Ferris wheel

When the circus came to our small town in Texas, I of course had to take my 10-year-old daughter, and we lined up at the ferris wheel for one of our first rides. The last time I'd been on a ferris wheel was back when our family lived in Dallas, and I got on one with my older brother. We'd gotten stuck at the top, and he started spitting on the people below. We were only stuck for about twenty minutes, but it was one of the longest twenty minutes in my life, because I imagined that if he'd hit someone, they would be waiting at the bottom when we finally came down, ready to beat us up, or with a posse to string us up or haul us off to jail.

That was in Dallas, though, and we didn't know any of those people that he was aiming for. Now, in this small town, chances were pretty good that I'd know just about everyone, or at least half, since people came in from the country. I knew this one guy back in the line about seven people; he was in a wheelchair, and he was trying to get special consideration for getting into the ferris wheel. His name was Barton, and I knew how he'd gotten in that wheelchair. He was a friend of my brother's, a little older than I was, and had goaded my brother at one point to go out racing or to do some wild and reckless things. My brother was a target for this kind of stuff so it made sense that a guy like Barton would come after him. But he got into a car wreck; killed one of their friends, killed an old grandmother out on a country road, and he himself would be in a wheelchair the rest of his days. Fortunately my brother wasn't involved; he was lucky. 

It was about sunset as we loaded ourselves onto the ferris wheel and started on up to get a view of our small town. Having moved from Dallas at the age of about thirteen, I'd always been aware how painfully small this town was, and it didn't help that the music track of the ferris wheel seemed to be stuck on "It's a Small World." I could old John Wallace's auto repair shop, and another place where they still owed me $18 for cleaning out their shed. I held onto my daughter tightly, even though we were safely behind a metal bar. You don't want to go in the wrong direction in these places, I thought, or there would be no way out, that was the disadvantage of a small town. People were as friendly and as helpful as they could be. But they knew you too well, so if you wanted to reform or change direction, you couldn't, because they were too sure they already knew who you were.

Some of my brother's friends had joined the army; others had gone off to Dallas as my brother did, where there was room to constantly reinvent yourself. I looked out at the sun setting on the town though, and I was satisfied that it had worked out well for me. I'd stayed, got a job and had a family. To my daughter, this would be all there was.

This ferris wheel got stuck, too. It was after we'd come around the top, and were on our way back down. My daughter and I sat there looking at John Wallace's auto repair for almost an hour while they went and got a cherry picker to get us all down. It was a laborious task, but eventually some guy I recognized from the fire department came and lifted us into the cherry picker which then brought us gingerly down to the ground, maybe an hour after we'd gotten into the car. Meanwhile they'd sent the people in line home; the thing was broken, and they couldn't finish it. The heck of it was, that stupid song "It's a Small World" was on the whole time. It was like the sound track was connected to the ferris wheel itself, so they couldn't just turn it off or change the music. It was on the whole time.

And it was much more of an ordeal for Barton, or so I heard. For us, it was about an hour, and we got a story to tell, a free ride in a cherry picker, to make up for the time we lost to do the rest of the circus. For Barton, it was more like a six or seven-hour ordeal, because he was at the top, and a simple cherry-picker wouldn't do the trick for him, because of his special condition. He had to wait for them to get all the right equipment, and that took quite a while.

At work, someone said that would be a lawsuit for sure, seven hours at the top of a ferris wheel. I pointed out that it was mostly the sound track that was the torture, the rest of it pretty much wasn't their fault anyway. Things break; there's not much you can do sometimes. I had sympathy for those circus guys, since I myself had no clue how the thing worked either. I considered it quality family time with my daughter, who didn't seem to mind. I had no idea how Barton took it, though, I almost never saw him.