Moose in the Kitchen

How do you know when your love for amusement parks begins to border on the obsessive? When you…

a) eagerly board a roller coaster with ascents so high and descents so fast that you actually black out

b) fly 2,400 miles for the privilege

c) spend 10 straight hours making use of that privilege

d) pop painkillers like kettle corn to keep the coaster-induced headaches at bay

e) use up all your adrenaline for the next five years, so if a serial killer trained his psychotic monocle in your direction, you’d simply flop over and say “Oh, go ahead with the chainsaw already. I’d run, but I used up all my chemically assisted fear in October of 2007.”

f) all of the above

If you answered “f”, you have a reasonable approximation of my insanity. And my Sunday. We flew from San Francisco to Detroit this weekend to visit Cedar Point, billed as “roller coaster capital of the world!” If you clicked on that link, the coaster silhouetted in the picture was the one that made me black out. Called Millenium 9000 or 7000 or 12, it inches you up a hefty incline while you enjoy a very nice view of Lake Erie. Then it drops you straight down for 300 feet until stars obscure your vision and you wonder if the Rapture has come and maybe you should have gone to church once in awhile. The first time my vision blacked out, I assumed that it was some injudicious blinking. Until we went again and the hurtling at great speeds toward the ground convinced my body that death was imminent and did I really want to see that? Or would I prefer to relive a few key points in my youth, most of which involved MTV and an illicit Snickers bar?

Cedar Point gets four flapping jowls out of five (it would have gotten five out of five if people had let me cut straight to the front of the line – they didn’t). Flapping jowls, of course, are the fun-o-meter of roller coasters. If it goes fast enough that your cheeks flap gleefully in the wind, you are having fun.

You know what else they have in Ohio? Seasons! Seasons where leaves turn and families pick apples to make into freshly pressed apple cider. We do have fall in San Francisco. Unfortunately, it looks exactly like June. To the naked eye, there’s little change aside from a crispness in the air, a deeper blue in the sky, and the vague desire for a scarf. But Ohio has a discernible autumn. And I was determined to wring every last drop of fall out of our trip. I had idyllic notions of skipping under canopies of crimson and orange and gold – and, yeah, that didn’t happen. Thanks global warming. But there were pumpkins on every porch and a sprinkling of red through the trees and I clung to that with all my season-starved fervor. Much as I clung to the quart of fresh apple cider.

P.S. Drinking half a quart of apple cider in one go can have unpleasant repercussions on a long car ride. You’ve been warned.