|
OUR TOWNS
At 60 M.P.H., and Sometimes Upside Down, Summer Rushes By
Susan Stava for The New York Times
Tony Reynolds, a k
a Coaster Tony, in the front seat of the 4,725-foot Boulder Dash at
Lake Compounce amusement park in Bristol, Conn. His record is 151 rides
in a day.
|
By PETER APPLEBOME
 ristol, Conn.
AFTER 3,634 excursions on the Boulder Dash roller coaster at Lake Compounce amusement park, Coaster Tony knows what he likes. He
prefers the second seat (less chance of colliding with bugs) to the
first and the odd cars (not on the wheels, meaning a smoother ride) to
the evens. He always rides with his hands high in the air,
prefers the air time and negative G's (the drops where you're lifted
from your seat) to the laterals (the sharp turns where you're rocked
from side to side). He usually wears sunglasses (bugs again - nothing
worse than a fly in the eye at 60 miles an hour). His customary
exclamation while riding is "Woooo hoooo," and he likes to gaze around
the coaster while it's barreling downhill to make sure everyone is
having a swell time. He prefers night, the ultimate in scrambling the
senses, to day. He said that at 34, he's slowing up a bit and
usually limits his outings to, say, 50 rides rather than 100 or so, but
a week ago, perhaps inspired by the Olympic spirit, he decided to go
for - and achieved! - a one-day personal best of 151. There
are, no doubt, flinty souls out there - snowboard lunatics,
arachnophobes, ski center operators - who dread the end of winter, but
there can't be too many of them. Around this time of year, most of us
get a quiet buzz of foreboding as the days get shorter, and you can
almost sense September just around the corner. And if most of
us have our own reason - the garden, the beach, tennis - to dread
summer's end, the 4,725-foot, two-and-a-half-minute ride on Boulder
Dash is Coaster Tony's. In real life, he is Tony Reynolds, a
sales manager at a Volkswagen dealership in Northampton, Mass. But at
Lake Compounce, the nation's oldest amusement park, and among his
fellow travelers in groups like American Coaster Enthusiasts, Coaster
Zombies or the Western New York Coaster Club, he's Coaster Tony, a man
on a mission. Just as other endeavors have their basic
delineations - Democrat or Republican, acoustic or electric - coaster
enthusiasts have theirs: steel or wood. Once, of course, all coasters
were wood. Now, new ones are overwhelmingly steel. Of the 86
opening or under construction this year, only six are wooden. And,
invariably, the ones with the prodigious double loops or the most
terrifying specs, like the year-old 420-foot-high, 120-mile-per-hour
Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, are steel. But
among the coaster mafia, wood remains king, and Boulder Dash, which
opened in 2000, invariably ranks at or near the top of coaster
rankings. Built into a mountain, with boulders and trees around every
turn, its ride resembles nothing so much as a trip in a car careering
down a wooded peak after its brakes have failed. "Steel gives you
the same ride every time,'' Coaster Tony said. "Wood gives you more
variation in the ride. It breathes; it never gets old. And this one is
just relentless. There is no break until you get back to the station.
It's what Disney tries to do by spending $300 million on theming, but
they can't do anything like this." Coaster Tony didn't set out to become a coaster marathon man. He rode as a kid, but not much more than the next guy. But
when his friends Sue Barry and Rich Yekel took to riding the Rolling
Thunder coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey 500 times a
year, he decided to become a regular on Boulder Dash, and soon he was
hooked, not just on that one but on coasters at other parks, 424 of
them at last count. On first glance, it seems a little lonely. His wife, Alicja, does not, to put it gently, share his obsession. "Her
first ride was on a little kiddie coaster, Rudy's Rapid Transit, at
Santa's Village in Jefferson, New Hampshire, and she was screaming for
it to stop,'' he said. "I couldn't get her on this without heavy
sedatives." But he seems to take a Salingerian delight in each
ride, bantering with the attendants, checking on how the little kids
hold up, so that each trip seems to be about some kind of communal
thrill. This is the last week this year that the park will run a
full schedule. There's a big gathering of coaster enthusiasts on Sept.
4, then it's just weekends through Sept. 19 and the Haunted Graveyard
on Fridays and weekend nights in October. So Coaster Tony gets to
stretch a bit of his summer out longer than most of us. Still, as he
left the park after closing on a humid night recently, the flag
rippling in a gentle breeze, families filtering out to the lot, it felt
just about perfect. The night was still. The crickets were out. The
park's Main Street looked like a dreamy mirage. You wanted summer to go
on, if not forever, longer than you knew it would.
E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com
|
