Ooops!

I visit strange foreign lands, and I hike at high altitudes in remote wildernesses.  I must be a total daredevil, an insatiable thrill seeker.  Right?

Ha!

I'm terrified of amusement park rides.  Not just those new coasters that twist and loop and spin you upside down, all in an apparent effort to turn your body inside out.  I'm talking about Ferris wheels.  I'm talking about carnie rides like octopuses and tilt-a-whirls.  I'm talking about anything that takes me up high, or that spins me around in a manner that could potentially hurl me some distance into thin air.  I'm especially talking about rides that remind me, while on them, that my life depends on some unknown carnival employee's engineering and/or mechanical skills. 

I've even wondered -- looking above me while riding -- what would happen if the cotter pin holding a carousel pole in place snapped.  Would I ride my horse off into space, Pegasus-like, on a death ride to oblivion?

But, yes, surprisingly enough -- I have in fact paid my money and forced myself onto roller coasters.  The old-fashioned kind, I hasten to add.  The kind that just goes up and down and around hairpin turns.  Not the kind that in any way forces you to travel upside down.  I've maintained my sanity during these occasional experiences because the ride is so fast and over so quickly that I don't have time to analyze the enormous variety of things that could go wrong -- at least, once the agonizing climb, dragged by a chain up the initial hill ("why am I doing this?  what was I thinking of?"), is over.

All this is prefatory to today's story about the roller coaster incident in Orlando, Florida.  The ride where the car stalled at the top of a vertical hill, suspended seventeen stories in the air.  The front of the car apparently reached the top of the hill in a roughly horizontal orientation; the seats toward the back, on the other hand, were hanging straight down vertically.  Those unlucky rear riders found themselves facing uphill, staring at the sky, but one look over their shoulder gave them a nice view of Earth from a height of 140 feet.  They were trapped for two hours before amusement park employees found some way to extricate them from the car and bring them safely down to earth.

Even worse for me than the ride, and the untimely stop, would have been the extrication.  How it was accomplished wasn't explained.  How it was done, I don't even want to contemplate.

Only one person was hospitalized, with neck and back pain.  I would have been hospitalized in the mental health care unit, foaming at the mouth and babbling nonsensically.