Wild rides

What more powerful word-pair spurts adrenaline sky high, literally, than a wild ride? Out of maybe dozens to choose from, any pick catapults and then, takes you crashing hard enough, so much so that, for a minute, one feels alien on the ground.

Wild rides, as something you and I know, promise defiance of gravity and other physical laws; these seem obvious, indeed, though no definition of “wild” says so. Rather, these focus on the concept of what’s unnatural, referring to bursts of unseemliness among humans, versus natural, as in nature.

Inventors of “wild rides” apparently factor in such opposing forces within us, which we keep in check with natural laws. But in truth, we do constantly long to break free, hence, the unabated lure of fair and carnival rides. On this basic need, I believe, such rides have become wilder through the decades, though our taste for it begins simply.

Take the ride on a swing—that absolute exhilaration to slice through passive air to create a gust and feel the sky on one’s face. I couldn’t have enough of it as a child; I’m sure you remember it, too, so much so that, on seeing one as an adult, I would rush toward it and on gangly legs and heavy butt, strive to fly with a momentary “lightness of being.”

And then came the pendulum ride. Perhaps, hardly anyone remembers the medium-sized fair on the grounds of Intercontinental Hotel during the holidays in the 1970s—it’s where my pining for wildness ended on a rotating gondola that swung back and forth higher and faster. Pendulum rides today, with 11 listed as top favorites in amusement registers and named scarier than the last, swing to dizzying heights in a full circle.

“Now comes ‘The Beast’ waiting to thrust, whoever desires, into a vortex of motion and speed at the 105 year-old Pacific National Exhibition’s (PNE) Playland, held annually here in Vancouver to open this week’s end. Said to be extremely wild, it spins riders at 360°, while at 90 kilometers per hour, swings them to 120° in either direction upward to 120 feet at its zenith, an “experience more than 5Gs of force,” said Laura Balance, PNE’s spokesman.

Stunned on getting off, wild riders can hardly talk, except in gushes, as caught on YouTube, unable even to duplicate their screams while feet up in the air, a heart-stopping moment, so extreme that what follows is a blank. As much as I try to relive my pendulum rides, no epiphany sparks.

So designed just for the thrill, and built in accordance with the laws of physics, so much so that risks must be calculated to zero danger, carnival rides do rule out the true element of surprise or the wham of the unexpected, a kind of wildness, which lurks everywhere in real life.

I can speak of rides on Manila streets as often akin to that on a roller coaster, like one tourist posted on YouTube of his experience. Or getting booked by the office to Surigao del Norte, instead of del Sur, as I had been once, lost and swept among fiesta-goers scrambling in bus stations—my photographer had to hoist me on his shoulders so I could crawl through a window for a seat to get to Bislig.

Conquests, such as the climb to Mt. Everest or a tightrope walk over Niagara Falls, cannot but be wild rides. Using an arbitrary juxtaposition, one might add the ongoing pendulum swings in election campaigns here in Canada and the US, though I think at its utmost in the Philippines.

But rides that I count wildest have been those that draw up a deep-seated fear of the void as a consequence of separation—which, yet again, is something quite natural in life, but as a prospect, we resist as if it were unnatural.