Glen Echo was the amusement park just down the hill from my elementary
school, next to Clara Barton's house in Glen Echo, MD. (Would a nurse like Clara
approve of the neck-snapping excitement, the sweet and greasy goodies? Well,
after experiencing bullets and cannonballs, maybe she would have no problem,
unlike my chiropractor, who decries plunging, twisting rollercoasters and
swirling teacups and alpine adventures displacing delicate arrangements of
sinew and bones.)

Was it a gentler, less frenetic time, when folks from Washington could ride the
trolley out to this park, out along on a bend in the Potomac? I still
remember where the stand was inside the gate where you could get that pink,
sweet, sticky, soft yet crunchy concoction in its huge cardboard cone. I
remember the smell of the fries, the corndogs, the greasy chains that
powered the rides. I remember the click-clack of the coaster climbing
towards its destiny- to plummet amid shrieks of delight and terror, real and
feigned.

Somehow, in my uncertain memory, I seem to recall hearing Glen Echo was slated
to be destroyed, replaced by condos. A few years ago I fled the stuffy
confines of a Georgetown conference out past the tree-lined views from above
the river. I drove along MacArthur Boulevard towards my old Bannockburn
home, which I had left as an eleven year old. Rounding a bend I spotted the
stone and wildly painted wood of some of the old buildings from the park
that I remembered in a foggy way. And then the slightly crude lattice-work structure of the
rollercoaster came into view. I pulled into the lot, separated from the park
by a new wooden bridge over a little creek. The park is relatively quiet
now, a center for arts. Strangely, it is now also a static museum to the
bounding, rollicking dreams and thrills of my childhood. But at least no
condos obliterate that memory.

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