Sadly, as far as I know, there are no secret, lost amusement parks in Manitoba. St. Cyril doesn't exist either. I didn't want to pin down the setting to a specific, real town because that would have entailed fact checking and such and such. No deal!

Sorry I'm so late. I've no excuse except laziness.

---

The Rescue of Abandoned Things

We drove along the dirt road as fast as I could make my Sunfire go without kicking up too much dust. Whenever we drove somewhere, Alex insisted we avoid the main roads. Her favourites were mostly empty lanes frequented only by farmers and locals. If we had to pull onto the shoulder to allow some lumbering farm vehicle to pass by us, she'd always wave. If the farmer waved back Alex would have a grin the rest of the day. The highlight of the drive so far that morning had been when she spotted six deer grazing near a copse of trees. She'd waved to them as well. As we drove, Alex aimed her video camera out the window and recorded the scenery flowing by. This had been a hobby of hers years before Youtube popularized amateur filming. She would record hours of footage on just about any subject and edit them into short films. Sometimes she would add a soundtrack in and other times just dub over her own commentary. While she treated it like a hobby, things she mostly made to amuse her friends, Alex definitely had a eye for filmmaking. I remember a haunting silent film she made, a recording of the room in a care home where her grandmother had lived out the last few years of her life. The film was made after she'd passed away. Her family had gone to collect her effects and once the room had been emptied and readied for the next occupant, Alex had gone in with her camera. Even though all signs of her grandmother had been erased, the film managed to reveal much about her. From the way Alex's camera lingered, you knew where her grandmother liked to sit and watch the Seine River. When the picture swept over the bed you would almost swear you saw her lying in it, like Alex had caught an afterimage of her.


Still looking out the window, she asked me, "How long until we get to St. Cyril do you think?"

"We'd be there already if you'd let me take the highway."

Alex twisted around to aim the lens at me and said, deepening her voice into a newscaster tone, "We're speaking now with Eric Toews, a man with no sense of fun. Tell us, Mr. Toews, how and when you lost of your sense of adventure?"

"All I'm saying is that if you're going to complain about how long the drive is taking, you should let me take the faster roads."

She punched me in the arm, then turned her camera back to the passing scenery.

"I wasn't complaining, just wondering how much longer. I only brought so many tapes."

"Probably another twenty minutes."

I reached over and squeezed her leg. Alex turned off the camera, stuffed it away in the bag at her feet and then bopped for a while to the CD that was playing - I can't remember which one.

---

St. Cyril, Manitoba. I'd never been there before, never thought of going. It was one of those names you'd here on the news now and again when local farmers suffered through a drought or a flood and not at all when things were going well. Along with filmmaking, Alex had a love for abandoned things. One of our first dates was her dragging me to see a documentary at the University of Winnipeg about lost and abandoned subway stations in the London Underground. I struggled to stay awake through a couple hours of dusty tunnels and half-completed subway stations, but Alex watched wide-eyed, hardly touching her popcorn and drink. The first thing she said after the film was to ask if I'd like to go to London sometime. Ruins and ancients things, though, didn't hold nearly as much fascination for her; it had to be something recently abandoned. The Vaughn Street Jail, in downtown Winnipeg was one of her favourite places in the city. Whenever we drove by it, Alex would gleefully point out the cars that were sitting in the courtyard where they used to hang prisoners, now public parking. I don't mean to make her sound morbid, let me just say. She really wasn't. Alex just had a soft spot for things other people had forgotten about.

We first heard about the St. Cyril Amusement Park from my dad. Alex was over for supper and it came up between spaghetti and dessert; a government backed project, another attempt to diversify the Western economy in the late 80s.

"They had a real roller coaster?" I'd asked, "Not just one of the crappy little ones they have at the Ex?"

"Two, in fact." I remember dad scratching behind his ear as he tried to remember their names. "The Atomic Twist and the Gravity Bender. And there was a water slide, too, and a gigantic boardwalk. They were expecting it to compete with Canada's Wonderland and draw tourists by the hundreds. The thing was open maybe two months before it went bust. Who wants to drive an hour and a half to St. Cyril?"

He didn't understand what he was doing to Alex. Her last forkful of spaghetti was suspended in the air and her eyes were shining.

"And they just abandoned it?"

"Let the weeds take it over. They couldn't even sell the land. After laying down all that asphalt, it would have been too expensive to turn it back into farmland."

"I can't believe I've never heard of it before," Alex said. I'm sure maps of southern Manitoba were already running through her head. "You'd think it would have made the news."

"Around the same time, they'd just introduced the GST. Anything else the government did that pissed people off was lost in the storm."

A couple of weeks later, Alex and I were meeting for lunch. I got to the restaurant first and ten minutes later she burst through the door and ran to my table, almost knocking down a busboy. She was waving the day's Free Press.

"I found it!" She spread the newspaper out on the table and jabbed a finger at the photo on the front page. The article was about springtime flooding, how many acres of canola and barley had been ruined. The photo showed the archetypical farmer: sunburned and deeply weathered face beneath a John Deere baseball cap. But in the distance behind him was a row of tall trees at the edge of his field. Peeking out slyly from the top of the trees was the arc of a roller coaster loop-de-loop.

"Let's go Saturday," Alex said. She hadn't even sat down yet. "Are you busy?"

---

We ended up driving around the area for quite a while, long circles around a country block. But eventually we spotted the old, overgrown road that lead to what would have been the parking lot for the St. Cyril Amusement Park. The asphalt was grey and cracked all over; green veins where the weeds grew through. There was a large billboard in the lot, peeled and sun-faded beyond legibility. I pulled into the spot nearest nearest the entrance, aligning my car with where I thought the lines once were. It's not often you get the best spot.

"This is actually probably a handicap spot."

"I'm willing to chance it," I responded.

Alex had bounded off to the ticket booth before I'd even hauled my small backpack from the backseat. Its windows were all broken and tucked into the overhang I could see an old, disused bird's nest. When I approached, she popped up behind the counter.

She said, "I found an old roll of tickets in a drawer back here." and then aimed the video camera at me.

"Welcome to the St. Cyril Amusement Park!"

"How much are tickets, and how many tickets per ride?" I asked.

She aimed the camera down toward the roll in her hand. The tickets looked like they'd been run through a washing machine several times. Alex turned the roll this way and that in from the of the camera and then looked up at me.

"Today? Today everything is free. It's our grand re-opening." She tossed the roll over her shoulder and leaned out of the booth for a kiss.

We walked through the gate and while Alex performed a slow, sweeping panorama with her camera, I closed my eyes and tried to send myself back to the first opening of the park, probably the only day it was jammed full of people, when they still thought this might be a good, successful idea. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't conjure up the sounds of children shouting and laughing, the bedlam of a thousand people wandering up and down with cotton candy and popcorn in their hands. Barkers trying to entice people over to their own particular, hopelessly rigged game. Instead all I heard was the wind and a nearby murder of crows screeching and crying.

It turned out we weren't the first people to rediscover the St. Cyril Amusement Park. In front of the House of Terror we found what was probably a party spot for the local farm kids. A fire pit had been dug and the area was scattered with beer bottles and glass. Some looked maybe only weeks old while on other bottles the labels had completely disintegrated. There where was a certain archeology to the graffiti inside the House of Terror, too, with newer stuff layered over older.

"Mr. Weibe sucks dick," Alex read aloud.

"I'd bet ten bucks that's the principle at the local school. Or at the very least a teacher."

We walked up and down, looking around. Alex filmed whatever happened to catch her eye. She was enjoying herself, but I was finding the place a bit creepy. I think it bothered me that the park was built and so promptly abandoned. Everything around was decayed, nature was moving back in and it never really got used. It was just wasted. I found something offensive about that.

On the drive out, we'd talked about perhaps climbing one of the roller coaster tracks but upon seeing them we decided they looked a bit too unsafe. But a bunch of the cars were still at the bottom. Their plastic seats and bodies were completely intact. Perhaps a bit sun-faded and weathered but otherwise unharmed. Alex filmed me sitting in the front car, screaming my head off like I was going through the Atomic Twist's loop. We switched and I filmed Alex pretending to be sick over the side.

"Oh - I want to ride on that carousel," Alex said while pointing down the boardwalk.

The carousel had seen better days. The canopy covering it was entirely gone leaving just a metal skeleton. It looked like an umbrella with all its fabric stripped away. The poles that suspended the animal chairs were rusty and some of them had crumbled and broken. I saw a decrepit seahorse laying forlornly on its side, almost lost amongst the weeds.

"Will you film me? I'll dub in some circus-y music later. It'll be cute."

We were at the gate and she was about to hand the camera to me when we heard the growling. We both froze; later on we'd realize it was a coyote, and a normal sized one at that. But I swear at the time it looked as though a gigantic wolf had padded out of the booth guarding the way into the carousel. The fur on its back stood straight up and it was slightly hunched, as though ready to spring at us. Alex slowly raised her camera to her eye. It was almost instinctual for her. The animal's growl turned into a snarl and after a moment, we caught each other's eye and reached the same conclusion: run.

We were half way back to the car before we realized the coyote wasn't chasing us. And soon we were doubled over, laughing.

---

We've gone our separate ways since then, Alex and I. She lives in Seattle now and is married. We exchange letters every now and again and she'll sometimes send me a dvd of one of her documentaries. I watch the movie Alex cut from our footage that day, sometimes. She put the coyote part at the end of course and when you see the coyote on film you realize it right away: it was a female, a mother. It probably confronted us to protect her pups from the invaders, Alex and I.

5 responses to "Week #10 - The Rescue of Abandoned Things "

Debs wrote: Thursday, 14 Feb 2008 00:43 Very nice! There is something appealing in abandoned things, no, even though they're actually just normal things and maybe wouldn't feel special otherwise. I sure felt that way when exploring one of Toronto's abandoned subway stations last year.

Karen wrote: Thursday, 14 Feb 2008 02:36 I'm glad he felt strange and creeped out because I did too, reading it. Loved the coyote at the end.

Ginny! wrote: Friday, 15 Feb 2008 01:28 Little thing: "Its were windows all broken." I like it. It's a little creepy.

D.J. wrote: Friday, 15 Feb 2008 02:03 I feel like everything's wrapped up at the ending a little too quickly ... but you do a great job of leading us in, and creating the mood. Good stuff.

D.J. wrote: Friday, 15 Feb 2008 02:04 Oh, and how can there be an abandoned amusement park ANYWHERE that isn't being used by The Joker as a hideout? :P

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