Book excerpt from my book Santa's Village Gone Wild! Tales Of Summer Fun, Hijinx & Debauchery As Told By The People That Worked There.
The Skyliner
By Christopher Dearman
Another thing that surprisingly brought stress to some of my days was when I had to work the Skyliner, also known as the “Sky Ride.” While the loading of adults on the continuous moving seats was often comical, when it came to children trying to get on, there were times of much anxiety. I would often have nightmares of children getting rocked in the head by the moving seat, or falling between the lone skinny metal bar that was supposed to keep them in. Because of this, I would always be on edge while operating it. That said, as long as I didn’t let the stress get to me, it was often fun to work on a ride that I had spent many hours on as a kid, watching my spit fall from the dizzying heights.
Most of the comedy came from the adults that couldn’t comprehend how to get on a seat that continually moved. I would tell them to go stand in the yellow box, and when the seat came up behind them, just sit normal and pull down your lap bar. It really was quite simple to do, but to some this was often not the case.
Without fail there would easily be at least a half dozen people each shift that would manage to screw up the pretty straightforward undertaking. You would see people just freeze up like a deer in headlights, life flashing before their eyes. The thought of trying to sit down on the moving metal seat that was bearing down on them was petrifying. Many got tripped up and knocked down on their ass from thinking that they might get decapitated.
In actuality, the thing was moving maybe five miles an hour, but to some standing in the box waiting scared, you could tell they thought it was moving much faster. Many times the nervousness got to them and they would judge the timing wrong. The funniest moment would have to be the time where a young mother was attempting to board the ride with her two kids. For some reason she choked from the stress while trying to put her smaller kid down on the seat, and ended up pulling the kid back into her arms. This in turn sent her slightly older kid off on the ride all by himself! Being you couldn’t put the ride in reverse, and also that I was just too busy laughing to stop the ride in time, she had to watch in horror as her kid ventured into the sky alone for what I’m sure was a ride the young child would never forget.
While you would think that my days of spitting off the Sky Ride to try to hit people from far above would have stopped once I reached adolescence, the thrill of watching a loogie hacked from above, falling down and hitting unexpected customers below, never got old. I know most of you will find that disgusting, but at least it was better then getting hit with another kind of bodily fluid that came from the many infamous Sky Ride hand jobs that were “rumored” to have taken place!
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