Surprise of the Familiar, Ariel Maps, & Midwest Dams
Small Cities Weekly | 07.05.2024
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Surprise of the Familiar
Zippin Pippin: 6 tickets
Seems worth it at a quarter a piece. Where else could I ride Elvis’s favorite roller coaster?
Nowhere but the Bay Beach Amusement Park. A city-owned hybrid of an amusement park and permanent county fair, there is something particularly small-city about this scene. Can you blame me for standing in front of the ticket stand after reading this?
“There will be people who come here on their lunch hour, pull up, get a couple of dollars of tickets, go on once or twice and then go back to the office,” Arnoldi said. “Where else can you just pull up, go on a roller coaster and then go home?” It’s a 90-second ride at 45 mph with just enough air time to relieve any workday stress. Wait time for the coaster, built in the 1910s, on a really busy day can run 35 to 45 minutes, but often times it’s as little as 10 minutes. [source]
Technology hasn’t touched the experience yet, so everything feels like it did when I was a kid. Paper tickets. Shuffling from stanchion to stanchion. Constantly calculating how many more runs before it’s my turn. Sweat foreshadows the ‘you got a little sun today’ that might come my way over dinner tonight.
I step onto the platform. Oh, I remember this part now. So many decisions! What car? What row? What seat?!
Answer: last car, next-to-last row, right side seat.
As the college kids check seatbelts and gather hats and purses, I think, “Ok, I can see how Elvis would want to ride this for hours straight. There could be something meditative about it.”
The car lurches forward, we round the first corner and the click-clack of the climb commences. We crest the hill, take a hard right - one, two,...the bottom drops out. The car falls faster than I do and my stomach floats. The new found speed transforms turns into jerks. Kids scream. I laugh. Can you be surprised by how familiar surprise feels?
We seem to be going too fast for it to be ending, but the brakes still work, squeezing every last second of speed out of the ride. We come into station. The next crew is waiting, eyes glazed with anticipation.
The chatter on the exit ramp is funny to me. Everyone wants to explain the uniqueness of their ride, even though we were all on the same one. It’s all part of the experience.
The click-clack and screams of the next round fade behind us. The crunch of the gravel parking lot slips in one last surprise of the familiar.
Only in a small city can the second home of the favorite roller coaster of a rock-n-roll icon be the best way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
The Zippin Pippin was Elvis Presley's favorite ride. The "King" rented Libertyland August 8, 1977 from 1:15 a.m. to 7 a.m. to entertain a group of about 10 guests. Decked in a blue jumpsuit with black leather belt, huge belt buckle with turquoise studs and gold chains, the "King" rode the Zippin Pippin repeatedly during a two-hour period. He lost his belt buckle on the ride that morning, and it was found and returned the next day. Elvis's Libertyland rental became his last public appearance. He died August 16.
Links
You can find links from this and all previous editions here.
A Portrait of New York City by Air in 1924, Thomas J. Campanella, Bloomberg
In The Practice of Everyday Life, the French scholar Michel de Certeau observed that street-bound citizens cannot know the city as a whole; they navigate it as blindly “as lovers in each other’s arms.” These “ordinary practitioners of the city,” as he put it, live below the threshold of visibility, plying the “thicks and thins of an urban text they write without being able to read it.” The aerial view changed this; it gave the Wandersmänner wings and a mirror.
Today the very technologies that enabled such an extraordinary perch have made images from the air or space prosaic and routine. Human flight itself was a dream of the ages; today many of us find the in-flight magazine more interesting than the view from a window seat. Yet we need to look again — at Nadar’s Paris; at 1920s New York; at Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders’ “Earthrise” photo of 1968, at the Pale Blue Dot shot by Voyager 1 from 3.7 billion miles away; of even that drone photo of the backyard snapped by your seven-year-old. For the view from above reveals the mystery and grandeur of our earthbound home, and its great fragility.
How the Midwest Floods Nearly Took Out a Century-Old Dam, Mitch Smith, NYTimes
“It’s the perfect storm, because we are dealing with more severe extreme weather events, and because it’s just the nature of time these dams are getting older,” said Hiba Baroud, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University.
The problems at the Rapidan Dam, about 90 miles southwest of Minneapolis, came after a period of severe rain that led to widespread flooding in Iowa, Minnesota and South Dakota. At least two deaths were linked to the floods, which destroyed homes, swamped farmland, overtopped levees and caused a major railroad bridge to collapse.
“This, again, was an unprecedented amount of rainfall that came in a very short period of time,” Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota said. “Many of these communities, I don’t know how they could have prepared for what they saw.”
…
Despite those well-known problems, Upmanu Lall, the director of the Water Institute at Arizona State University, said too little was being done.
“It costs money to remove it. It costs money to fix it,” Dr. Lall said. “We have to do one of the two. We are not doing either one.”
“Probably Not the Best Location for a Craft Distillery”, Midwestener, Substack
“It’s hard to compete with the big boys in the liquor industry, so you might as well concentrate on making a local product that’s unique,” Hanzlick says. “Maybe you can’t compete at the liquor store down the street, but there are people out there who will appreciate it. Besides, if you’re pumping out 10,000 bottles a month of anything, pretty soon, that’s just another job. Making interesting stuff that actually tastes really good—there’s some pride in that.”
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