Even from here on the ground he can feel its pull, the dips and curves of the roller coaster broken down in his mind into mathematical certainties. For John Fetterman, it's as reassuring as a sunny day.
He knows every inch of the Twister because he created it. From its peak more than 100 feet up to its 72-foot drop and swooping underground tunnel, he designed it to pin riders to their seats and make them feel as if they're going to sail into space. It's like that in his head sometimes with the numbers flying around, crashing together. He has to focus hard to bring them back into line, smooth and clear and melodious.
At 52, he is used to this. His mustache is graying now, and his shoulders slump a little under the forest green T-shirt he wears tucked into his shorts.
He learns more from listening to a roller coaster than riding it. The sound of the chains clanking as the ratchet teeth under the cars catch the links and slowly haul them toward the summit. The steel wheels clacking across the track.
The Twister is the marquee ride at Knoebels, an amusement park set among the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains that beckons with yesteryear charms: bumper cars and carousels under the pines, next to the Swiss Christmas chalet and Haunted House. In between are kiosks where you can buy battered fries, Jell-O salads and home-made fudge. An hour north of Harrisburg, it's the "largest free-admission, free-parking amusement park in the United States," says owner Dick Knoebel. "You can come here and enjoy the park and not spend a dime. But you better not want an ice cream cone." It'll set you back $2.20 to catch a thrill on the Twister.
Its old-fashioned atmosphere is what makes this place exotic. Its quirkiness is what makes it right for Fetterman. It's a place he can pursue his obsession. Maybe the only place.
Professionally speaking, Fetterman has called Knoebels home for the past 30 years. He lives about a mile down the road and drives his old S-10 pickup to the gravel lot on the edge of the park six days a week. It's about as un-Disney as you can get. While other parks were going for bigger, taller and faster, Knoebels didn't. Fetterman's newest coaster, under construction, is the embodiment of that resistance.
"It's the culmination of a dream," he says, standing before the rising wooden form of the Flying Turns, a $3 million replica of a ride first constructed nearly 80 years ago. "It's built on a human scale. I could certainly design something extreme, something stultifyingly stupid, but I won't even consider doing it. It's too easy, and ultimately disappointing."
He is determined to show the amusement world that you can provide a thrill with more than brute force. While the top steel coasters can soar 400 feet and higher, the Flying Turns will be all of 47 feet tall, with top speeds of maybe 25 mph.
Earlier in his career, Fetterman thought perhaps the industry would sit up and take notice of his work. He gave up on that long ago. But when the Flying Turns is done, it may just be what he has been quietly aiming for all along.
In a world of fast and furious, he wants to build the thinking man's roller coaster.
An affinity for wood
Pinball machines were his first love. He was obsessed with the clatter of the steel balls, the geometry of the mechanical actions, the melodic chimes of the games. It spoke to the part of his brain that sets him apart, "the semiautistic half-wit with a crazy math ability," he says, shrugging.
But in 1976, when he graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in mathematics, there were no jobs designing new pinball games in an industry being crushed by the new video games. "Pac-Man" and "Galactica" held no allure for him, even if that's where the money was.
So he went back to Knoebels, where he'd been a "park rat" as a kid, and became a ride manager, running and maintaining a secondhand steel roller coaster called the Jet Star.
He hated that ride. It was complicated and quirky and relentlessly uncooperative. He had to mentally tear it down every day to figure out what tweaking was needed to keep it running smoothly. And it lacked the organic beauty of a wooden coaster, which to him is like a living thing, the feel of the ride changing from hour to hour and day to day, responding to the temperature and other aspects of weather.
"I did a lot of supper breaks," he recalls. "I'd get together with a friend and we'd talk about all the great roller-coaster designers, Fred Church, Harry Traver, John Allen. We'd talk about fun roller coasters, dangerous roller coasters."
He immersed himself in the grand sweep of roller-coaster history, dating to 1873, when Pennsylvania coal workers began hopping on the Switchback Railroad coal train at Mount Jefferson for its short but thrilling drop in the last few moments down to the Lehigh River. (The first coaster designed specifically for fun was built in 1895 -- 600 feet of trolley tracks between two wooden hills in Coney Island, then a burgeoning beach resort in Brooklyn. Riders would pay a nickel to climb up, then ride to the bottom in cars that reached the whopping speed of 6 mph. Attendants had to push the cars back up.)
Fetterman discovered the work of legendary designer Allen, who was the first to begin applying advanced scientific principles to the creation of rides. Physics, slide rules and psychology (not to mention the concept of liability) came to roller-coaster design only after the Roaring Twenties, when wooden coaster construction peaked at upward of 3,000 worldwide. (In the early days, parks would post signs on the loading platforms warning "No standing"; when riders fell out, this was generally attributed to their own negligence.)
These wooden coasters soared and shook riders with whirlpool spirals, gravity-defying ascents and spine-crunching dives. But speed and centrifugal force were only the beginning of the sensations on a good roller-coaster ride, Allen told the Chicago Tribune in 1976, a few years before he died. Romance was always in the back of his mind.
"On a curve, we very carefully determine how much thrust your body, and the car, can take," he said. "Then we determine what the proper angle would be to bank the curve so that the girl will get thrown into the fella's arms. I devote a great deal of time to this."
But despite Allen's efforts, America's love affair with the wooden-structure coaster was dying by the 1950s. Walt Disney, for one, was disgusted by the "honky-tonk" atmosphere that had enveloped parks like Coney Island, which had fallen under the sway of the mob and allowed drinking, gambling and even prostitution to take hold. When Disneyland -- the nation's first theme park -- opened in 1955, there was lots of fiberglass and steel and not a wooden coaster in sight.
Steel roller coasters and the advent of computers catapulted designers into the realm of the extreme. Priorities shifted to rocketlike accelerations (zero to 128 mph in 3.3 seconds on Six Flags Great Adventure's Kingda Ka), greater heights (420 feet for Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster), sharper angles of descent (76 degrees on Six Flags Great Adventure's El Toro) and more punishing G forces ( 4.6 on Six Flags Magic Mountain's Riddler's Revenge).
By the mid-'70s, many of the old amusement parks were dying, leaving the skeletons of their roller coasters behind, according to Richard Munch, founding president of the American Coaster Enthusiasts.
Pete Knoebel, Dick's uncle, realized the bind his family's park could fall into. Roller coasters drew crowds, but steel (for one of the new ones, anyway) was too big-budget for his small-town family park. He brought Fetterman along to look at an old coaster in San Antonio's Playland Park, which was slated for the wrecking ball. The first wooden coaster made entirely from pressure-treated wood, it was in surprisingly good shape for its age.
Knoebel bought it and had it moved in sections to Elysburg. In three months, at a cost of about $1 million, it was re-erected at the park under Fetterman's direction, given a fresh coat of deep-forest-green paint and opened for business June 15, 1985. It was renamed, fittingly, the Phoenix.
Munch credits the move with helping to turn the world's eyes back to the wooden ride that was quickly disappearing from the American landscape. Knoebels showed that an old coaster could be revived, and dozens of others followed.
"If it wasn't for them, the past would be lost," says Munch.
"We thought it was great we were moving a roller coaster," Fetterman says. "As time goes on, I see there was more in what we did than what we thought at the time. . . . We proved again the wooden coaster could be successful."
Safety, and satisfaction, in numbers
When he was very young, he discovered numbers. He remembers the euphoria when he suddenly realized the symmetry of 10, how it made everything click.
Three and seven are married and four and six are married. Add seven and six, split the seven into four and three. Four goes with the six to make 10.
"I can't say it's rational, but it's emotional for me that numbers go together," he says of how he imposes order with the numbers flying about his brain.
This gift was better than his musical talent. Even though he played the piano extraordinarily well as a boy, he found it stressful to be around other people, much less compete as a solo performer. Numbers, though, were a refuge.
As he got older, he'd read road signs as he rode in the car with his mother: 47 miles to Pittsburgh, 53 miles to somewhere else. He'd play with the numbers in his head, faster than he could form words:
Forty-seven and 53 are equi-distant from 50. Square 50, that's easy, 2,500. Since 47 and 53 are three away from 50 , take three and square that. Take nine from 2,500 and get 2,491. Forty-seven times 53 is 2,491.
"It doesn't sound all that sexy, but it's reassuring somehow," he says. He shares his love of numbers with his wife, Louise. They both worked at Knoebels during their teenage years; he saw her when he came home to visit from college, but blond, pretty and popular, she was always dating someone else. He finally screwed up the courage to ask her out. They married after she graduated from college; she's now a senior financial adviser at a medical center.
"My wife is much smarter than I am," he says. They have three children: Sarah, Erica and John Allen, named for the roller-coaster designer. John Allen, at 16 the youngest, works in the arcade. The girls worked at Knoebels during the summer when they were growing up.
Fetterman often meets his wife and son for dinner at the park during the week.
"She would like me to be home more than I am," he says. But after 26 years of marriage, she's accustomed to his roller-coaster obsessions. The Flying Turns is his oldest one.
It was during his early years at Knoebels that Fetterman first saw photos of the legendary ride dreamed up by a former World War I Canadian Royal Air Force pilot named Norman Bartlett. Bartlett showed up one day at the office of John Miller, one of the greatest roller-coaster designers of the early days, with a moving picture of a toboggan slide, according to Robert Cartmell's "The Incredible Scream Machine: A History of the Roller Coaster."
"I don't think [Bartlett] knew the difference between a tenpenny nail and a two-by-four," Cartmell quotes a witness to the meeting in his book. But Miller took the idea and turned it into a ride.
Fetterman was amazed at the rubber-castered cars caroming wildly through a cylindrical chute of cypress like untethered bobsleds. It was different from anything he'd ever seen before. And it was essentially extinct.
He remembers asking Dick Knoebel about it. Knoebel had ridden one of the originals. And he'd ridden a steel rendering of the ride in England. "It wasn't the same," Knoebel told him.
"There's a smell and feel to it that you don't get with steel," says Carole Sanderson, president of American Coaster Enthusiasts. "The oil they used on the wood, the graphite of the tracks. . . . A steel coaster is very sterile. But the wood is . . . like a piece of furniture, like artwork."
Fetterman tucked away the memory, and went on with his job. He and the Knoebels relocated the Rocket. He built the Twister, modeled after a design by John Allen. Then three years ago, he made a pitch to the Knoebel family: We should build a Flying Turns.
"I had just worked on this for 30 years and got to the point where it felt like it can't lose," says Fetterman. "But I think it's gutsy on the Knoebels' part."
Where a larger company might have bought a roller-coaster design and had it built within months, Dick Knoebel says he recognizes Fetterman's perfectionist tendencies. Knoebels amusement park, founded by his grandfather, has evolved over time. Why shouldn't a ride? "It's what works," Knoebel says. "None of us here at the park are suits."
Even now, Fetterman is still changing a design that is midway through construction. He has added vertical supports, increased the layers of wood on the track and lengthened a straightaway since work began. Just one or two workers hammer on the site on a midweek afternoon.
"We're moving, but we're not running," says Leonard Adams, the construction foreman who wears a Stetson-shaped hardhat and yellow-lensed sunglasses. Last week's rain shut down work only for a few days.
The beauty of this roller coaster, Fetterman believes, is that it will show it takes less force than one might think to convince people they are going to barrel into the earth or float away.
Away from the park later, Fetterman confides that in person he finds roller coasters a little overwhelming. All the noise, the clanging, the constant bangs and rumbles leave him jangled. The most pleasing sounds to his ears are chimes, a modulated pitch, the tones of Tibetan throat singing or of Ben Franklin's armonica, a glass bowled instrument that emits crystalline notes.
Could you build a roller coaster that would sound like that? He's been playing with that puzzle in his mind. He hasn't solved it yet.
Still, he hears its harmony in his imagination. Maybe he'll build it some day.
News researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.