When I was a child, there were a few occasions where my mother brought me to Canobie Lake Park. If you're not from the area, Canobie is an amusement park alongside a lake of the same name, in Salem, New Hampshire. It's a decent place (still cranking every summer), and I'd been several times as a kid—knocked my head around the House of Mirrors and giggled, played in the arcade collecting tickets for prizes, and got soaked on the Log Flume ride—hands up, smiles abound. It was great fun to be there, to explore, and to wonder. I appreciated the architecture of the place as much as the rides themselves. Meticulous details were the grab for my eyes, imaginative crannies the designers had tapped into, in order to ensure park visitors felt like they were in another world. And I did.
It was a magic place, cut from the same cloth that made Disneyland. However, there was one autumn Friday night (1986?) that stands out from the rest of my visits. A babysitter of mine and her boyfriend had brought me to Canobie—just the three of us, as my mother was out on a date. When we arrived in the boyfriend's car, the lot was madness. I'd never seen it like that during any of my visits with Mom.
From the backseat, I could see flickering neon, hear the roar of the roller-coasters and crowd, and a new excitement came over me, not unlike like the cool and constant fall breeze, pushing itself over my hair through a card-thin-crack of the window next to my head.
We walked through the main gates after paying, and although it was nighttime, I remember clear skies overhead. How I could see any of those stars while surrounded by the twinkling light pollution, I still don't know. But I did see them. I remember the pure and ever-present of the white, however small—still beautiful in that place of electric stimulation. Past the hot dog stands and payphones, around the oddly designed hedges, and near the amphitheater, we continued deeper into the park. My babysitter kept my hand in her own—loosely, carelessly—far too preoccupied with Brad, or Brian, or whatever his name was. I was a tag-along, but of course she couldn't ditch me, much as she probably would have liked to.
The evening had been running smoothly. I didn't understand that I was the third wheel, so I didn't care. They gave me Coca-Cola as I played the rubber duck game. That's the one that promises, "Everybody is a winner!" I won something. A wall sticky: cyclops, purple.
I'd gone on some rides (babysitter watched), played Pac-Man, and did my best to stay close to my guardian when she wasn't necking beneath the sandy blonde hair of Prince Charming. Despite missing my mother a bit, everything was just as it should have been.
But life has a funny way of slithering around a child's joy, choking it dead like an anaconda.
Something was off, and suddenly—the way a special vase falls from the mantle, or a firework bursts the moment the flame meets the wick. No time to get away. There were noises and some yelling, though it wasn't the hands-up-elation on some spinning ride. This was real panic. Park visitors around and ahead of us were spilling out from the lower, more ominous section of the park—a place I knew the haunted house was located. I was afraid of that "ride," too young to find any value in being scared shitless for the hell of it.
"Someone's been stabbed," a voice nearby said. I can't tell you that I knew what that statement meant. I didn't. I heard it, but it was the reaction of my babysitter that sounded my alarm. Suddenly I was afraid. Her teenage hand tightened quick around mine, as she yanked me toward the arcade, the Matterhorn—to safety. Her boyfriend whined a brief protest, angry in tightening denim, but my babysitter moved hurriedly and did her job. She knew better.
As people rushed through the park, their open mouths and pale faces were another sign of danger. Canobie had been a happy place only moments beforehand—a Friday night to achieve escape, eat fried dough, and whip your stomach around thereafter, all while trying not to get sick. But as the masses moved past, the orange neon of the arcade sign was replaced by the emergency blue of police lights.
I could be wrong, but I believe that was the first day I understood what someone being dead meant. I felt the permanence of it, the weight of finality, as I stood shivering along a whimsically designed pathway, like something from Oz. Canobie didn't seem wonderful anymore to me, a realization that was acute, and terrible. The architecture soon failed me, too. A white sign near my elbow read "Pirate Ship," with a squiggly arrow painted in black. I looked in the direction of the ship and saw it somehow, shut down and impossibly black against the backdrop of night. These rides weren't manifestations of imagination—they weren't magical at all. Someone had to turn on that pirate ship, had to paint that sign—an artist, a kid from college, somebody. But it wasn't a pirate, and that transparency is what ultimately did me in. Creation of those things was nothing but a ploy for dollars. And in a decade dominated by Reaganomics and consumerism, maybe that makes sense. Maybe that is where I was supposed to learn about reality—about the loss of some portion of my innocence.
Someone was stabbed, dead maybe. It scared the hell of out me. It's fitting that I was at the amusement park, with all of the make-believe any kid could handle. Because in that moment, one in which I lost something so very special to me, I learned something about humanity, and what people were capable of.
Behind my frightened and cold body, my babysitter stood, all of 105 pounds of her, aiming at the carnage she knew was deep inside the park. Adults around us were worried and vocal about it, and when they demonstrated fear, my babysitter simply placed her lips onto the top of my head for a moment and whispered that it was going to be okay. We stayed there for a long while, the two of us, both of her warm hands slung over my chest.
Sometimes all we need is for someone to tell us that it's going to be okay, even if it isn't true. That type of make-believe is worth believing in, far more than cartoon mice and jolly pirates. A calm tone, a pair of warm hands, and the good in someone.
Thanks, young lady, whoever you are. I appreciate it.
Barry