"The child suffered minor injuries in attempting to exit a ride before it stopped."-- statement posted on Facebook by Essex Steam Train & Riverboat
"Minor injuries" normally kill a story. If news judgment had a diagnostic manual, most bumps and bruises would fall under "fatal conditions." And it should be that way. An overeager junior reporter might plead with the city-desk Kevorkians not to flatline his byline, but generally speaking such stories deserve to be swiftly put out of their misery.
This story was pronounced dead the afternoon of Sunday, April 29 at a pediatric emergency room in New Haven, Connecticut: A doctor leaned over my bruised, bloodied, and neck-braced two-year-old nephew Chase and said the CT-scans indicated the only lasting injury he sustained was the hole punched in his smile. Relief sighed, a sliver of normalcy restored, time of death 4:49 p.m.
Though I've plumbed my share of personal experience for material, the story was gone and I had no intention of resuscitating it. For all their active verbs and abject terrors, it never even occurred to me to write this -- that is, until my brother forwarded me the official statement quoted above. He raged at those 14 words. I tempered my anger with guilt. "The child," just to repeat, "suffered minor injuries in attempting to exit a ride before it stopped."
In 15 years of reporting (for the New York Post and elsewhere), how many times have I parroted back such statements to editors, and worse, to readers? How many times have I quoted -- with little question or thought -- coldly legalistic and depthless sentences like that one? Even when wholly accurate they're dismissive shorthand -- tiny morsels of processed fact designed to be easily digested on deadline.
Consider this a corrective, a belated memorial for all those stories eulogized only by press release.
"The child" is my nephew Chase, a boy of 25 months, 37½ inches, with untamable curly locks, and an outsize appetite for pickles and olives. My wife and I, along with our four-year-old twin boys, my parents, my brother, his wife, and Chase made the drive up to Essex, Connecticut for "A Day Out with Thomas," a vintage steam-train excursion pulled by an internationally touring life-size version of the beloved blue tank engine of children's storybook and TV-show fame.
As additional entertainment for the thousands of families who purchased tickets for one of Thomas's 25-minute jaunts, Essex Steam Train -- the historic rail yard hosting the event -- brought in half a dozen or so carnival rides. We limited ourselves to first-response vehicles: the boys rode the fire engines and the rescue helicopters before Chase ended up in an ambulance.
The fire engines, which moved along a circular track with less urgency than an FDNY trip to the supermarket, raised few alarms. Standing on the sidelines, we -- along with all the other parents and grandparents -- perform the amusement rite: With each turn, as our kids come into view, we burst with kinetic energy. Waving wildly (using the hand not filming the scene with an iPhone), we yelp words that are barely words. "Hiiiieeeeeeeee," we shout, shooting the exaggerated, sure-to-elicit-a-smile faces every parent perfects by the sixth month of the kid's life. They wave back, flashing ear-to-ear echoing grins, and then they're gone.
We pause, catching our breath during the 5, 10, or 15 seconds it takes for this whirling zoetrope to reignite us into animation. In these lulls between frames we doubt we can muster the same enthusiasm for the next go-round, but we usually can. The waves, if anything grow more frenetic; the "hiiiiiiiieeeeeeees" hit higher notes. The kids clang the bells, spin the steering wheels, and squeal siren songs of innocence.
My phone brims with these 40-second snippets of blaring carousel music and shaky cinematography, rated-G entertainments my kids relish reliving on multiple viewings. But we never imagine how fine a line separates Disney from disaster.
The helicopter ride took an alternate flight path: "Air Rescue," beckons a sign framed in turquoise light bulbs at the entrance to the helipad where five blue, purple, and green whirlybirds -- each connected by metal octopus arms to a central axis -- prepare for departure. The boys race for a blue one. My wife buckles them in -- Finn and Sawyer in the front bench and Chase in the rear, yanking each strap blood-pressure-cuff tight.
We assume our usual positions as the helicopter fleet lifts four or five feet straight up and takes fast circular flight. My boys' two smiles blur by before I can even unholster my waving hand. Chase is harder to miss. Shoved by centrifugal force, he slides wildly across the wide bench fumbling for something to grab onto. "Iiiiiiieeeee," we cringe, as he spins out of sight.
Another turn: I hear Finn and Sawyer laughing as they zoom back into view. Though he isn't smiling, Chase rights himself and remains upright by clenching the front of the bench. The mild panic eases from his eyes -- and ours.
Another turn: But as they come around again Chase gets thrown back and forth and ends up horizontal on the seat. His eyes search for his parents. But like the falcon in the Yeats poem, he cannot find the falconer.
Another turn: Things fall apart. His head thrusts out the door through a gap under the metal safety bars. "IIiiiieeeeee," we cry as anxiety explodes all around us.
Another turn: Now a jumble of head, hands, arms, and shoulders dangle from the door. The possibility that things will turn out right slips away. The center cannot hold. "Stop the ride," my wife yells, running around the perimeter to get the operator's attention. I squeeze the top of the fence. My body body fills with potential energy, but I do not move.
Another turn: Only his legs remain inside the ride now, as though some sinister spirit is swinging him by the ankles and slowly loosening his grip. "Nooooooo," my brother screams at a pitch that pierces through all the others. "Oh, Noooooo." The blue helicopter spins out of sight once more. We do not see his tiny body's flight through the air. The violence occurs in Hitchcockian fashion -- out of view. THUD. THUD. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
My brother's legs buckle. As I hurdle the fence, I see him crumple in place like a building in a controlled demolition. My sister-in-law and I rush to the other side of the ride, unsure what we'll find.
Chase landed in the dirt after first slamming into the raised metal platform at the base of the ride. Blood and screams gush from his mouth. The blood dimmed tide is loosed. But he's alive. Breathing. "Don't touch him, don't do anything," a voice shouts. The ride finally stops.
All around us the other mothers and fathers are screaming and lunging to rescue their kids from the rescue helicopters. And seeing their panicked parents rush towards them, all the children -- some of whom must have witnessed the moments of impact -- start wailing too. Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
A slew of dumb questions. "How old is he, seven?" asks a volunteer paramedic. The ambulance arrives, and the actual EMTs debate how to strap Chase to a spinal board long enough to hold three of him. They finally load him and his parents into the ambulance and muffle his screams by shutting the doors. When Thomas the tank engine pulls into the station no one seems to notice.
The ride to the hospital might be the worst of the three. We piled into our cars, buckled our seatbelts and sped after the ambulance, our minivan following the GPS-prescribed route, while our minds looped and swerved without any direction. Unable to bear the uncertain road ahead, the brain damage, loss of motor functions, or developmental disabilities that fill our imaginations, our thoughts circled back to the helicopters.
Chase's ride replayed over and over again in high-definition mental footage. We watched him hanging out of the helicopter doors, could hear the chorus of screams, but were helpless to do anything more than dissect and second-guess every frame. I dreamed up alternate endings: In one I jump the fence, grab hold of the spinning helicopter and pull Chase to safety. In another I swoop down and make a diving catch to save him. But mostly we assigned blame. Mostly, we blamed ourselves.
Deleted scenes came back to us: Me, holding the boys' hands as we waited our turn for the helicopters. "This one's fast," I said to my wife as the ride whizzed by. Why didn't we stop right there? No helicopter parents would let their kids on these helicopters. Daedalus, they would say, you didn't fly close enough to the son.
Here are the boys, rushing to the blue helicopter and jumping into the front row. My brother wanted Chase to sit next to either Finn or Sawyer, rather than alone in the back bench, but we chose not to push it. Why didn't we force them to move? We spared ourselves a momentary tantrum, a teaspoon of grief, but we might have averted an ocean of it.
I watched my wife strapping the three boys in. The ride operator, a middle-aged man and not some teenager, then made his rounds, poking his head into each chopper for a perfunctory check of the straps. Just before latching the door he spotted something troubling. He bent down, reached to the floor beneath the boys' feet and fished out a quarter that had fallen from Sawyer's pocket. "You might want to hold this," he smiled, returning the coin to my wife like Charon handing out a refund. (Hours later, as he took our statements in the hospital waiting room, a state police officer mentioned how devastated this ride operator was.) But why didn't he stop the ride sooner. Why was the minimum height just 36 inches? Why was the ride designed with a gap in the door large enough for a boy to be hurled through?
I saw myself, turning away from the pain and blood as the paramedics attended to Chase. Falling back on journalistic instinct to ground myself, I took notes and snapped photos of the scene. I jot down the name of the ride's Italian manufacturer, and photograph the inside of Chase's helicopter, noting his seatbelt was still buckled. Why, in this moment of suffering, did I act like a trial lawyer in discovery?
My four-year-olds joined this second-guessing game. Sawyer reminded us that prior to the helicopters he wanted to go on another ride, but we insisted the line was too long. "I told you we should have gone on the strawberries," he said.
In the hospital room, Chase laid on top of his mother in the bed watching episodes of Bob the Builder on a monitor a nurse wheeled in, while we waited for the test results. When a doctor came in, my parents peppered him with neurological questions. "I'm a dentist," he explained. Though the official word didn't come for another hour, when the medical priority became examining the gap where his front tooth once was, I knew Chase was in the clear.
But I wasn't sure the story was dead until my mother answered a phone call from a friend and tried to tell it. "Chase fell from a -- yes, yes, he's fine," I heard her say. That was it. It's the same in the news business: The destination is what matters, not the journey. Reporters begin at the end, and in this case the ending was, happily, a boring one.
We buckled up for the ride home. As my wife drove up the hospital garage's narrow, winding ramp toward daylight, the rear door scraped against the concrete wall. The injuries were minor.