Helix
There is no pull-up. We leave the station and drop right away. The green tri-tubed steel track drops and bends and the green zig-zag rungs between the tubes start running like the perforations of a film, as the projector ingests it and speeds it up, makes it flicker, makes it blend. We drop. We drop and lose our weight and fall into emptiness, into speed.
If we had not realized what we were getting ourselves into, if we had thought, but thought wrongly, that we’d be able to handle this, it is now too late. This track will do its thing and we will do our thing, clinging to it. There is no stopping. It is impossible to get out of this now.
Fall into void, lean into curve, push into seat. The curve does not stop bending. It bends, and bends, and we corkscrew. Turning upside down is surprisingly easy, as if standing on the other side of the earth. A sharp turn and a long-stretched curve in which we are tilted sideways, almost graze the ground of the lush, green forest into which this track, the Helix, is built. This could have been it, this could have been all the energy which the drop from the station had to offer, but now we rumble onto the launch, a straight stretch where magnets undo our slowdown, speed us up and shoot us skyward. Before us, an arc convulses into the air, this is our track, and we must surely fail halfway through it, but no, we have been shot to make it, if barely. The fall from this height brings a lot of speed. We corkscrew. Get pushed into more curves. Yes, there’s a vertical loop, or maybe two, but being upside down is the least of our worries. What could be mistaken for gravity is pushing us into our seats or lifting us out of them, against the restraints, our bodies feel sometimes light and sometimes heavy. A parabolic hill which we climb and would fly off of if the track did not pull us down into a sharp and bending fall right after the summit. We hit another launch and get shot into an even higher, wider, tumbling arc through the sky. Just how deadly can you fall. Just how joyfully can you stare into what would otherwise kill you.
The track suggests we will smash into steel, eject, and die, and then pulls us around with a force we do not understand and makes us not die.
This could have gone on forever. Not that I’d wanted it to. Not that I’d screamed with joy as many others did. I was in fear, and as the train did indeed slow down rather than, again, accelerate, it felt quite undeserved. I was shaking. My daughter asked how I liked it.
I had promised her we’d do this. She, eleven, with her new-found passion for roller coasters, me, who has found it increasingly scary, over the years, to even swing on a swing in a playground. I would overcome my fear for her, I had promised her, because she had asked.