I flew with my late wife and our daughter to Walt Disney World and Epcot Center in 1983. Having grown up watching TVís ěWonderful World of Disneyî and seeing scenes of Disneyland on that program, a Disney theme park was always something that I had wanted to see.
Perhaps the excitement about it being something which everyone should see before they die made me not reflect so much about the possibility of falling 30,000 feet to the earth and actually dying. For the most part, the flight was smooth, but when we hit some air turbulence, I had the sensation of feeling my stomach drop, giving me some second thoughts about my decision to fly.
In reflecting on all of this, one of the things that defines life, especially where fauna are concerned, is the presence of motion. Even coral polyps and hydra have some movement. I always felt comfortable with the necessary amount of motion that defined me as a living thing, but when that motion involved the choice of height and the possibility of vertigo, I was most often content to do what my most distant ancestors, in that most distant and dim time long ago had done, ětake to the ground.î