by Lindsey Coulter

Each summer, my partner Andrew convinces me to do what I forget from year to year is a very stupid thing. He takes me to an aging local amusement park called Lakeside (this is not the stupid thing), and together we let the years and stressors melt away as we snuggle on the Ferris wheel, collide in the bumper cars, and steer motorized boats through thick green water. He plies me with swirl cones and funnel cakes and french fries slick with grease and salt until I am weak and agreeable. Then he says, too casually, “Let’s ride Zoom.”

As amusement park rides go, Zoom has a sort of simple, terrifying grace. Part of a class of attractions commonly known as ‘drop rides,’ Zoom consists of a tall, narrow tower soaring straight up into the clear blue Colorado sky. The tower is static. It does not spin or flip; it simply hoists a gondola in which a dozen riders are locked into molded plastic safety seats approximately ten stories above the other parkgoers, those wise enough to remain on the ground. Then, after a brief pause and a mechanical click at the top, the gondola and riders are released to plummet at breakneck speed back toward the earth. In the final seconds before smashing against the ground, they are rescued by a magnetic break. The ride goes up and then down—clean, swift, and ruthless.

As each summer fades into fall, I forget how much I loathe the ride; how it seizes and inverts my stomach, how it reaches down my throat and snatches air from my lungs by the fistful, how it makes me feel as though I might suffocate before my body is inevitably pulverized by the metal platform below. Andrew, unlike me, has maintained a beautiful, childlike sense of awe when it comes to amusement parks. His happiest memories of youth are of riding roller coasters on repeat at Cedar Point and Disney World. As adults, we have continued to indulge his passion. We’ve traveled to the sprawling Lotte World in South Korea and made a pilgrimage to Coney Island’s iconic wooden roller coaster. I go happily because I love him and will never pass up a vacation or a modest thrill.

As roller coasters grow bigger, longer, taller, and more death-defying, drop rides have followed suit. Parks race to outdare and outdo each other, erecting skyscraping contraptions that send riders hundreds of feet in the air, dwarfing our local Zoom. The tallest to date is the now-defunct Zumanjaro, located at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township, New Jersey. When in service, the ride was an intimidating 456 feet tall, soaring above its nearest competitor—the also defunct Orlando FreeFall—by 26 feet.

Drop rides toy with humans’ most basic and instinctual fear. But first, paradoxically, they offer something resembling inner peace: as seated riders ascend from the platform, their feet dangle; they double check their safety belts; and they are treated to an unexpected moment of Zen. As they rise, they become the air, the sky. Fear and excitement momentarily dissipate as they remember how beautiful, clean, and calm the world can appear from above.

That part doesn’t last long. Really, the true allure of drop rides is the moment riders slip into free fall, putty in the hands of steel, plastic, and gravity. Weightless suspension is paired with utter loss of control. For a few breathless seconds, senses are heightened or stolen altogether. That brush with catastrophe, or perhaps mortality, stretches the experience in every direction, multiplying seconds and heartbeats.

The FreeFall feels like this: As the seat to which I am strapped succumbs to gravity, it savagely drags me down with it. My paralyzed body is yanked upward by the g-force. My shoulders smash into the molded plastic safety harness, as my hands frantically grip its frame. The air ravages my ears, nose, mouth, and even my eyelids, flinging open every crevice, every vulnerability. I am left utterly exposed, my fear on full display. The scream that began in that split second during which up became down is strangled by some invisible external force that has embedded itself deep in my throat. All I can do is cling, wide-eyed, mouth gaping, heart racing, blood pumping, limbs trembling, as I fall and fall and fall and fall.

But right before all that falling, I experience something like a Zoom-induced episode of Tourette Syndrome. The moment the padded safety harness immobilizes me, my mind and body channel my desperate desire for control through the only available outlet: my voice. My mouth becomes ungovernable, spewing obscenities regardless of the presence of children—many, many children. The vulgarities offer a modicum of catharsis. As Zoom ascends into the thinning air and my heart pounds and my lungs crank into overdrive, I unleash these once-forbidden words. It feels like the only way to control the terror. Each fuck that flies from my fear-parched mouth becomes a mindfulness mantra.

The word “control” is both a verb and noun. However, “in control” is an idiom: figurative, conceptual, and tenuous. Its meaning and power are so easily dismantled. Easily dismantled—isn’t that how being in control also feels? There are scientific arguments that claim the need for control is biological and key to humans’ evolutionary survival. The idea of a locus of control, the belief that certain events are within one’s personal control, also butts up against an illusion: as we plummet to earth, I imagine mentally pulling Zoom’s emergency brake from the confines of my seat; but it’s just a trick of the mind.

As an adult, I am largely empowered to make decisions regarding my body. There are plenty of opportunities for me to use my words and agency to simply decline. There is always time to change my mind, leave the line, or offer my seat to an eager six-year-old who has just cleared the height requirement and has a far fuzzier concept of mortality. But I don’t. As much as I hate the ride, it has a curious siren song. Its allure for me lies in the moment of weightlessness, but more so in the brief seconds of powerlessness that follow.

I’ve always been a controlled and mildly controlling person, keeping two hands and a firm grip on life and its many variables. I tend toward caution over risk. I weigh and overthink everything. I am constantly aware of the gravity of my choices and take almost nothing lightly. So, to feel weightlessness, to voluntarily forfeit my control to Zoom, this is my annual sacrifice to the goddess of adrenaline and chance: she who blesses the magnetic brake that will catch me before I meet the ground.

On earth, weightlessness, or rather microgravity, is also a trick of the mind. The sensation occurs when a body is in freefall, liberated from tension, friction, and air resistance, constrained only by gravity. To truly experience microgravity, you can become an astronaut. Or you can fling yourself off a cliff.

Given my own corporeal response to Zoom, I assumed that sudden weightlessness might be so jarring and unfamiliar to the body that it would cause internal chaos, but apparently the opposite is true. Momentarily freed from its quiet but endless battle with gravity (and sans the terror of falling), the body relaxes. In prolonged microgravity or zero-g situations, however, the effects can be profound: bone and muscle mass decrease, bodily fluids shift, and brain structure changes. The vestibular system can’t orient itself by differentiating between up and down. The proprioceptive system, which allows humans to perceive the movements of our body parts, sometimes loses track of its own limbs.

Loss of control, of myself or my body, is the greatest terror I can imagine. For instance, perhaps I will one day be diagnosed with dementia, which runs in my mother’s side of the family, leaving my body a hostage to an unmoored mind. Or maybe while hiking I will stumble and bounce like a ragdoll down a canyon, unable to right myself or cling to a life-saving bit of foliage. Then there is the fear, now terrifyingly real, of finding myself living under a dictatorship in which individual freedoms and bodily autonomy are eliminated. In some nightmares, I inexplicably find myself floating in space, grasping at gas and vapor as the blue marble of Earth recedes. In others, I am finally smashed into the perforated metal platform lurking cold and hungry at the base of Zoom.

I don’t think these fears are unique, and fear of loss of control in general is even less so. The ability to maintain control of self or situation has long equaled survival for our species. Maybe the absence of true struggle is why modern humans spend so much time courting death, reveling in narrow escapes and the rush of cheated mortality. To feel the cool edge of Death’s scythe on the back of your neck is one thing; to tell the tale is another. So, do I do the stupid thing, strap myself to the death trap, because I need to feel the air rush back into my lungs as the brake engages? Does the fleeting weightlessness make me feel more alive, or does it just bring my abstract concept of death into sharper focus? Either way, the momentary separation from the conscious mind must be as close as a person can reasonably or responsibly come to the sensation of dying, which some might argue is the ultimate loss of control.

I’m sure most people harbor a fascination with the idea of a near-death experience: to peer into the abyss and glimpse some great truth or even greater beyond. Studying the phenomena and those who have survived it has become a legitimate science. There is even an International Association of Near-Death Studies, which fosters community among people across the globe who have had NDEs—some euphoric, others incredibly distressing. For the most part, people who experience NDEs report a deep and pervasive sense of peace, perhaps similar to microgravity or true weightlessness. In this temporary death, they are calm, serene. They are given the gifts of expansive thought, hopefulness, and clarity. They rest at the top of the tower, looking out across the clean, soft and muted world in that brief moment just before the metallic click and release. I imagine it feels like the moment before the scream is sucked from my own lungs, where there is equanimity and distillation. The world is beautiful from above. Earthly problems and worries grow tiny and dim as mortality comes into focus. In the moment of freefall, my mind goes entirely blank. Stress, anxiety, density, and volume are erased, replaced by something clear, fleeting, and nearly weightless, more than a sensation, not quite an emotion, lacking the baggage of gravitational pull.

I don’t really believe death to be the ultimate loss of control; living without control seems exponentially more terrifying. And I am not so naive as to equate a carnival ride with a near-death experience. There is no glimpse at some great white beyond at my local amusement park, no life-altering epiphany that resets my path. On Zoom, as much as I might want to dissociate, I remain firmly in my body—conscious, curious, and complicit. The moment I am released from the harness and set my feet on the perforated metal platform, however, I am reduced to trembling. I am convinced I have just narrowly skirted death, which I’m not sure is an emotional reaction or yet another trick of my traumatized brain as it assesses danger and readies for impact. Either way, the message it sends to my body is clear: We almost lost control.

The truth is that death brushes against us daily. In 1990 I contracted scarlet fever, which was often a death sentence for children before antibiotics. In 2004, I was nearly trampled by wild horses while sunbathing on a beach in the Dominican Republic. In 2007, a snapped Zoom cable severely harmed a thirteen-year-old girl. In 2022, a braking mechanism failure caused a drop ride to slam into the ground, injuring all sixteen riders. Near misses like these should be a forgone conclusion; loss of control, catastrophic or not, is inevitable.

The truth is that people die on drop rides. They’re usually children whose fragile bodies slip through the restraints. The most recent was a fourteen-year-old boy who had been riding the Orlando FreeFall. All 430 feet of the ride were later dismantled.

Control in general is fleeting, inconsistent, as much a trick of the mind as weightlessness. Even the most basic decisions about one’s body and trajectory through time and space are hemmed in by social structures and expectations, physical capabilities, political regimes, arbitrary rules and policies implemented by people most of us will never meet. Researchers have identified that autonomy and self-determination are fundamental psychological needs. But if our need for some level of control is embedded within our very humanity, then the process of releasing it also requires it. Control can be a decision as much as it is an impulse and imperative, but those decisions are not always good or wise or rational. I laugh when I read that overly controlling people are also more likely to be risk-takers, perhaps the likeliest among us to line up for the Zoom.

Still, I lovingly, defiantly, and protectively cling to the idea of self-determination. My mind and my body are my most precious possessions. Preserving them—and choosing how I will care for and use them—consumes me. Only sometimes my fingers cramp with the constant grip on the wheel, the harness or the brake. My jaw aches from gritting my teeth. My heels bruise as I dig into the dirt. And that is why I let the siren song of the Zoom draw me in. While the ride could kill me, it also doesn’t judge me as I briefly hand over the mantle of control. It is a sympathetic observer as well as an accomplice. It invites me to savor the chaos and the brush with death, to briefly float out of a body tensed by gravity, a body weary of the unrelenting need to maintain focus and momentum. I desire to be ungrounded, reset by a moment of restorative terror. And so I allow that body and all that it means and contains to be hoisted aloft. Because when I fall, and survive, everything will still be waiting for me at the bottom.

Lindsey Coulter is a Denver-based editor and essayist and a graduate of the Regis University Mile High MFA program. She was accepted to the St. Mary’s College Storyboard Residency and has been published by Livina Press, Lone Wolf Magazine, 5280, and Groove, with forthcoming work in Grub Street.