Food Feature: On the boardwalk

It’s rare that the timing of my life works out. I remember reading Charlotte’s Web when I was 12 years old and being taken by the freedom the young protagonist, Fern, and her brother Avery experience at the county fair. “Let’s let the children go off by themselves,” their father suggests. “The fair only comes once a year.” When their mother becomes worried, she asks, “Do you think it’s really all right?” to which her husband replies, “Well, they’ve got to grow up sometime. And a fair is a good place to start, I guess.”

What a marvelous idea. I tried to use the same logic on my mother at one of the junky parking lot carnivals that occasionally mushroom up in the remote corners of Gwinnett County, but she didn’t buy it. The subdivisions in my suburban pocket of Atlanta and our parking lot sideshow fairs were a mocking imitation of the real neighborhoods and county fairs of the Charlotte’s Web-era, and I always felt slightly cheated because of it.

Sometimes, though, you can still stumble on a frozen piece of history. That’s the experience of visiting the boardwalk in Santa Cruz, a gem of a beach town about 75 miles south of San Francisco. Stepping onto the Santa Cruz boardwalk is like leaping back at least 30 years in time — sometimes literally, depending on the age of the ride. It’s a true boardwalk-beach town scene, a cornucopia of rides, games, cheap gift shops, gooey carnival food, suntanned people and sand in bathing suits. Santa Cruz’s boardwalk, which opened in 1915, claims to be the only “major seaside amusement park” left on the West Coast.

The boardwalk overlooks a stretch of the Santa Cruz beach, an unremarkable strip of coastline whose only asset is the lovely expanse of Pacific Ocean it holds in place. The centerpiece of all this is the Giant Dipper, a 76-year-old roller coaster that proves that experience really does matter.

The beach is unimpressive — a wide stretch of dirty sand crowded with people and litter. It was too cold to swim, so my two friends from San Francisco and I stretched in the sun for about 45 minutes, people-watching and reading magazines. I also studied the map of the boardwalk and checked out the prices for the rides. All-day passes were $22-$27, depending on the number of rides and games desired. Individual rides cost from $1.50 to $3 a piece.

Since there were three of us, we went with the 60-ticket strip. Our first stop was the Giant Dipper, a classic, wooden frame coaster that opened in 1924 and was declared a national historic landmark in 1987. You may recognize the coaster — it was used in the movies Sudden Impact, The Lost Boys and Dangerous Minds, among others. Standing in line took less than five minutes, and the ride itself was stellar, pure roller coaster thrills.

We also went on a more modern coaster, the Hurricane, built in 1992 and featuring fancy turns and twists. Not nearly as much fun as the Dipper. We also went on a ride called Chaos, designed specifically to help you lose your lunch, and one called the Tsunami, which swings you and a boatful of people up and in circles at a perilous height. We bypassed the water rides, and instead of going on a newly opened and mysterious ride called the Cave Train, we headed back for a second turn on the Dipper.

We were surrounded by kids of all ages, and it reminded me of another way the timing of life doesn’t work out sometimes. Now that I’m old enough to hang out with my friends at an amusement park when I want to and have the fiscal control to decide what kind of sugar-chocked treats I want to buy and how many rides I’ll go on, the joy in that kind of experience isn’t as potent as it used to be when I was 12 years old. Still, the boardwalk sure is fun.