101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [18]
but the result is striking: millions of cicadas can come out of the ground in a single night.
Once above ground, cicadas devote themselves to one thing: finding another cicada. Newly emerged cicadas, still nymphs, climb up on whatever woody structures they can find and quickly molt into adults, leaving behind amber-colored, creepy-looking sheaths that are great for practical jokes. Then the males start singing, joining together in chirping choruses that can reach up to 100 dB. Females respond by coyly flicking their wings, and about ten days of nonstop noise later, they mate. Females cut slits in twigs, lay eggs, and then die, their carcasses dropping from trees to form a thick, crunchy carpet. Six or seven weeks later, tiny white ant-like nymphs hatch, fall to the ground, burrow into the dirt, and the cycle begins again.
So let’s get to the wedding: the Great Eastern Brood, also known as Brood X, is the farthest-reaching cicada brood in the northeastern United States—and it’s set for a reemergence in 2021. Sometime early that summer—probably in the heat of wedding season—millions of cicadas will tunnel their way toward open air and, if you plan things poorly, your wedding site. Imagine it: your vows being drowned out by the singing of thousands of horny cicadas, insects falling onto your guests’ heads, the crunch underfoot of countless abandoned shells.
Dave Allen Photography/daveallenphotography.com
The upside is that cicadas are harmless—they don’t bite or sting, and they’re not even attracted to human food. But at 1½ inches long with large wings and bright red eyes, they’re definitely noticeable, especially given their tendency to fly into things. If your wedding site has seen cicadas in the past, consider renting a tent.
Chapter 22
(Tr)Action Park
Action Park—also known as Traction Park, Class Action Park, and Death Park—was an amusement park in Vernon Township, New Jersey. Responsible for at least six deaths and countless accidents, it inspired so many personal injury lawsuits that in 1996, it was forced to shut down.
The park was built as an off-season moneymaker for the Vernon Valley/Great Gorge ski area, and featured rides so obviously dangerous that they call into question the sanity of the person who designed them. Take, for example, the Alpine Slide. Built into the ski slope, it sent visitors zooming down the hillside on a concrete and fiberglass track in sleds equipped with poorly maintained brakes. There were two speeds available: very slow or extremely fast. Extremely fast meant risking having your sled jump the rails (a frequent occurrence), suffering abrasions and burns when you hit the track, and being hurled into a bale of hay at the bottom of the hill. Very slow, on the other hand, put you in danger of being rear-ended by the extremely fast person behind you. In 1984 and 1985, state records show that the ride resulted in at least fourteen fractures and twenty-six head injuries. It was also responsible for the park’s first death.
But the accidents didn’t stop there. Employees—mostly under twenty years old and often inebriated—souped up the Super Go Karts so that guests could play bumper cars at fifty miles per hour. The Super Speedboats, which visitors often rammed into one another, shared a pond with a healthy population of water snakes. The Tidal Wave Pool—nicknamed the “Grave Pool”—required twelve full-time lifeguards, who reported rescuing as many as thirty people per day on busy summer weekends. The Tarzan Swing dropped people into a pool of water so cold that in 1984, it’s said to have triggered a man’s fatal heart attack. The Aqua Scoot gave people head lacerations. The Diving Cliffs were positioned above a pool whose swimmers didn’t know they existed. The Kayak Experience’s submerged electric fans killed the park’s second victim: a twenty-seven-year-old man who was electrocuted when his boat