In the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella listened when a voice said,
If you build it, he will come. A few years ago, Roy Schaefer listened when his son said,
If we build it, they will come. This wasn't about building a baseball field,
it was about a family's dream to build the longest mountain coaster in all of North America.
For nearly 40 years, the Schaefer family has successfully operated the Berchery ski area
in Charlemont, Massachusetts. And while the Schaefer's continued to drive the local economy by
building wind turbines, solar arrays, and operating zipline canopy tours, it has been their bold
dream to build the Thunderbolt, North America's longest mountain coaster that inspired a small
army of loyal employees. By late September of 2014, the Thunderbolt was finally completed.
On October 3rd, the engineers and state inspectors gathered for the track testing.
Each coaster car was loaded with 350 pounds of sandbag. The employees themselves were the first
to ride the Thunderbolt. On Friday October 10th, area manager Jonathan Schaefer woke to a beautiful
autumn morning and said that it was the first time in over six months that he'd slept through the night.
Now that the Thunderbolt had been built, would they come? By noon, the hall cable was running and at
exactly 1 p.m. as Schaefer predicted, the very first customer began to climb to the summit.
The word was out that the Thunderbolt was running. Cell phones began ringing. The Twitter thing was
tweeting and traffic began flowing up the Mohawk trail. There was a stream of customers and the
area's employees were trained and ready. They came from Greenfield, they came from Northampton,
some came down from Vermont, and then they came from everywhere. Some were grandmothers,
some were grandfathers, and when school let out, the children came to ride the Thunderbolt.
That evening, the front page of the newspaper declared the Thunderbolt a success, as did all
of the feeds on social media. And just as the sons of Roy Schaefer predicted, if it was built, they would come.
