While I’ve been fascinated with roller coasters for my entire life, I was extremely afraid of most of them until I was a teenager.
As a young child who got incredibly interested in just about anything and everything that was thrown in front of me, I guess it ultimately wasn’t a surprise that I became curious about roller coasters after my first-ever visit to an amusement park.
I had to have been no older than four years old when I was taken to the now-defunct Kiddieland for the first time, a children’s amusement park in the Chicago suburbs that shuttered in 2009 and has since been replaced by a Costco.
Kiddieland was a relatively small park that contained a series of basic theme park attractions for kids, but my interest was solely squared on Little Dipper, a junior wooden roller coaster that served as the only attraction of its kind in the park. It was the first coaster I ever rode, and I was immediately enamored.
That fascination took a step up on a family vacation to Kings Island in July 2002, the first time I was around massive roller coasters while getting to ride a few more myself – including the iconic Racer, an 88-foot tall wooden racing coaster that made it seem to at least myself and the rest of my family that I wouldn’t grow up with a big fear of coasters.
Yet being an astonishingly dorky kid who loved looking things up on the internet, I would surely get in my own way in this regard.
In August 2003, I visited Six Flags Great America for the first time with my immediate family, and my fears for taller coasters began to develop. When visiting Kings Island, I was told by a cousin of mine that after riding The Racer, I would surely be able to ride American Eagle at Great America, another wooden racing coaster.
I may have only been seven years old, but one look at the wooden monstrosity that is American Eagle led me to immediately be afraid of the ride and others like it. Not long after getting home, I discovered that American Eagle‘s drop had a good 65 feet on The Racer, the beginning of me growing uncertain about coasters thanks to knowing the height of them.
Soon, this developing fear became a fixture of my amusement park visits, only being further set in stone after riding Viper at Six Flags Great America in August 2005 with my mom. Despite the coaster being just 100 feet tall with top speeds of 50 mph, the ride scared the living shit out of me as a 9-year-old – and I was further convinced that anything that was approaching triple digits in height was not for me.
Maybe it was the feeling of my stomach dropping on the initial descent or just unfamiliarity with the forces one experiences on coasters, but I was quite sure that tall coasters weren’t for me.
With that said, I strangely never developed a fear for going upside down on a roller coaster, as I would have been willing to ride Demon at Great America had it been under 100 feet tall – but even as a 9-year-old, all I could think about was the coaster’s 102-foot height and how awful the drop on Viper felt, which was enough to keep me off.
Still, I did ride my first inverting coaster the following year in July 2006 during a vacation to Cedar Point, thanks to Corkscrew only boasting a height of 85 feet with a 65-foot drop – a coaster I was able to ride without feeling exceptionally nervous or scared.
Despite the fact that I was getting more and more enamored with new, taller roller coasters as I continued to get older, I still didn’t think I would ever be able to ride any of them myself – approaching my teenage years with the fears of triple-digit heights still front-and-center in my mind anytime I ever even thought about an amusement park – let alone visited one.
In June 2010, that finally was going to change. I was invited to go along with my childhood best friend, another friend and his dad to Great America, and I accepted the invite with the intention that I was at least going to try to ride some roller coasters. I was 14 years old at this point, my friends both loved riding coasters and I knew I didn’t want to be the only one to not ride anything throughout the whole day.
It was June 22, 2010 – a hot but not overbearing Tuesday in the north Chicago suburbs, and I was just over a month away from starting high school. There was a feeling I had that if I couldn’t get on these rides now, I didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to.
Fittingly, we started the day with none other than Demon, the very coaster that had terrified me not because of its four inversions, but because of its extremely modest 102-foot height and 90-foot drop. To this day, I maintain the vivid memory of making the first turn in between the lift hill and the drop, saying to myself that I was finally about to experience what I had spent literal years afraid of.
After descending the brief, airtime-filled drop, I knew that a height like this wasn’t prohibitive for me to ride coasters, and I was eager to continue to try out new rides.
Even back in 2010, Great America’s lineup was perfectly conducive for an exercise like this, featuring a logical progression of coasters that allow blossoming thrillseekers to work their way through the rides with gradually increasing intensity, making it much less likely that any one ride was going to scare me away for the day.
At this moment, I also began to think about a friendly wager I made with my older sister, a lifelong adrenaline junkie, the previous night. For some reason, I was feeling quite confident the day before heading to the park, and asserted to my sister that I was going to ride the 202-foot tall Raging Bull despite having never been on anything taller than 100 feet – which had scared the shit out of me at the time.
I don’t know exactly where the $20 I was betting on this came from, but I told my sister that I would give her $20 if I didn’t ultimately end up getting on the coaster. After riding Demon, my motivation was reinvigorated, and I was determined to not let my sister get what she thought was the easiest $20 of her life.
From there, I got my first rides on Batman: The Ride, American Eagle and the now-defunct stand-up coaster Iron Wolf, none of which made me want to slow down our pace of riding new things throughout the day. At this point, I felt I was ready – and we made our way towards the queue for Raging Bull, the park’s headline attraction that has been serving up thrills since the spring of 1999.
While the park wasn’t jam-packed on this day, it was certainly crowded enough for the park’s most popular ride to have a lengthy line – an agonizing wait that allowed me to further ponder exactly what I was getting myself into.
I also knew that I ultimately had no pressure to ride anything I didn’t want to – something that was communicated to me before we got to the park. And I will say to any other fellow enthusiasts – if you’re going to the park with a friend who isn’t really into coasters, don’t be overbearing. Have them wait in line with you and do what they’re comfortable with, but people will be scared if they feel like they have no choice – and that’s no way to get somebody excited about roller coasters.
As we approached the trains, I had convinced myself that I was going to do it. I hadn’t rode all of the other coasters and made a bet with my sister for nothing. I had made it to the front of the line, and I was going to ride this damn coaster, hell or high water.
I’ll never forget taking a seat and fastening the bulky clamshell lap bars that I had only seen moving at high speeds from afar. Sitting next to my friend’s dad, he reached out for a fist bump and reminded me that I had $20 well on my way as I sat trembling, anxiously awaiting the train’s dispatch.
Before I knew it, the train had taken off and the point of no return had arrived – I was on this coaster, for better or for worse. While the 202-foot climb felt like it took years, the moment waiting for me at the top is something I will never forget for as long as I’ll live.
While I had avoided looking anywhere but straight ahead during the ascent, I took a split second to look around at the park’s surroundings before the 208-foot drop that awaited me. What followed was pure euphoria and bliss.
I was expecting the worst pit in my stomach that I would ever feel, but what I was met with instead was an unmatched feeling of graceful weightlessness paired with the face-melting sensation of feeling a 73 mph descent for the first time. Anticipating that my worst fears of coasters would be confirmed, I instead learned in an instant why people wait in long lines and drive far distances to experience what I was in that very moment.
By the time we reached the lateral-filled turn after the first drop, I knew for sure that I would spend the rest of my life loving coasters – immediately thinking of all of the tantalizing rides I was previously too afraid of that I now desperately wanted to experience for myself.
After getting off the ride, I called my sister with my friend’s dad vouching for me as proof that I really did get on Raging Bull, making my way home to receive $20 and close the first chapter on what would be a lifetime of chasing new coasters and theme parks to experience.
To much of the general public, roller coasters and amusement parks are child- and family-centric experiences that people are largely expected to grow out of after reaching a certain age – only to return with their own kids as adults.
Yet I never looked at roller coasters in such a simplistic fashion, much in the same way that the original Spyro trilogy is much more than just a set of kids games to me. Sure, many of my memories at theme parks came from when I was young and had gone with my family – but I consider myself lucky enough to have built those kinds of memories during each stage of my life.
It all started with this day well over 16 years ago that I’ll look back on fondly for the rest of my life, largely because of all of the other memories it has led me to make in the time since. Within the past five years, visiting amusement parks has become a summer pastime for my wife and I, and it’s been an incredible way to make the most out of our out-of-town trips while continuing to act as a link between my favorite childhood memories and the experiences I’ll continue to hold close to me for the rest of my life with my partner.
I think there’s a decent chance I eventually would have gotten over my fears anyways, but to have done so at the park I grew up attending and would go on to make many more memories in was truly special – something I appreciate even more today as I now live over 2,100 miles away from where it all started.
In a world where it’s easier than ever to be angry, anxious and uncertain about the world that surrounds us and the future ahead, amusement parks serve a greater purpose than they ever have – still acting as a magical refuge detached from the ugliness of the rest of the world where people from all walks of life can be thrilled in a way that can’t be done anywhere else, whether you’re 7 or 77.
It’s hard to think of anywhere else like that.
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