Xtreme Power
We’ve spent most of the day at the draft horse show, and the kids have just ridden their fill, well, their maximum quota (at the approximately six bucks each for a less than two-minute thrill), of rides on the midway. This evening, we’ll attend the draft pull, a decidedly male affair after a day of carriage driving and fancy hats.
Now it’s mom’s turn.
I am waiting for what is hands-down the biggest, scariest ride on the midway. The words Xtreme Power flash in buzzing, gaudy lights way above what is a gigantic, twirling, spinning, churning, swing type of contraption suspended from beams of steel. As the Xtreme Power cars hurl back and forth in front of my eyes, then way up into the air above most of the other attractions, its riders screaming at the top of their lungs like they’re in the clutches of some man-eating beast, I’m thinking the machine is like this stupendous marriage of a roto-rooter, zipper, the home-made tree swing that my childhood friend Adam and his brother built in their backyard out of plywood and chains (the likes of which will never be seen again in our zealously safety conscious and litigation loving homeland) and a tilt-a-whirl on steroids.
C., my 10-year-old, is peering at me with a hang-dog expression from where he stands in the crowd with Dennis and his sister. He isn’t tall enough, my thrill-seeking gradeschooler, and can’t experience this monstrous contraption with me. He’s trying to make me feel guilty for going without him with those long eyelashes flickering over sad eyes, but it’s not working. I mouth the words Next Year.
I am third in line. In front of me are two teenaged boys almost resplendent in their gang gear. Their heads are shaved clean, and they are pierced in what appears to be many interesting places, at least that are visible to the eye. The other possibilities I don’t want to think about. One of them has a swastika on his forearm. I kind of doubt he has the four winds in mind. They turn and stare at me with their dead, level eyes, like two fish out of water in the midst of all the fresh air and festivity. I smile back briefly, it always seems the safest thing to do—be friendly, but not too friendly to people who seem like they’d just as soon eat you alive if you weren’t all out here in public.
They don’t smile back.
As the carnival guy locks us down into the seats of the Xtreme Power, as if we are all astronauts preparing for flight, I look across our little group of seats, and, wouldn't you know it--right across from me are those boys again, and one of the boys is glaring. Or perhaps it’s just an extension of the previous stare? Glaring with steel gray eyes like he’d like to kill me.
And I wonder if that kid has ever touched a horse.
Like he wished he had a handgun or something, right here, right now.
Or picked up the reins in his hands and experienced the power of a horse departing the earth in a gallop.
If it was just you and me, lady, on a lonely stretch of planet, you’d have a problem on your hands.
Or driven a team of horses. Or followed a trail into the mountains.
I wonder how any boy his young age can live on the earth and embrace death with such open arms, with red and black symbols of hate scrawled into his flesh. Instead of hoping he gets help, I find myself hoping he stays away from the horse barns. I comfort myself by thinking of all those gentle, doe-eyed draft horses stabled almost a universe away from the midway, where such boys might not care to tread. Horse shit. And all that. This is not a world of fairy tale endings.
We twirl, we ascend, we plummet almost to our deaths and then back again. I try not to look at the gang boy who’s in the clutches of the Xtreme Power with me and everybody else, but a couple of times I find that I just can’t help myself. As our eyes meet across the ocean of air, I get the impression that he’s pissed off at the idea of anything alive.
And right now I am, being swung back and forth in an arc I have no hope or desire to control.
The fat little boy next to me is grinning from ear to ear. The knuckles of his pudgy hands are almost white. He has lost every pretense of cool during flight. And I am laughing. I am laughing. I am laughing. I am laughing with the fat little boy, and the woman wearing all that gold, and the teenaged girl who had been worried about her hair getting all messed up but who’s now holding her arms way up above her head with the thrill of the wind, and the couple of ranch boys whose cowboy boots are somewhere down there on the ground where they left them, and the gang boys with their cold eyes, and at my little boy’s look of abject disappointment from where he stands looking up at me, momentarily left behind.
I laugh at the complete and ridiculous joy of being tossed up and down by a giant who is playing with all of us.
