During the summer of 2020, in the midst of the most intense pandemic-related anxiety I have experienced, I decided to get really into roller coasters.
This is, of course, only logical. In a time when I could barely leave my own home, save for aimless drives that probably served more to frustrate than to soothe, it is natural that I longed for theme parks, emblems of everything that the pandemic had sapped from society. Massive nexuses of travelers from far-flung corners of the globe, packed into profit-maximizingly close quarters, in the sweaty heat of the summer, were surely the most optically terrifying places to be (in a bitter irony, these largely-outdoor spaces may well have been safer than packed movie theaters, the thing I absolutely have missed the most about life pre-pandemic). So, why not try to cope by diving full tilt into consuming every piece of theme park content I could?
I began my journey with a comment on some news article about the reopening of SeaWorld Orlando. I don’t remember what article or what comment or even what website, but I was reading a lot of news at the time for pretty obvious reasons. The comment contained a link to a video by the YouTuber TheTimTracker, (real name certainly Tim, real last name almost definitely not Tracker but we’re going to roll with it). Tim Tracker is, I would later learn, a reasonably big creator in the space of theme park YouTube – especially Orlando theme parks – and has enough subscribers that he would occasionally be recognized in theme parks in small little encounters that would make their way into his videos. So it of course follows that I had never heard of him nor seen any of his videos.
It will never cease to amaze me how compartmentalized fame can be in today’s media landscape; TheTimTracker currently has 851K subscribers, which is hardly an insane number (YouTube’s biggest channels are orders of magnitude larger), but is roughly the same as a lot of the bigger video essayists I subscribe to. Those people – essayists like Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, Harry Brewis of Hbomberguy, Jenny Nicholson of Jenny Nicholson – have sizable enough followings that they can earn a respectable living off of their video income through YouTube ad revenue and supplemental streams like Patreon.
That there existed a world out there of people like Tim Tracker who can earn an entire living by creating videos about theme parks, and that this world had existed for years without ever intersecting with my own world, was astonishing to me. A wealth of human experiences just existing in such a niche, specific bubble. In a time where I found myself feeling helpless and small, with the bounds of my world shrunken to their lowest point in my entire life, this was a wonderful feeling to have. There are entirely unknown-to-me worlds out there, and though I could not directly access them at the time, I could peer into them from my pandemic sequester.
The video itself, the point and description of which I have belabored to arrive at for long enough, was a vlog account of Tracker’s visit to SeaWorld Orlando’s reopening day, and a close look at the various safety measures the park was taking. SeaWorld Orlando is a fraught park for myriad reasons, and for those myriad reasons I had not personally been to the park since 2009. The intervening decade was tumultuous for the park, with the Blackfish documentary cutting hugely into the park’s public image and the chain’s then-recent sale from Anheuser-Busch to a faceless conglomerate that afforded it more direct autonomy necessitating a change of strategy. The park had clearly shifted its focus to being more thrill-oriented than animal-show oriented as it had been for years (on my first visits as a child, there were only, charitably, two rides at all in the park; there are now three rides just from a single manufacturer, among several others, a clear shift in the park dynamics). Seeing this vlog account of SeaWorld was, then, a doubly strange experience. It had at once the familiarity of a half-remembered locale, its face marked by years of growth and change so that it was only partially recognizable, and the uncomfortable experience of seeing such a place emptied of its usual inhabitants, of its typical spirit. That spirit was instead traded for the ghosts of those not present, becoming a place littered with constant reminders of absence and of the unspoken, feared visitor that possibly – likely – walked among the few there seen.
I was transfixed. It was a surreal experience that captured so much of what had been racing through my mind in the anxious days when I could not rest my thoughts. The feel of familiar experiences forever transformed in the shadow of the largest shock to the status quo in my lifetime (and, indeed, the lifetimes of virtually anybody alive). The lingering, awful question of whether we’d even be able to return to “normal,” or if things were always going to exist in this before and after space from then on. And, of course, the forbidden allure of those things most dangerous in our new pandemic reality.
If you’ve never watched a Tim Tracker video – and, statistically, you haven’t – you may have a wrong view of what this vlog was like. Tracker is nothing like the typical view many have of a YouTube vlog, full to brim of jump cuts, voice projection into a microphone an inch from their face, and exaggerated emotionality. He has a smooth voice and speaks slowly with a gentle enthusiasm, even as he often dryly reports on what he observes. The edit is slow paced, with camera work never moving any faster than walking pace, and with lingering shots to give viewers long looks at whatever he happens to be showing off. It’s a calming effect, and made for a welcome break from the constant noise in my head that pandemic anxiety created.
A focal point of the video featured Tracker testing out various types of face masks, with the intent of discerning which one might be most comfortable for theme park wear. Part of this rigorous, certainly replicable and awaiting peer-review study involved riding a roller coaster while wearing each of the different mask types to see how each one held up while racing down the track. For reference: neck gaiters (which it later turned out were ineffective at preventing the spread of the virus anyway) fall down easily, a medical paper mask mostly held but did slip down eventually, and a closely fitted cloth mask was the most secure.
Tracker tested these masks on the roller coaster Mako, a steel hyper roller coaster built by the Swiss manufacturer Bolliger and Mabillard, or B&M. SeaWorld is no stranger to working with B&M; they have two previous roller coasters from the manufacturer: a floorless looper, Kraken, and a flying coaster, Manta. Mako, however, was a new addition – added in 2016 – that I had no knowledge of. B&M roller coasters have a very distinctive track, however – an iconic box-frame design – that I recognized not only from the other SeaWorld B&M roller coasters, but also from the Busch Gardens B&M coasters (the inverted roller coaster Montu, the steel looper Kumba, and the dive coaster ShieKra) and the lone B&M at Univeral’s Islands of Adventure, The Incredible Hulk Coaster (a launched steel looper). I had, at this time, no understanding of roller coaster manufacturers, however; I simply recognized the roller coaster design and knew it looked similar to a lot of other roller coasters I had ridden as a child who liked to ride roller coasters.
My history with roller coasters prior to the dive off a cliff (there’s surely a dive coaster metaphor to be made here, but search me for the specific words with which to do it and you will come up empty, as I have) that would follow this discovery of the Tim Tracker video was, to paraphrase a somewhat hackneyed metaphor, two inches deep and half a mile wide. I had the fortune of going to virtually all of the major Florida theme parks several times throughout my childhood (with Disney World’s various parks being the ones I attended the least), and had been well exposed to roller coasters. It took a while, as I was fearful of inversions for a long time. But after dipping my toes in with some non-inverting roller coasters at Wild Adventures in Valdosta, Georgia (all Vekoma models; a junior coaster now called Outpost Express, a wild mouse now called Go Bananas!, and a junior suspending looping coaster then and now called Swamp Thing), I eventually, proudly, graduated up to riding anything this state had to offer. I was young, and had a young person’s interest: obsessive, but in a somewhat shallow way that is more about enthusiasm and less about accruing real knowledge and expertise. The most knowledgeable I became is being able to match real world roller coasters to the model names featured in Roller Coaster Tycoon, a series of PC games I played quite often that nominally is about building theme parks but that I used almost exclusively to build my own roller coasters.
All this context to say: I didn’t know a lot about roller coasters, but I knew enough to know that I loved them. A trip to Cedar Point, the roller coaster capital of the world, had long been on my mental list of things I’d like to do someday. News of new roller coasters built at theme parks nearby me would capture my interest. I was hardly a roller coaster enthusiast, but I wasn’t quite an average passive theme park attendee either.
SeaWorld was not a park I attended with any regularity; my family was much more taken with Busch Gardens a bit further south, in Tampa. But the few times I went to SeaWorld were fairly substantial parts of the theme park tapestry of my childhood. On my first trip there – I do not remember at what age – I rode Kraken, which was the first roller coaster of that scale that I ever rode. I had a bad habit of chickening out of intimidating rides at the last minute, but my aunt (with whom I was riding) was very savvy and careful to make sure I was locked into the restraints before I had a chance to panic and bail. I did panic, but the park attendant moved the ride along before my protests could be heard, and the ride began. I was terrified. It was an incredible experience. I remember it with such clarity.
Another trip I remember with clarity: the last time I was at SeaWorld, in March 2009. I was a high school freshman on spring break, and my younger brother was going to SeaWorld with one of his close friends. My mom and I accompanied him, and his friend was accompanied by his mom and his older sister. This older sister was just about my age, and while we were both very much in that “too cool to spend time with younger sibling” phase of adolescence, we were very much not in that “too cool for a trip to a theme park” phase (if such a phase even exists). So while we were certainly at the theme park with our respective families, true to our extremely cool teen existences, we kept a healthy distance from those respective families and spent much of the time roaming the park on our own.
In case this labored description wasn’t obvious, I had a memorable SeaWorld experience because I got to spend a lot of time with a person I had a mild to moderate crush on. I didn’t know too much about myself at the moment, and certainly not some things I would later discover. I don’t know if she knew about the crush, or if that crush was at all reciprocated (I supremely doubt it). But even just as friends, it was a wonderful time. An early (for me) glimpse of the kind of social rewards of that kind of largely unchecked freedom to just spend time with someone outside of established, supervised environs and circumstances.
This trip was also the first time I got to ride Manta, the B&M flying coaster near the front of the park. It’s an excellent roller coaster with a very appealing color scheme that makes it immediately inviting: it just looks beautiful. It rides well, too, with a very fluid experience that is among the smoother and more comfortable rides I’ve been on. In my two-inch-deep-half-mile-wide obsession, I had done a lot of reading about other rides at other parks I might one day get to visit, so the idea of a flying coaster was one I was familiar with. This sense of pay off to anticipation, of getting to experience something I had seen and read about but not taken part in firsthand, was exciting. In a time when roller coasters weren’t something I could ride, remembering that experience helped keep things from feeling too despairing.
The trip has one final distinction: it was the last time I went to a theme park before being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. My friend Patrick (as well as novelist John Green) talk occasionally about certain events that divide a life into a before and an after. Unavoidably, chronic illnesses tend to do that, and for me, the easy divide is that diagnosis. I was diagnosed in April of 2009, so by the time of the March 2009 SeaWorld visit I was already firmly in the throes of the disease. But undiagnosed and thus uncontrolled diabetes wreaks a unique kind of havoc. I was constantly thirsty, constantly urinating, and constantly experiencing mild symptoms of dehydration. I was also dangerously underweight, at this point, and it made for a strange theme park journey. It was the last such journey I would have before being a diabetic in a theme park, which – though appreciably the same – comes with its own concerns about blood sugar and eating that make existing in a theme park just a little bit more maintenance than before.
I don’t imagine I need to be too explicit here, to draw the parallels between theme park experiences being forever altered by a chronic illness and theme park experiences being forever altered by a pandemic, but there it is. Seeing the SeaWorld video from Tim Tracker, and reflecting on the permanent shift in theme parks that was likely to follow their reopening after pandemic-induced closures, brought me back to that 2009 SeaWorld trip. It is a curious confluence of memories, filled with moments and events that have a small but outsized significance, and to revisit it in this moment felt cosmically ordained.
Now, the coaster that sparked all of this thinking: Mako. It’s a coaster I noticed before knowing anything about it, on my way to Disney World with some friends in 2018. That trip is another one that exists as a fascinating confluence of events and self-discovery; I had been a working adult for two full years by that point and had somehow never realized that I could simply go to theme parks myself. I was learning how to be myself in a group of fully adult friends made and forged outside the confines of some sort of educational system. I’m slow on the uptake with a lot of things; cut me some slack, I’m an anxious wreck 90% of the time. Regardless, the coaster looms large on the horizon as you approach – or, rather, pass by – SeaWorld. It travels the side of a lake, with its older sibling Kraken coiling around the opposite shore, and the stark contrast of the two is striking. Kraken’s color scheme has always had a mild washed-out look to it, with a bright, almost pastel aqua and beige theme to its track and supports. Mako, on the other hand, stands with a deep purple color scheme that looks properly brand new. Set against a coaster that has always looked several years old, even when it opened, Mako looks all the more impressive. I knew little about it as I rode past it, but thought to myself that it looked beautiful.
Tim Tracker praised Mako quite highly. I was a bit perplexed by this, at first. My experience with roller coasters had led me to prize inversions above all else, and Mako had no inversions at all. Instead, as a fabled B&M hyper coaster, Mako was focused on airtime – moments of negative g-forces where riders are lifted out of their seats – and achieved that through a combination of height (it is the tallest roller coaster in Orlando, and if you don’t count the still-not-opened Iron Gwazi at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, the tallest coaster in the state overall) and speed. My puzzlement at his claim led me down a further rabbit hole into the world of roller coaster enthusiasts.
As it turns out, coaster enthusiasts often tend to value airtime over inversions, a preference that bears out when you look at the landscape of the prestigious attractions across the United States (and the world more broadly, of course, but let’s narrow our focus just a bit for convenience). Florida is a curious anomaly. For one, two of our major theme park hubs – Universal Orlando Resort and Walt Disney World – are not as focused on delivering cutting edge thrills as they are delivering highly themed experiences that tie in to their media properties. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is a masterpiece of theme park design; it’s a shame that it’s in the service of a media property created by an execrable human being. Walt Disney, for all his unpleasant capital-C Capitalist tendencies and beliefs, was deeply invested in the kinds of vaudevillian, stage magic style sleights of hand that give the Magic Kingdom a genuinely magical feel, and the theme park designers that have taken up that standard in the years since his death regularly outdo themselves. The Haunted Mansion is not a thrilling ride – you will experience no airtime while riding – but the practical illusions littered throughout it are still impressive and joyful to witness.
This isn’t to say those parks are averse to thrills. Universal especially is more than happy to provide some thrilling roller coasters. The Incredible Hulk coaster is so beloved that its manufacturer – B&M again – replaced the entire roller coaster with newly manufactured track and supports back in 2015, to ensure that it will run smoothly and reliably long into the future. Their new attractions, manufactured by the Liechtensteinian manufacturer Intamin, are much more thrill-focused: Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure features multiple launches, and the Jurassic World Velocicoaster is the fulfillment of years of promises from one of Intamin’s most beloved models, the blitz coaster.
But these coasters, along with their thrill-centric cousins at SeaWorld and Busch Gardens, all share the same limitations not always imposed on parks in other states: Florida has strict height limits on structures, and has not allowed theme parks to build roller coasters taller than 200 ft. Until Mako’s construction in 2016, the only roller coaster of a comparable height in the state was Sheikra at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay (it stands at exactly 200 ft), constructed in 2005. With limits on how high they can build, roller coaster designers working with Florida theme parks turned to things like inversions, which can deliver strong thrills with a smaller height requirement. Hyper coasters and their bigger siblings, the 300+ ft giga coasters, use their height and speed in the service of airtime and lateral force intensity. These are experiences highly valued by the coaster community, and less accessible to Florida theme parks, who have had to get creative.
I speak about these with the confidence in the jargon of someone who has spent a year immersed in enthusiast culture, but it is precisely the alienness of these terms – airtime, laterals, blitz, stapled, zero-g stall, heart line roll, and so on – that first pulled me into the world. We return to that initial attraction: a world I have only barely scratched the surface of, inaccessible to me in a locked down world, but one that I can glimpse through the black mirror.
Sometimes you write something that you know is guff. You read back through and can’t help but notice the waffling, overly considered waxing poetic, think “I can’t publish this anywhere,” and consign it to the Google Drive writing folder forever. But I’m trying to be more sincere lately, and part of being sincere is being open and vulnerable. It is no challenge at all to be sincere if you simply never speak. So, guff though it may be, here it is.
The crux of this long piece is simple: I’ve gotten very into roller coasters in the past year. I didn’t get a chance to ride any for a very, very long time after I began to fully descend into an enthusiast rabbit hole. But so much of any hobby, of any obsession, is in the incidental feelings it brings. This piece opened as I noted that I had gotten very into roller coasters; what followed has largely been about everything else. The first time I rode Manta is inextricable from that trip being spent largely with a mild crush and being the last theme park I went to before being diagnosed. Those early (and bad) Vekoma rides at Wild Adventures are forever marked by being the focus of my eighth grade science project, wherein I (extremely unscientifically) collected blood pressure data on several of my family members (and myself) both pre- and post-roller coaster ride. These are all part of the fresco of memory that make up my love for roller coasters.
And they are all life experiences that the pandemic paused. For well over a year, those memories exist only as blurred images with two vertical bars imposed over them.
It’s a trite observation, at this point in July of 2021, to observe that the pandemic took things from us. I’m not breaking new ground. But it’s what’s been on my mind. I couldn’t ride roller coasters for over a year, right as I chose to dive deeply into them for the first time. It was, in many ways, an agony. A reminder of the present circumstances that prevented so much more than theme parks. But it also, as I’ve made very clear, was not about the roller coasters or the theme parks at all. It was about the other things. The rich memories attached to the theme parks. In diving so deeply and completely into the coaster world, I was, in a way, accessing those memories and imagining future ones.
It helped. More than I knew at the time.
And as we have now entered a new phase of the pandemic, one in which some things have been reclaimed by those of us who have opted for vaccination, I have seized the opportunity to reclaim this, and to forge new memories in proximity to this newfound coaster enthusiasm.
On June 26th, 2021, I – for the first time in over a decade – went to Busch Gardens Tampa Bay with my partner of nearly two years. This was not our first theme park adventure – before we dated we went to Universal Orlando and Magic Kingdom together, and spent Valentine’s Day 2020 at Epcot (while I was wildly ill with a mysterious cold that probably wasn’t covid-19, but who’s to say?) – but it felt so significant, so liberating, it may as well have been.
It was one of the happiest days I can remember.
I began writing this with the intent of talking about some of the thoughts I had about the various roller coasters at Busch Gardens. How I was surprised at how forceful Tigris, the Premier Rides SkyRocket 2 clone, felt, or the way that I was unfortunately stapled on every single B&M coaster in the park which made me question whether or not Montu should remain my favorite roller coaster or not. I was going to talk about how absolutely impressed I was by Cheetah Hunt, a ride nearly every enthusiast calls a “family coaster” but which packs a lovely punch in its three launches (with an unexpected bit of ejector airtime right after the third launch that knocked me out of my seat every time we rode it).
All of those thoughts are real, and I shared them with my friend Paul in a series of goofy vlog-style videos that my partner and I shot after every ride we rode. I ended each vlog with a request to Paul to “like, comment, subscribe,” and while my partner made fun of me every time, they also laughed every time I said it, which is certainly why I continued to say it.
I do love roller coasters. I love talking about them in the heavy jargon of enthusiast culture. They are fascinating machines with fascinating history (just read about Kings Island’s Son of Beast for proof of that). But that love is inextricably tied to the memories attached to them that are, ultimately, incidental to the coasters themselves. And I am just ecstatic to be finally making new memories of that type, after the long dark.
I’ll be riding Velocicoaster this weekend, at Universal Orlando’s Islands of Adventure, with my partner.
Cox in a Box 