David Levy

But then, God bless him.

Just because Daddy said so, he agreed.

He looked at the ride, and I heard him say, yeah, that does look kind of scary.

And his shoulders dropped, and his eyebrows wrinkled, and I don't know exactly how to describe what two years of enthusiasm and anticipation that's about to bust out of an eight-year-old boy's body looks like, but whatever that is, it had been there a minute ago, and now it was gone, and that was because of me.

I know that fear is not a genetically inherited trait, but I just witnessed how it could be handed from one generation to the next.

But in that moment, and I knew I only had a moment, the only thing I could think to do to prevent from handing my fears off to him was to swallow them myself.

So I took a deep breath, and I said, yeah, that ride does look kind of scary, but it looks like a fun kind of scary.

Let's do it.

So the thing about this ride, most of the rides in the park have a harness that holds you in.

This ride is the harness.

And as the attendant was attaching the cable to the back of mine, I looked at the top of the arch where the other end was attached, and I remember thinking, that's a lot of cable for something to go wrong with.

So I start looking around for a clipboard with a piece of paper on it, the kind of thing you might see in a public bathroom.

Just some sign that somebody's been around recently to inspect this thing.

No clipboard.

And then the scissor lift, which is holding up the platform that I didn't even realize we were standing on, begins to lower.

And now we're attached to the arch, so we're not lowering with it, and pretty soon we're on our tiptoes, and then the platform goes lower still, and we fall forward so that we're hanging horizontally by these cables.

And this was unexpected, so Tyson laughs, and I scream, because that's what I do.

And then the attendant binds our legs together, and he comes around in front, and he takes our inside arms, my right, Tyson's left, and he wraps them around each other at the elbow.

And he says, whatever you do during the entire ride, do not unhook your arms.

So I'm starting to sweat, and I grab my wrist, because I am not letting go of Tyson's arm.