High Rollers

St. Pierre withered in the white-hot heat of such greatness and disembarked from Le Monstre after an otherwise astonishing 670 hours. But Rodriguez, already in possession of the world record, refused to stop. He rode for gratuitous hours, then days and finally weeks, until he passed the 1,000-hour mark and put the record forever out of reach. On the final lap of his odyssey, he breasted a tape at the platform, a U.S. flag on his sweater, and then swigged from a champagne bottle. He was bussed by a pair of Blackpool belles. Then, spent, he called his mother from a cell phone.

His legs were badly bruised. His knees, though padded, were cross-hatched with cuts from the violent jostling of the steel car as he slept. His face resembled a peeled tomato, rubbed raw by the wind off the Irish Sea. Imagine driving from Miami to Juneau and back at 65 mph with your head out the window, and you only begin to comprehend the man's 11,362-mile ride to nowhere.

Ensconced that night in an English hotel, Rodriguez couldn't sleep. "I kept waking up in bed," he says, "bracing myself for the first drop."

The next morning, England awoke to a bizarre and lengthy editorial in The Times of London denouncing Rodriguez. "If futility can be graded," the piece said, "surely this bizarre bid to turn entertainment into tedium might almost set a record."

The first time Rodriguez heard this was when I mentioned it to him recently. "I know I'm not Neil Armstrong," he said. "I keep this in perspective. I know there's a lot of humor here. I'm 40 years old, and it will be easy for people to say, 'This guy is missing a few bricks.' But you know, I don't get paid, I have slept in airports, I try to raise some money for diabetes research. I just want to keep my dignity, if that is possible. This is not a glamorous life."

So why live it? "I think it's the connection to people," Rodriguez says. "Most people don't understand what I'm doing, but they want to be a part of the fun. They ask, 'Can I bring you a blanket?' 'Will you come to dinner at the house when it's over?' At Blackpool, a family brings me candy. I rode with a little girl and a little boy when I set a record in Blackpool in 1979, and I wrote them a note. They came back in '94 and rode with me again."

The kids had, of course, grown up. One of them still had his yellowed note, and she showed it to Rodriguez 15 years after he'd written it. It said, "Thanks so much for riding with me." His life had come full circle. But then it did so 505 times every day on the Dipper, 22,725 times in all last summer.

The Traditional complete-circuit roller coaster always returns to its station, to where it began. So it is with all of roller-coasterdom. In the way that cities are building retro ballparks, neoclassical wooden coasters are now going up, and ancient amusement parks—such as 101-year-old Kennywood—are the envy of the industry. "The '50s saw urban decline and the flight to suburbia," says Futrell, the NAPHA historian, "and the '60s became a real struggle for the old-time traditional parks. The '70s brought theme-park development. Now we're getting back to the vintage parks. Kennywood is almost the Wrigley Field of amusement parks."

Kennywood's Thunderbolt was named the top roller coaster in the world in a highly publicized Discovery Channel special that aired over Memorial Day weekend. The wooden coaster opened in 1968. "There are a lot of people who don't even count steel as coasters," says Breymier, the Coaster Zombie.

"Ride operators like the older rides," says Futrell. "They're solid but simple pieces of machinery, with pulleys and gears and chains."