The Devil and Great Adventure

Gold... power... smokin' hot stringed instrument competitions in two-part harmony with feelin': these are the things the Devil of American fable and song tends to lean toward for his bargaining chips.

But if he'd ever wanted to expand his repertoire a little, I'd say he'd have found himself a thriving new niche market courtesy of one school trip and the Looping Starship down at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey.

It was our junior year high school Physics Class. And the benefit of this class was not simply that we got to drop things that went "sploot" to see them plummet at 9.8 meters per second squared in the name of Science.

Although any 16 year old will tell you, that was pretty satisfying.

No, it was that every year, the junior class went on a field trip to Great Adventure amusement park.

Now this, too, was in the name of Science, and Education, and Big Whirly Things Demonstrating Physics in Action. We knew this, because we were sent with worksheets, where we were supposed to calculate these Real Life Examples scientifically. Y'know, in between applying sunscreen and smearing ourselves with day-glo liquid cheese.

We started out with the best of intentions. Why, we crowded into the Enterprise and understood just how it was that centripital force prevented Sally Rodriguez and Andy Goldberg from being pitched off into Long Island. Which was a disappointment to some because Andy Goldberg had really been holding our football team back this season.

We strapped ourselves into the Pitfall and worked out that yes, my inappropriately loose footwear had, in fact, dropped at 9.8 meters per second squared. And we calculated the distance it would take for me to hop to the nearest souvenir shop to purchase a pair of flip-flops.

We even managed to calculate the amount of force that was behind the lunchtime chili cheese dog, nachos and funnel cake Kelly O'Hara was reintroduced to on the pirate ship.

But when we buckled into the Looping Starship, our view of life was forever changed.

This ride was new at the time, a Space Shuttle-shaped contraption on a 360 degree arm. Having just seen the Challenger blow up in very recent memory, there was already an uneasy sense about the ride.

It would have been like folks in the early 20th century stepping onto a gondola ride named "The Titanic of Love." It sets a certain tone.

But, this ride had also been advertised on local radio and television for months now. Its reputation preceeded it to the point that it had become a thrill ride Collossus.

We were young and pepped up on sugar, and completely game for anything. And so was one of our math teachers. We'll call him Mr. Barnes, an eccentric man who looked a bit like actor Joel Grey with a mustache, and whose wardrobe choices involved glaring polyester primary colors which he would mix-and-match with joyful abandon.

Heretofore, Mr. Barnes had been treated with the bored tolerance you'd expect from teens. He was there to supervise, and nothing more. A kelly green pantsed and yellow shirted and red cardiganed prison guard we tried to block out which, given the color scheme, you can imagine wasn't terribly easy.

When the Starship first started its back-and-forth penduluming, we felt all the optimistic anticipation of youth.

Back and forth... back and forth... higher and higher the Starship it climbed.

Right... left.... backwards... forwards... we swung and rocked.

The harnesses over our heads pressed into our middles as our weight increased against them.

The harnsesses shimmied and wiggled against this pressure, as our view began to swing from sky to ground.

Until finally, finally, there! There, we were hanging like bats above the entire park. Our world turned completely on end. The time we hung there seemed interminably long. And that, my friends, that is when my classmates and I began to crack.

One girl began to laugh uncontrollably. Another was shrieking. And one of my friends began to speak in tongues.

No, wait, it wasn't in tongues. It was just the words she was saying before us were so foreign, so unbelievably impossible, the ears would not initially process it.

"Mr. Barnes, if you get me off of here, I promise, I'll really buckle down in math. I'll get As! I'll start a study group! Really, I will. Just get me offa this thing!"

And the trend began to catch on. As we swept back around the 360 for a second dangling upside down experience of seemingly infinite length, other kids began to make their bargains.

"Totally, Mr. Barnes! I'll do extra credit! I'll tutor other students! I'll clap the erasers without being asked! Just get us down from this thing!"

If Mr. Barnes had been wise, he would have gotten this all down in signed contracts. After all, we did have paper and pens with us.

Because as the Looping Starship finally made its slow, sweeping, careening descent back to Earth, those promises, they evaporated like the blue raspberry Icee stain on Patrick Kennedy's t-shirt.

"So about those A's... when do you want to start that study group?"

The memories of promises made vanished into the humid Jersey early summer air. Even our worksheets were forgotten. We had gotten on the Looping Starship and we survived.

The Devil wouldn't have let us off so easy.

The Great Jersey Kiddom Nature Experience

Jumping off the roof... Biking 'till ya barf as a test of physical endurance... Breaking the land-speed record for downhill sledding until being formally introduced to a tree...

These were all things one of my friends and I detailed recently as very real, once entirely logical past-times of Kiddom.

Ah, Kiddom. That time when virtually anything seemed possible, and sharp boundaries of good judgment often took on a somewhat hazy, more Guideline-oriented position in our enthusiastic, still-developing brains.

I suspect the brains of my friend Sarah and I had been stunted due to one of these boundary issues. If not before one particular day, certainly afterward.

Sarah had lived down the street from me for Practically All of My Life. Which was to say, a couple of years.

And at the very end of her housing complex, at the far back of a long winding drive, was the closest most of us New Jersey-born city kids ever came to Nature...

It was a small park by a brook.

Oh, the park wasn't anything to speak of. It had two metal creatures on springs you could bounce on-- at least until the summer sun got too hot, would heat 'em up until transparent waves reached the power lines, and they'd sizzle our shorts-clad thighs like flabby grilled cheese sandwiches.

There was a circular board on a reluctant lazy-susan type apparatus. Where, with enough energy, you could get to speeds of upwards 1/4 mile an hour. We were more likely to pass out of exhaustion from the effort rather than the thrill.

There was a rusty jungle gym, which soon became just a little too low for us to enjoy in any particular Tarzan antics.

And there were a set of swings, which squeaked their plea for oil the moment you looked at 'em.

Sarah and I liked the swings well enough. But we actually preferred the metal safety bars in front of them. They were designed to keep non-swinging spectators a sensible distance back. But we found them ideal for practicing Olympic-style uneven bars routines.

It was just as Sarah was going for the Gold one day, that I noticed the drops of blood on the ground below her. Sarah was one of those kids who got nosebleeds practically on schedule. I was sure there was a paper on her fridge at home that read:

• Home from school
• Homework
• Snack
• Nosebleed

Well, normally we were at Sarah's house the times her daily Nasal Leeching would begin. But with us out there in the midst of Nature-- a whole 15 minute walk from her house-- well, we weren't about to head home just because of Old Faithful.

No, we decided we would instead find something to sop up the bleeding.

And my, didn't those giant leaves over there by the little brook look handy?

We moved in closer for examination. Or rather, we both moved in-- but Sarah had her head elevated, so I examined. The leaves were beautiful. Great crinkled prehistoric-looking things on long stalks. Something straight out of Land of the Lost. A quick moment of discussion, and we ripped one off and Sarah pressed it to her leaking facial feature. It was working! We had done it! How resourceful we were!

Until we noticed the smell.

We learned later that this beautiful leaf, this fine example of botany was, in fact, Skunk Cabbage. And its stench which-- if we had been truly honest with ourselves, probably smelled no worse than we did as we radiated Olympic sweat and spilled soured Yoo-hoo from lunch-- sent us fleeing into the gently babbling brook.

Sarah began to wash her face, ewwing and shrieking as only a pre-teen girl could. And it was there, in the greenly leaf-dappled light, in the world of waterbugs and mossy rocks and the occasional oily rainbow swirling along the water, it was there we became very thirsty.

And we decided to drink of Nature's Bounty. We'd seen them do just like this on Little House on the Prairie. And Mr. Ingalls would never steer us wrong.

Well, when we arrived back at Sarah's, it didn't take much to determine we'd been up to something. Blood still traced around Sarah's neck. Leafy green stains still smeared her nose and freckled cheeks. Our shoes squelched. Our socks sagged damply around our ankles. Mud dotted our calves.

And in moments, the story unraveled of how yes, Sarah had had another nosebleed but we had completely taken care of it. We were wholly self-sufficient. We mopped up the blood and even enjoyed a nice little drink from the stream.

"Er, which stream?"

"The one by the park."

Here we learned a new word: contaminants. And that our region of Jersey was one of the largest pharmaceutical and chemical producers in the state. And how that particular creek stretched for miles, in and around this amazing mecca of export, until it eventually dumped into the Lackawanna River along the railroad tracks not far from my house.

A phone call brought this little geographic and manufacturing trivia to the attention of my own mother. Who made me promise never to drink from the stream or any other non-faucet water source again.

And I couldn't be sure, but Mom seemed to survey me more closely that evening at dinner.

It wasn't with anger, necessarily. Just this uneasy, furtive evaluation.

In retrospect I think I now know what she was looking for. She was searching for signs of a third eye, the bud of an 11th finger. Or skunk cabbage leaves to sprout from my ears.

This was North Central Jersey Nature, after all. You never could be too sure. Nature, we knew, worked in mysterious ways.

Space Farms: Wildlife's Final Frontier

"A rat! Aiiieeeee, it's a rat! A giant, huge, hideous, disease-carrying rat!" a ten-year-old me shrieked and ran into the house breaking the land-speed record for a single-jet, corn-flake-powered pre-teen.

The offending "rat," we learned was, in fact, an unlucky baby opossum. Unlucky, not just because it had fallen out of its safe tree, but because it had a run-in with a flying, exploding, elementary school banshee out to ruin its moment of quiet contemplation and tree-logistical problem-solving.

But given that this was north-central Jersey, where wildlife pretty much consists of stray dogs and groundhogs flattened off Route 46, my confusion of marsupial with plague-spreading rodent really was understandable.

It's not as if, among the strip malls, pizza parlors, doughnut shops and bowling alleys we had much chance to commune with nature.

And that's why one year in elementary school— in a quest to expand our horizons and expose us to the Joys of the Natural World— my class went to explore the wonders of "Space Farms Zoo and Museum."

Space Farms' claim to fame, back in the 80s, was it was the home of Goliath, the "World's Largest Bear." On the billboards and TV advertisements, the 12-foot-tall, 2,000 pound Alaskan brown bear was shown roaring at the cameras. A proud representative of all that was wild and proud and toothy in the Animal Kingdom.

We arrived at the attraction, our young hearts drumming a rap beat in excitement. Animals... real animals... something beyond dogs and cats and the classroom hamster which peed on us daily. This was what life was about!

And look-- there in that cage-- a lion! King of Beasts!

Only this was the old, fat, jumpsuited King. Not the young, slvete, gyrating King.

This King was one step away from having a coronary over his last fried peanut butter and gazelle sandwich. He looked like he'd soon give his final roar in the Space Farms litter box.

We hastened on, bowing our heads in respect.

Next we came upon a cage of monkeys, who tried to hustle us for money and banana slices... "C'mon, baby, just one little slice of banana... One slice... you can hook me up, can't you?"

Then there was the hyena who did stand-up prop acts with creaking vaudeville jokes and then angrily heckled us until a few kids cried... "Aw, you wouldn't know funny if it came up and bit yer tail.. Yeah, go cry to yer mama..."

There were buffalo roaming the sweeping 50-foot pen... And llamas hanging out on street corners and spitting.

But then we saw it. The great Emperor of the Forest we'd all been waiting for. Goliath! The World's Largest Bear.

"Is he dead?" one of my classmates asked.

"No, I think I can see him breathing a little."

"Where?"

"There where those gnats are all landing."

He laid there in the bottom of his cage, looking at us with glazed eyes, one group of onlookers as any other in an endless, blurry parade.

Like a plus-sized woman in a tiny spandex shirt, it was hard to tell if Goliath really was as large as was claimed. Or if his cage just was three sizes too small.

Fur was missing in patches. Flies buzzed around his head and, long ago, he'd given up doing anything about them. They were close personal friends now. And it depressed him, because just about the time he'd really get to know one, its 72-hour lifespan would be over and it would die.

Silent, we moved on to the Museum portion of the attraction. The varied collections of the Space family, for which the farms were named.

We threaded through displays of vintage cars and dinosaur bones and the skulls of long-dead Native Americans, propped up, labeled and lit for our viewing.

Then— to tie nicely in with the animals we just met outside— we saw Space Farms' wide collection of beasts, stuffed or in jars. Probably once part of the outdoor zoo, now they were entombed in sawdust and glass cases, or thriftily cradled in empty peanut butter jars and thick yellow-clear fluids, still entertaining visitors in some last macabre irony of showmanship.

Yes, Birth, Growth, Death, Skippy jar... such is the Circle of Life.

At the giftshop, classmates bought velvet flocked animals to take home with them, a token to remember our fine, furred friends of the animal kingdom.

That was when I, having no souvenir money, found a whole quarter on the ground. A quarter! It glinted in the sun. Yes, this terrific streak of luck was the talk of the classroom the rest of the year.

So with it, I bought the only thing $0.25 cents could get you back then. A metal drink coaster, bearing scenes of happy Space Farms days and the attraction logo.

Today, as I refreshed my mind with details of this unique place, I discovered that in addition to having the World's Largest Bear, Space Farms had yet another honor bestowed on it:

According to Roadside America, it was named one of Parade Magazine's 1989 "Ten Worst Zoos in America."

I also learned that our dear friend Goliath never really left.

Yes, his spirit may be roaming free among the shady Alaskan trees, along snow-encrusted mountains. But his body has been mounted Space Farms-style... Tucked in a fireplace display, between a case of guns and a hat-rack made of antlers.

I look at the photo and can almost hear the gift shop's piped-in Musak, as it plays crackling strains of a familiar tune... The Eagles' Hotel California.

"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave..."

That's right-- sing it, fellas. Nature in North Jersey.

Goliath-- I salute you.

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