Action Park

Yesterday I shared this wikipedia entry on Action Park with my friend David, who's family had a summer home near Vernon Valley when we were growing up. I only visited the park a handful of times but I have very strong, fond, memories of those days. I didn't know it had such a reputation for being dangerous. Or perhaps I'd heard rumors but at that age perhaps it seemed that everything (or nothing) was dangerous so they made little impression on me. That the park should be liable for our safety was a concept unknown to me. Action Park provided a relatively controlled environment for carrying out the stunts we did on our own in our neighborhoods. So what's the big deal? We were used to being responsible for the preservation of our own lives.

I was morbidly pleased to read that one of the fatalities is, if inconclusively, attributed to the Tarzan ride, a favorite of ours. It is a simple rope swing that plunges you into water. Even we understood at the time that this one was dangerous, because it was not automated. The rider was responsible for letting go of the triangular bar at the end of the rope at the right time. We studied the timing carefully, both for safety purposes and for maximizing the pleasure of a ride that required 45 minutes of waiting on line. Now that climbing trees and swinging on ropes is no longer a daily activity of mine (it was then), I marvel at the park's trust that any, forget the majority or the totality, of the riders would get this right. And by right, I don't mean effecting the perfect trajectory, I mean not slamming back into the launch area or making any equally sketchy dismount. As it turns out the alleged cause of death, in the case of this one attraction, was the shocking cold temperature of the natural pool that caught the swinger. I remember it being cold.