There was no line on the wood ramps leading up to the coaster. My brother walked a bit ahead of me, leading me toward the first amusement ride I had taken in three years. Because we like to think of ourselves as coaster connoisseurs, we sat the in last car, back seat. Any coaster fan will tell you that the ride is bumpiest back there, and cresting the top of the first hill at full speed in a completely different ride than the front.
I suppose if, at the top of the first hill, as the chain clacked like laughter and dragged us in diabolical lurches up to the sign that read DO NOT STAND UP, I had turned my head to the right, I would have seen it. Maybe I would have been distracted, for one brief second forgotten that I was about to go from high above the earth to ground level in about two seconds. As it was, I was hanging onto the bar, reacting the way I always did at the top of a coaster hill, in that breathless instant before gravity has its way with you, my mind racing, no, I’m not ready yet, give me a second to brace myself! But that was it. We swooped over the crest with unbelievable momentum, and the timbers rattled as did my teeth and we were down on the ground, trying to breathe while that momentum was already dragging us up the next hill. My brother let out a whoop, and I grinned, having missed that sounds, remembering it from back when a yearly pilgrimage to Cedar point was a given. Now, three thousand miles way and several years older, I was reintroduced to it.
Soon we were both yelling, the only people on the coaster save for a couple at the front. Our yells rang out as we dove for the ground a dozen times, each time saved by the arc of the gently curving track, cunningly designed to leave us suspended a fraction of an inch above our seats for the shortest second as we barreled over the top of each hill. All too soon it was over, and my brother told me there was one more thing that he wanted to show me before we left.
He led me away from the entrance where his car was parked, between the rows of buildings, which in the beginning were penny arcades and attractions, now surf shops and arcades twenty-five times more expensive. Down a narrow but well-lit area next to an indoor Olympic-sized pool, where little speakers playing string quartets popped up out of the underbrush like weeds.
We broke free from the enclosing buildings and found ourselves on the boardwalk that ran along the ocean. It was hard to see the shore, because of the large sodium-arc globes that ran off in either direction at precise fifty-foot intervals along the planks, but I could hear it, smell it. The ocean mist had settled in early that evening, so I had been denied the view of a bona fide San Diego sunset, but there was something calming about how night had settled, sneaking up in a shroud of gray fog.
I asked my brother where we were going. I saw nothing of interest along the boardwalk, save for the buildings we had just walked through. Everything else had been shut up for the night, lights turned off. “Down here,” he said.
He stepped off the boardwalk, down some concrete steps to the beach. He said something about how he hoped we’d get to see some sand crabs, so I watched my feet as we headed down to where the waves came in. Now I wonder, did he say that just to get me to look down, to not see what we were walking toward? “Here we are,” he said when we had reached the water’s edge. I looked up into an absolute void.
Out in front of us, the black-and-white wave simultaneously rolled out of and slid back into a blackness darker than any I had ever seen. A wide band where the horizon should have been had simply been erased. No stars, no moon. Just and empty space, so empty that I felt there was a black curtain three feet in front of me, blocking out that part of the world. I could have seen it from the coaster, but I was glad I hadn’t.
I thought about it for a second, and it made perfect sense. The haze above us was lit by the boardwalk lights, the sand and waves reflecting the same, but out at eye level, twenty miles straight ahead in the ocean sky, all the boardwalks in the world couldn’t have lit up the air that far out. No light, and nothing for it to bounce back from. No eyes to record it anyway. There was nothing that could have been blacker.
It was almost as if I had been blinded in that one area of me, a Cinemascope-sized chunk taken directly out of my vision. But this wasn’t the kind of darkness that comes from closing your eyes. This was a wonderfully open darkness, where space existed but there was no means of sensing it other than simply knowing it was there. All at once I felt the pull of other times, other people. The first people, who didn’t have the safety of neon and incandescence to return to, who saw that emptiness filling every inch of space around them, the waves calling to them seductively. The men who looked out and saw adventure, who conquered the emptiness by spending entire lives sailing through it on boats made of roller-coaster wood.
My brother and I exchanged a few words to assure each other that we were still there. Then we turned around, still seeing no crabs, no forms of life at all, and headed back through the buildings, now darker, no longer infused with invisible string quartets, and returned to civilization.
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