Staying Close to Home on the Yankee Cannonball

The Yankee Cannonball is not the oldest roller coaster in the country; that distinction is held by Leap-the-Dips, a figure-eight-style coaster in Lakemont Park, in Altoona, Pennsylvania, which was built in 1902.

But the Cannonball, which is, by far, the most famous attraction at Canobie Lake Park, in Salem, New Hampshire, still takes your breath away from the parking lot.

Built in 1930 in Waterbury, Connecticut, and then relocated to Canobie, a 59-acre, family-owned trolley park founded in the early 1900s, the ride is a jiggly, wooden thrill ride, operating at 56 mph.

This is a travel piece about staying close to home.

I love the Cannonball, but it’s not actually why I come to Canobie Lake Park, or why I have been coming to Canobie, year after year, since 1988, when I first moved to the neighboring state of Massachusetts, despite my intervening years as a New Yorker.

In my childhood, Canobie was our local amusement park, but I find a different sort of amusement here in adulthood. While my own kids run to any ride that spins, whirls and spits them out, I’m moved by a place that is always and forever the same.

I like the ersatz “olde” villages, anomalous sections of the park that have nothing to do with each other, and the dining venues from the 1960s that have never been updated. The fiberglass tables and umbrellas in shades of orange, brown and yellow. The arcades, lit in neon as soon as dusk hits. I love that the landscape never changes, that the Turkish Twist — a ride that definitely feels both culturally inappropriate and extremely dangerous in 2024 — still exists, a purple, onion-domed dungeon, where gravity and centrifugal force suck thrill-seekers to the side of a spinning capsule as the floor falls out beneath them.

The thing about a theme park is that it isn’t real. No city is ever that clean or landscaped or transitions that neatly from one culture to another. That’s the magic of these parks, in general: that they transport you to the nicest versions of cities.

The magic of Canobie, in particular, is that it is a frozen-in-time place, a tidy respite from the real world. That I know its bones so well that it feels completely safe, even when it is tipping with people.

When life feels otherwise overwhelming, Canobie somehow does not. It is unchanged, irrespective of any updates: a corkscrew coaster replaced with an irreverent inverted coaster called “Untamed,” in 2011, for instance, or the introduction of Castaway Island, a water park, in 2018.

On any given year, I can still walk into this perfectly preserved time capsule in southern New Hampshire and locate everything I need. There are familiar landmarks and well-worn paths. I don’t worry about losing my children, even when the cell towers fail us. It is a place, actually, where worry simply does not follow us.

This was the first summer where I stayed quite close to home. Besides one languid trip to Italy at the close of August, my goal was, instead, to enjoy the quickly fading pleasures that New England offers up only in summer: purple-striated sand dunes, lobster overlooking the water, afternoons wading in my own swimming pool.

One Saturday night, out of nowhere, I packed my husband and kids into the car and hurried them 30 minutes north to Canobie, already our second visit for the season. With half-day tickets, we stayed right through that magical amusement park hour, when the neon comes on and the park turns into a carnival.

It was, I should note, the first time that my oldest was large enough to ride the Cannonball, and so we waited in line for an hour, weaving up and down through hordes of people, leaning on metal poles. There are no cheats at Canobie, no lightning lanes or express passes. You have to do it the hard way, so that, by the time you get to the front, you’re so exhausted you have no choice but to succumb to the ride.

He wasn’t scared, my son. Maybe fear only resides in the old. I think I didn’t used to be scared on roller coasters, either. While I strapped my loose arm — the coaster is lap bar-only — across his chest, he wrenched it off and threw his hands up in the air, screaming with delight at each dip and drop the coaster took.

It was the best, he wanted me to know — but I already knew that. The magic of that coaster had been living with me for years.

In a year that has taken me to eight countries across four continents, I was most pleasantly surprised by how easy it was — how lovely it was, in fact — just to stay home, to be precisely the kind of person who could swoop my children up on a Saturday night and take them far, far away to the magical land of New Hampshire.

I would do it again. I would travel the world and come back, again and again, to Canobie Lake Park. Because wherever your travels take you, there are few pleasures as sweet as the places you know completely by heart, the ones etched into you, like water over stone.

The Cannonball, steady in its Granite State resolve since the 1930s, awaits our return, that rickety coaster, that emblem of freedom, riding high above the world, one moment at a time.