The Cannibal

This week Ammon's grandpa took him and some of his cousins to an amusement park.  It has become a yearly tradition, this visit to the amusement park.  My dad took me and my siblings each summer when we were growing up, and now as a grandfather, he takes the grand kids.

I went along to help corral little bodies this time and I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we all had a great time.

The amusement park has all sorts of rides ranging from a massive ferris wheel that takes you up way above the trees where you can look across the entire valley, to a roller coaster called Cannibal.  Cannibal as you can imagine is not for the faint of heart.  As you approach the ride there are signs all along the path that say that cannibal will eat your cell phone, wallet, sunglasses and anything else in your pocket.  In fact, you are required to leave any items in your possession in lockers off to the side of the ride before you board.


The list of things cannibal would eat did not specifically include cochlear implants and hearing aids, but employing my skills of deduction, I figured hearing devices may be in danger on this ride.  Luckily, grandpa had already taken cannibal for a ride earlier in the summer so he was willing to be "the holder" of all items the rest of us needed to have secured. This included Ammon's implant and hearing aid.  This of course meant that Ammon could not hear anything once we got in line.  I felt kind of bad about that as he missed out on conversations happening with cousins, but unlike Chance, Ammon can actually hear some things with out his hearing devices.  It is hard to know exactly what he hears, but he can hear if you are real close to him in the ear that takes a hearing aid.

On one hand, not being able to hear everything worked in Ammon's favor because his cousin and sister started expressing their reservations about the cannibal ride.  I was sitting in the middle with Ammon and Ammon's cousin and sister were on the ends.  The lap bar had just come down and locked us down so tight that we could barely feel our legs, when Ammon's cousin who is his age said:
"Why am I on this ride again?  Why did I do this? Okay, okay, I think I can do this, yes I think I can do this again."

Ammon's sister said:

"Mom, I don't know that being on the outside is safe here at the front of the car.  You should have switched me spots."

Nothing like a boost of assurance as one gets ready to embark on a ride for the first time as Ammon and I were doing.

The ride moved from the loading dock, to a sort of elevator shaft, where the car was taken up several stories and then deposited on a track high above the parking lot.  From there, the car shifts forward and a door comes down blocking the way from where you just came. You find yourself looking out across the valley high above the rest of the world for just a moment before your car turns and plunges down a long winding track at great speeds.  Ammon and I were holding hands when we went up the elevator shaft.  As we began our decent downward on the twisted track, I figured maybe we should hold onto the rails in front of us instead.

It was a spectacular ride with loop the loops where you found yourself hanging upside down and a stretch where you went through little arch's of water.

We all lived. After experiencing the Cannibal, I am thinking that taking off the implant and hearing aid was the right decision.  That would have been a loooooooong fall down to the parking lot below and I don't know that we could have resuscitated hearing devices that had experienced such an adventurous fall.