101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [19]
And then there was the Cannonball Loop slide—an enclosed waterslide that ended with a roller coaster-esque loop-de-loop. Based on the faulty premise that a wet bathing suit would provide the slickness and momentum necessary to carry a person up and around a 360-degree loop, the ride was closed after only a month.
Gone are the days of Action Park’s treacherous rides, untrained employees, and copious beer stands. It’s now the Mountain Creek Waterpark and is, by all accounts, much, much safer. But the morbidly nostalgic can still catch a glimpse of past dangers—underneath the route of the modern-day gondola lies the abandoned track of the Alpine Slide.
Chapter 23
A Giant Room Filled
with Human Crap
Imagine a room filled with human shit—huge, steaming piles of it, arranged in rows in a dimly lit, windowless space the size of a parking garage. Actively rotting, the piles give off a fog so thick that, on particularly humid days, the machinery operators can’t actually see the ground.
Sound appealing? The Inland Empire Regional Composting Authority is the country’s largest indoor composting facility for
biosolids—a fancy word for sewage sludge. Housed in a former Ikea warehouse, the facility gets its raw material from an area in Southern California called the Inland Empire, blends the sludge with wood chips, lets it rot, and sells it as SoilPro, a fertilizer for home gardens.
By the end of its sixty-day journey through the warehouse, microbes have broken the sludge down so thoroughly that it’s recognizable only by a faded manure-like smell and dark brown color. But there is nothing subtle about the process it took to get there. In the main composting room, which is a vast cavern bathed in dim yellow light, mounds of steaming sludge stretch toward the ceiling in piles taller than the trucks that brought them in. A system of powerful fans changes the room’s air twelve times an hour, but the smell is still so strong that stepping out of your car’s protective bubble for even a moment will burn your eyes, turn your stomach, and saturate your clothing with the scent of ammonia and excrement.
A warehouse full of rotting feces. You had me at “Hello.”
Steaming piles of poop
Courtesy of the author
Chapter 24
Kingman Reef
There are places you should stay away from because they’re not worth the trouble, and there are places to stay away from because if humans visit, things get screwed up. Kingman Reef qualifies on both counts.
Smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Kingman Reef is about a thousand miles from Honolulu. Technically it’s the northernmost of the Line Islands, but that’s a dubious nomenclature since it’s not actually an island. Above water, Kingman Reef is an uninhabited spit of smashed coral and shells, decorated by occasional pieces of human-made flotsam: plastic bottles, broken bits of Styrofoam, and a shocking number of widowed flip-flops. Its total land area is about 0.01 square miles.
When I visited the reef on a two-week marine biology expedition from the Line Islands to Hawaii, the first thing I noticed as our boat approached was a shipwreck washed up on the spit’s opposite shore. At first this seemed cool—a shipwreck! How fun! Then I remembered that I was on a boat. I also noticed the mood of our captain, who was becoming increasingly nervous as we neared the spit. Unable to drop anchor—he didn’t want to damage any coral—he was guiding us back and forth along a line, motoring the ship a safe distance away from land, killing the engine, letting us drift back toward shore, and then starting the motor again. He did this for sixteen hours.
Meanwhile, the marine biologists in charge of the expedition decided that our proximity to the reef was the perfect occasion for a new evening activity: shark baiting. Who cared that it was beginning to storm? Using the remnants of a tuna they had caught several days before, the crew spent the night dangling chunks of flesh off the side of the boat, tempting sharks—of which there were many—to approach our boat and