While growing up I was mildly obsessed with Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, particularly his depiction of the traveling carnival that disrupts the peaceful order of Green Town, Illinois. Among its many wicked delights is a magical carousel that can age (or de-age) a rider, one year for each full rotation; even as a child I knew the carnival was evil, but still the carousel — with its magical ability to help a kid skip past the awkwardness of adolescence into the full bloom of manhood — struck me as particularly appealing. And now, as a 45-year-old, there is something tempting about the idea of riding it in reverse, and slipping back to recapture youthful innocence, if only for a moment.
I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and although I moved away many years ago it recently occurred to me that it contains its own version of the Green Town carnival. Waldameer Amusement Park is situated on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie, just off the road that leads onto Presque Isle (Pennsylvania’s only real beachfront property). And while there is no carousel that can strip away the years, just walking into the grounds and smelling the distinctive mix of funnel cake, cotton candy, hot oil, and sunscreen opens a portal to the past. Waldameer opened in 1896, and continues to roll out new rides, but, for me, inside the park it is perpetually and always the summer of 1991, and I am once again heading into 6th grade. This illusion is helped along by the fact that many of the rides, which seemed old fashioned even then, are still in use today. These are the kinds of rides one might find at the traveling carnival that sets up in the local high school parking lot: the Scrambler, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Paratrooper, the Spider — rides with cars that spin, sometimes on the ground, sometimes on a rising arc through the air; the sort that entice pre-teens and nauseate adults (to be clear, this is not a critique).
I have no doubt that kids in 2025 still have magical days at Waldameer; riding the log flume, or the Sea Dragon swinging ship, or the classic wooden coaster, The Comet, is going to be fun in any year (and Waldameer now has a legitimately great coaster that arcs out over the four-lane thoroughfare leading onto Presque Isle, offering breathtaking views of the Lake). But in 1991, of course, we had no phones, so being dropped off at the amusement park was like becoming unstuck in time.
The best day of the year was the “parish picnic,” when you could get a discounted “ride-a-rama” bracelet, which allowed for unlimited rides all day long. If you were a Catholic school kid (as I was), just about every child you knew would be there for the day. Parents would come, but they mostly stuck around the picnic pavilions, while the children ran free. These were the sorts of days where relationships formed while in line for the bumper boats, were sealed with hand holding and a quick kiss in the darkness of the Whacky Shack, and dissolved over arguments about whether or not to re-ride the Comet long before the sun went down.
Parish picnic plans were made weeks in advance; you needed to solidify an even-numbered group of friends to go around with (odd numbers meant someone would have to ride alone), and decide on an easily accessible rendezvous spot — “meet by the bumper cars at 10!” And on the magical day, if you were late, and the gang had already wandered off, then you had to meander through the park hoping to track them down. The park footprint is not huge, but it is big enough that you could stroll for hours and keep missing your friends. Your best bet was to go on the Sky Ride, a leisurely gondola style experience (basically a glorified ski lift) that looped over the grounds, and hope to spot them in line somewhere. If you were lucky enough to do so, you’d need to get off and sprint to catch up before they moved on, but even if you didn’t manage this, it would be a relief to at least see them and know that they hadn’t secretly made plans to all go to the beach without you instead.
But maybe you don’t spot them, or the middle school anxiety over what riding alone would do to your social standing prevents you from even trying. In this case, you might stake out a spot on the midway and hope that the gang, or at least someone familiar from school, would pass by, while you tried to look busy knocking down stacked bottles, or hitting the ring toss, or beating any of the other seemingly rigged games. If you didn’t have money for games (or had already spent it on a giant coke and popcorn combo), then the last, and perhaps best, option was to hang out by the twin haunted houses, because you could be sure that your friends would be there eventually. Even if they’d already gone through them, they’d be back. The heart of Waldameer is, was, and always will be the vortex in the back of the park where the eponymous pirate from the Pirate’s Cove walk-through funhouse stares across at the maniacal facade of the Whacky Shack dark ride.
Both of these rides are classics of a certain genre of amusement park experience; they were made in the early 70s by a legendary designer named Bill Tracy, and are among the few extant examples of their type still operating. And inevitably, during any trip to Waldameer, you will find yourself there with your friends, waiting to go inside one or the other, all of you joking about how lame the effects are inside — a cadre of pre-teens eager to show how unafraid you all are of the rides that used to give you nightmares, each carrying inside the same frisson of anxiety. Because while the rides are undeniably cheesy, with their foam and plywood giant rats and sharks and skeleton heads, they still manage to produce a brush with the uncanny. They are unsettling experiences.
So you and your friends will race each other through the many rooms of Pirate’s Cove, going too fast to really appreciate the creepy tableaus, pausing just long enough to laugh at the floating skulls chanting “I ain’t got no body” by the exit, before rushing out into the light, and into the line for the Whacky Shack. And if you haven’t found a romantic partner to ride with, you’ll go on with a buddy, and you’ll both smile with delight as your cart bangs through the purple doors and into the darkness, where you’re met by the neon green lights of the Crooked Corridor receding before you. And sure, it’s not Bradbury’s carousel, but it is awfully close.
Michael O'Connell
Michael O’Connell is a writer, editor, and teacher who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the author of “Startling Figures: Encounters with American Catholic Fiction” and editor of “Conversations with George Saunders.” He writes both literary criticism and narrative nonfiction, usually on the intersections of religion, literature, and contemporary culture. His work has appeared in a number of literary journals and magazines, including The New Ohio Review, The Under Review, Dappled Things, National Catholic Reporter, The Jesuit Media Lab, Busted Halo, and America. He is currently the inaugural fellow at the Jesuit Media Lab, where he writes and teaches courses. You can find more of his work on his substack Nothing Gold. If he is not currently riding a roller coaster, he surely wishes that he were.