On Roller Coasters
Roller coasters are more than just thrill rides, they are an art form that offers us transcendental moments.
Roller coasters are beautiful, and I don’t use that word lightly. They are as much a feat of art as they are engineering, with creative track layouts, trains, and set dressing elevating experiences to the next level. But this is more than mere commercialized, capitalistic shlock like some may dismiss it as. Roller coasters offer a critically needed collective transcendental experience, a sort of high-tech version of rituals and rites of passage of cultures more ancient.
We tend to go through much of our day on auto-pilot, sucked into the world of screens, not living in the moment. But roller coasters, in a deeply unique way, force you into the moment. You cannot ignore the speed, you cannot ignore the g-forces, you cannot ignore the screams of the passengers around you. For a brief couple of minutes, it is just you, maybe a few friends, some strangers, and the track, wind in your hair.
You are strapped into restraints, forced to let go of the situation, and just accept the intensity that comes. Like with many high-intensity activities from skydiving to BDSM, adrenaline and endorphins flood your body, the latter of which acts on your opiate receptors and quite literally gives you a high. However, you cannot attain the high without letting go, without surrendering your control over the situation to forces you cannot control.
Often, the things we truly want in life require taking a leap of faith, to go through an ordeal to come out the other side, from moving across the world or going through the risk and recovery of surgery. The roller coaster, on a short time scale, shows us that if we can push through what anxiety we have, the pay off is worth it — that we are not wrong for feeling that way, but we cannot let those feelings control us. In many cases, the build up in anticipation and tension makes the payoff seem all that more valuable.
At night, the roller coaster experience becomes even more sublime. The track ahead is harder to see, but, at most coasters, you are surrounded by lights. One of my favorite memories is riding Goliath at Six Flags Over Georgia over and over one September night, the line short enough that I could just re-ride in the front row. The train takes a deep dive over a shimmering pond, which reflects the park lights and the moon above, whose radiance you can take in for a split second before your momentum drives you back up another hill.
I also had the fortune to ride ArieForce One — may she rest in peace — at night before the closure of FunSpot America. Though it did not have the level of dazzling lights and landscaping of Six Flags, the experience was still beautiful. The day time rides were hot, but at night, it was refreshingly cool, especially with the wind in your hair. Unlike the Goliath, which focuses on speed, Arie had a lot of intense twists and turns that spun you around and left you weightless in your seat. It was an over ambitious investment from FunSpot, tasking Rocky Mountain Construction with making one of their biggest and baddest IBox — a form of steel track design — yet.
There is a sense of childlike awe you can recapture with roller coaster — at least if theme parks are nostalgic for you. The sensations can remind you of the exuberance you once felt when the world felt new and exciting. The challenge, of course, is carrying that over to regular adult life. But the great behemoths of steel and wood are still there waiting should you ever need the reminder.
Hopefully, the experiences are deeply memorable, even if fleeting. Time seems to slip away more and more as we grow older because our brain just remembers that something was merely more of the same. The more you can force yourself into the moment in ways that stick with you, the more you can fight this process — the more you fill your record of what happened with moments that pushed the limits of what you can even experience as a human.
Maybe roller coasters are not your thing — though it is good to push through the fear you might have to try to develop an appreciation for them. But it is important to find these sorts of activities that rip you out of the mundane nature of your day-to-day life and make you encounter the sublime deep outside of your comfort zone. Maybe it is just a quiet day of camping without the creature comforts of home. Maybe it’s exploring the limits of your mind with magic mushrooms. Regardless, a life where you are not pushing the boundaries of what you experience is a life not fully lived.
Be brave. Be bold. Be determined. Do the thing on the other side of that lift hill, whether it’s for fun or for personal growth — or maybe both. The more you push yourself to do what feels hard, the more you will accomplish and the more your life will feel full and rewarding. Roller coasters may capture this principle in a unique form of art, and in them lies a great deal of beauty. But the perspective they give is far-reaching.