Roller coaster
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It’s such a pervasive metaphor, roller coaster, as to seem rooted in everyday experience. But I for one hadn’t been on an actual roller coaster in the most recent third of my life. Then my boyfriend, who is a theme park enthusiast*, proposed a trip for my birthday to Dollywood, in eastern Tennessee. We flew to Knoxville and drove to Pigeon Forge, where a Vegas-style main drag stretches (and stretches) out beneath the pristine slate silhouette of the Great Smoky Mountains.
The name Dollywood dates to 1986, when Dolly Parton bought an interest in a park that had opened 25 years earlier, as Rebel Railroad. The first iteration of the park, pre-Dolly, centered around a train ride in which Confederate soldiers defended the riders from attacks by robbers, Union soldiers, and Indians. This entertainment hasn’t survived.
Fear is fascinatingly specific. I wrote just last week about my interior guardrails around road cycling. I’m also pretty good at, say, concocting murderous villains who lie just out of sight in the woods enfolding a rented cabin in Pigeon Forge. But strap me into a chair designed to give gravity free rein over the molecular arrangement of my skull, and I’m good. Even when James, for some reason, started pulling up news accounts of recent safety failures at amusement parks, I was alternately too stupefied by the heat and pacified by fresh cinnamon bread (this alone is reason to visit Dollywood, I’m not kidding) to care much. If it’s your time to go …
But fear, to whatever degree it appears, is only one part of the thrill of a roller coaster anyway. Another is the sensation of the movement itself, of contortion, acceleration, rotation, inversion. Your surrender, first to the safety harness and then to momentum and torque, is complete.
In its role as metaphor, I’ve until now inadequately rendered the roller coaster as an oscillation, up and down. But the modern coaster, and Dollywood is outfitted with several of these, is more multidimensional. On the Wild Eagle, a “wing coaster,” the seats are suspended outward from a central rail, so that your feet dangle over the space beneath (or, at various points, above and to the side of) you. The spine, we learned in yoga teacher training, moves in six ways: rotation left and right, bending backward and forward, and flexing to either side. A full use of the metaphor exploits this human plasticity. A roller-coaster ride is a state of total gravitational confusion.
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* But like really.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.