When I operated rollercoasters for a living one summer,
I learned a good lesson in empathy.

Aurora, Ohio's Geauga Lake Family Amusement Park is fairly large as amusement parks go. Before it was purchased by Cedar Fair it was a Six Flags attraction — specifically, Six Flags Worlds of Adventure. There's a good selection of both steel and wooden coasters, and there's enough there to give you a fun day. What's more, the park's never too crowded anymore, so there's hardly a line for anything. The park is wrapped around Lake Geauga, and to walk from one end to the other without stopping takes about twenty minutes.

The lake itelf is a curious thing, but not because it's particularly large or pretty. Having an amusement park built around it has made it a foamy, olive-green soup. What is interesting about it, though, is that no one knows how deep it is. Divers went in one year to find the bottom and after reaching a depth of 500 feet turned back because the water was too murky to see anything. Since 500 feet is damned deep for a freshwater lake — especially one that's hardly a quarter mile across — the survaillance team surmised that the lake is the end of some kind of natural underground pipeline to some larger subterranean body of water.

Cedar Fair bought the park from Six Flags for roughly $135 million about a month and a half before the 2004 summer season started. It was a disaster. The strain of switching protocols coupled with immense difficulty filling the popular shoes of a Six Flags park in such a short time was just too much for the Cedar Fair folks to handle. The park was practically empty, and managers were firing more employees than they were hiring; every department was short staffed.

I was there from California visiting a girlfirend and working in the park's human resources office. Now, to call this thing "human resources" is really a stretch. I spent more time selling uniforms and bitching employees out about walking around the park with their cellphones exposed than I did addressing environmental concerns and complaints about sexual harrassment. But I did see my share of applications (some 4,000 that season) and knew that people were getting fired left and right. And as far as that went no department was worse than rides. If you knew of the profound stupidity that goes into some of these operations many of you probably would never get on a rollercoaster again. It was unreal, the reasons why some of these kids would get fired. There was talk of shutting the park down that season and just having a go at it again next year — it was that bad.

Cedar Fair could not stomach the loss of face that would result from a completely failed season, so they improvised. They started to pull people to rides from other departments. People in finance put on little red rides shirts and got trained on lifts. The manager of the food service department spent a week checking harnesses on Steel Venom. So it was only a matter of time before I'd end up out there too.

The human resources manager and I struck a deal. I'd work three days a week in the office, three or four in rides. Nice 70-hour weeks. HR pay. Deal with people who are having fun instead of people who are looking for jobs. Good deal.

I've always been a melancholic cat — pretty quiet and serious. Operating rides changed that. Surprisingly, I got flirted with quite a bit as a carny. I won't get into the details of it but I got chatted up more times just standing there waiting for the train than I have at any other place at any other time.

My girlfriend hated it.

I spent much of that summer operating a ride called Head Spin, a looping little steel devil that touted itself as the only boomerang coaster in Ohio.

Those of you who are familiar with rollercoasters probably know what a bommerang coaster is. It is bascically a track that is not a continuous loop but has two dead-ends. The train starts at one end (a lift), runs the track, stops at the other end (another lift), then is carried backward over the track again by momentum, coming to a stop in the station. It's a bit like an enormous pendulum. In the case of Geauga Lake's Head Spin, the train is hitched to a cable that carries it backward up a 120-foot lift — a rougly 50-degree grade — at the end of which it is suddenly released and the ride starts. It creates a nice negative-G effect. Not something I'd recommend for a first coaster, but quite a lot of fun.

Now, because this is a relatively old ride, the lift is quite slow. It takes the pulleys and the hydraulics roughly 30 agonizing seconds to pull the train to the top, and if you're either controlling the ride or in the queue line anywhere near the front, you're likely to be a bit unsettled by the machine's struggling-sounds. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, though, the ride runs without a hitch. Smooth sailing, people screaming in joy, cheeks bunched up like taffeta in the sugar-sweetened wind etc etc etc. Nothing to fear but fear itself.

One morning in late August we held the train for a few minutes because while I was checking harnesses I was taking the time to calm a nervous woman near the front. When her restraints had locked she had started to panic, and I was explaining to her the mechanics of the ride, why the train could not possibly fly off the track, that the ride had run thousands of times and carried tens of thousands of passengers without a single injury, that it would be over in a glorious ninety seconds I Swear. I admit that I had started to get a bit impatient with her at this point and was close to just unlocking the harnesses and asking her to wait on the platform, but gradually she started to calm down. So after a few more minutes we cleared the train and started the ride.

The train stopped dead on the lift about 100 feet up.

The sound of the motors in the restricted area slowing to a stop synched in rather curious perfection with the drop of my own heart. It didn't worry me that the train was stopped so much. I knew it was a safe ride and it would be in the station in a few minutes, provided we could get the maintenance guys out fast enough to override the ride op's controls and manually bring it down. The problem I had was that I'd have to go up and confront my passenger.

I gave a pitiful look to the moon-faced 16-year-old girl at the controls. It was time to do a lift walk.

The lift walk is one of the most dreaded parts of operating a big ride.

Look closely at any steel rollercoaster. You'll see that some lengths of track have small platforms and sets of stairs mounted alongside them, at track brakes, at lifts, anywhere that there is a brief lull in the action. Typically the stairs are rooted somewhere in the restricted area on the ground and are an arduous climb. Slopes in rollercoasters are not made with ergonomic climbing in mind; they're engineered to make things fall fast. Now, the stairs are there not only to evacuate passengers in case of a very badly stuck train, but also for maintenance workers and ride operators to climb to reassure stuck passengers.

I have to tell you that the restricted area of a rollercoaster is one of the coolest places in the world. You don't appreciate these things until you get close enough to reach out and touch them. The track was made of steel beams — solid, mind you, not hollow — bigger around than my whole body. This was a feat of engineering with the unmitigated hubris that it existed only to run people around in a fun way. Rollercoasters are amazing.

It took me a good three minutes of climbing to reach the front end of the train. The passengers had watched me lumber all the way up, and by then they looked more bored than scared. I'm frightened to death of heights, so I tried not to shake while I explained to them car by car that the train would be lowered into the station as soon as the maintenance crew arrived.

The train was full, so it was a long process. Some thirty passengers needed to be touched upon. After awhile the heights stopped bothering me, and I started to take in the scenery of the park. Even the olive cesspool of a lake looked beautiful from 100 feet up, and my scared passenger was taking the experience in stride; she smiled, and said that the stoppage was a welcome break from the day's stress. When everything is still, the top of a rollercoaster is a very peaceful place. So after maybe ten minutes I'd made my way to the back of the train and was getting ready to start the long climb back down.

Then the track jerked so hard I was thrown against the stair rails, and we all swayed in the air while the hum of machinery floated up from the ground.

The motors had restarted. The train began climbing up the lift again.

The sound of gasping that came off the train was sickening. The passengers knew. As soon as the winch let loose the track would shake so bad I'd either go flying off the stairs onto the asphalt ten stories below or stumble under the train.

I looked down at the steel boxes that had the engines and saw my team lead, all pudge, bounding down the stairs from the platform into the restricted area. Waving. As though I could beat the train to the bottom of the lift. I stood there, held on as tightly as I could to the stair rails, and watched the faces of the passengers edge by. The maintenance crew had not arrived, so they had not started the train; it had started on its own. I thought about my girlfriend.

I almost pissed myself when the train stopped again a few feet from the top. The track swayed again. The people gasped again. Anticlimactically, the engines died again.

I didn't wait; I skipped back down the stairs as quickly as I could. I was nearly crying with relief when I got back up to the platform and saw the sixteen-year-old girl, still at the control panel, with the emergency-stop button firmly pressed down. Her name was Maddie, I think.

She looked me dead in the face and said

"I stopped the train. It's okay. You have nothing to be afraid of."

I asked my HR manager to spend every day in the office after that.