In the trenches of Con Thien, Vietnam, a Marine Corps corporal used to quietly sit and dream about a carousel in a mountain meadow.
His logic was simple: find the complete opposite of his surroundings of death, screaming hot shrapnel, and chaos. Sitting there holding a music box given to him by his sister as a gift, the war—for a sweet, fleeting moment—fell away.
Fast forward almost forty years, and the Carousel of Happiness nonprofit allows thousands of Coloradoans and out-of-state visitors to experience their own little escape on board the ride’s animals that Cpl. Scott Harrison (Ret.) hand-carved in a picturesque valley in Nederland, Colorado.
“I started out just trying to treat myself, but then it just changed into something I could do for others,” Harrison told CBS News’ On the Road with Steve Hartman.
A post at Con Thien, Harrison explains, was as good as a death sentence for a young marine such as himself.
The violence he saw there stayed with him, and despite an alcohol addiction and a houseboat in the middle of the ocean, he couldn’t escape the clinical PTSD that came back with him from Southeast Asian jungles.
There may have been far worse than sleepless nights in store for the former corporal, until he circled back around to those quiet moments with his music box and his mental mountain meadow.
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“I thought that if I could actually start making that vision come true, it would keep me on an even keel and make me happier,” Harrison said.
So in 1986, 18 years after he was deployed, he bought a broken-down Looff carousel manufactured just after the turn of the century and began to hand-carve all-new animals in the course of repairing it. In 2010, the carousel opened in a valley in Nederland, Colorado, where today over one million people have ridden on this simple, essential carnival ride.
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And though Harrison’s may not be simple—hand-carving and painting is skilled, technical work—it’s absolutely essential.
He was featured in an award-winning documentary Carving Joy, and the Carousel of Happiness podcast features guests and nonprofit staff ruminating on joy, happiness, contentment, positivity, and wellbeing in days when such things seem in short supply.
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