Nothing says home like an ostrich slider
Imagine hurtling toward the pavement at 113 km/h, falling from a height of 50 metres, roughly the equivalent of a 15-storey building. And paying $40 for the privilege.
The Skyscraper, a midway ride that towers over Stampede Park, turns cowboys into foul-mouthed, screaming schoolgirls as it flips them around on a rotating arm, their expletives at times heard clearly by merrymakers touring the grounds.
Not me, I assured myself as I swaggered through the gate to be strapped into the harness, as if I were a hardscrabble cowboy with a strictly baritone inflection who could not be broken.
After the vomit-inducing thrill ride ended, my painfully shrill shrieks likely still echoing through his eardrums, the ride staffer asked me, “First time, eh?”
It would not be the only occasion my dignity would take a plunge during my adventures on the midway.
Born in Calgary, I spent most of my life in the Maritimes and now I’m back, returning to the stomping grounds of my childhood, ready to experience the rides, the games, the food all over again.
The sensory overload of it all — the aromas of cotton candy and deep-fried everything, the echoes of screaming thrill-seekers — instantly brought me back to my childhood. But some things have changed. Take the menu of farm animals grilled and sold as “sliders,” for instance.
“Are those things exactly what they say they are?” I asked.
“Yes,” the clerk answered matterof-factly.
Uh. Ok. “I guess I’ll go with crocodile, ostrich and python,” I babbled, wincing as the words fell out of my mouth, with the kind of grimace smeared across my face that my mother used to tell me would become permanent if I kept it up.
Taking my plate to a dark corner, I let my fears of eating creepy monsters get the best of me, which is likely why my crocodile slider tasted like scales and swamps. I couldn’t get through a single bite, though it wasn’t a knock against the chef. It’s just that I struggled to get images of beady little crocodile eyes bobbing on filthy swamp water out of my head.
“It had a texture of chicken with a taste like fish,” Stampede foodie Rowena Cua told me as I tried in vain to find somebody, anybody, who’d assure me I wasn’t a wuss.
Crocodile was her favourite among her three sliders, which also included kangaroo and python.
After putting a dent in the ostrich slider — which had won me over, mainly because the flavours weren’t overtly offensive — I turned to the snake, which I’ve heard tastes similar to gamey chicken. But it actually tasted like scales and muscles slithering through dirt. In my expert, professional cowboy opinion.
“I liked the flavour,” customer George Paulussen said, almost triumphantly. Feeling beaten down, but still scrounging for reassurance, I asked him: Do you feel adventuresome eating this stuff?
“No, not really,” he replied flatly. “We tried the prairie oysters, too, once.”
Prairie oysters, this ignorant Maritimer would soon learn, are a euphemism for cow testicles.
Yes, they ate testicles and I’m complaining about crocodile.
But the abject humiliation was nothing compared to losing a water gun game against a pint-sized gunslinger named Owen Smith, who happens to be aged nine and five-sixths.
The game demands marksmen with sharp aim to hit a target, which propels racing characters toward a finish line.
“I don’t really have a secret,” he said after I told him I’m a sore loser. “I just pushed down the trigger.”
As if it’s that easy.