“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.” René Daumal
If you never got to ride the world’s tallest indoor roller coaster at the world’s largest indoor mall back in the day then you missed out on a face-tightening, hair whipping, neck snapping, heart-dropping, belly churning experience.
And the fact that three people died in the mid-80s when their passenger car derailed and hurled their death wagon backwards from the final loop into a pillar and the concrete floor below? That only made it more perilous. You could be next.
The Mindbender was a full body, soul, and mindfuck in that way that was both thrilling and terrifying. It was a one minute and 13 second religious experience, especially that first section that felt and sounded as though you were on the slowest cog wheel train, clickety-clack climbing to the top of the mall, 145 feet above it all. And then pausing there in liminality so that all you could do was look out the window at the far away world and regret that you had long since discarded the notion of your own personal Jesus.
That was your pitiful petition before the plummet. Please God – don’t let me die on this ride.
And then the drop, the whiplash turn, and those two fast loops. More up, down, sideways; corkscrew hurling towards some uncertain future. And always the G-force of 5.2 plus 60 miles an hour times you don’t know what’s coming next even when you do since you’ve been on this coaster a zillion times because you’re a sucker for fear and pain and punishment and that nanosecond of pleasure that is so short-lived.
By the time that third loop comes, you feel reckless and like you have nothing left to lose, so you lift your arms and smile wide for the camera that’s there to capture your reaction. You’re supposed to look like you’re having fun and that it’s no big deal.
The end comes with a glorious jolt like the close-call relief of a near car crash. The buzz and click of the shoulder restraint lifting is Pavlovian. You’ve survived the unknown. Again. You hurry to climb out of the roller coaster car, just in case it starts up again. Sometimes you run right back into the line-up, like that time when your six-year-old daughter shrieked and cried throughout the entire Tower of Terror ride and then immediately asked to go again.
But either way, you’re in an altered state akin to having just shoved yourself in the washing machine and hit all the cycle buttons before closing the door and starting to tumble. Your shoulders ache, your balance feels wobbly, you’re dizzy and you’re confused, but it feels baptismal. In fact, you don’t even know how to recount this disorienting experience without shifting from past to present to future tense. How to honestly speak of this vertigo, vortex ride that is not any one thing but all the things?
And that’s a bit like the adoptee search journey. (As though we need another metaphor to explain what it’s like to be an adoptee.) Grief therapists use a roller coaster motif to describe the oscillation of grief, often landing on the tired misnomer of the five-stages but let me just say this. No two adoptee rides are the same. Some adoptees are non-plussed by the whole experience. Others feel sick, anxious. And some, like me, run the whole gamut from joy to sorrow to awe to fear and dread, to bewilderment to exhaustion.
My own journey has tracked much like my first of countless rides on the Mindbender. That slow and oblivious climb in my first decades to the tipping point of nearly stealing my adoption file. The drop that felt like the bottom was going to fall out of my life if I didn’t find my birth parents. The crisscross, zigzag search path that led me this way and that. The search agency birth mother reunion that brought me yet another complicated family, but this time, dressed in Ukrainian costuming. The 15-year whirlwind loop of all of that, from lost to found to lost again. The DNA discovery of my paternal birth family. And yet another loop upon discovering my birth father took his life on Holy Thursday in 1992. And then the loop and jolt of the ride coming to an end with my birth mother’s death in 2021, followed by my paternal aunt’s death two years later.
They decommissioned the Mindbender in 2023, which was the same year I felt like my search journey had shifted. The ride continues, metaphorically, of course, but it’s different now. I’m like the afterhours crew at the Viva la Adoptees theme park. I’m still stirring the ashes of my dead in the small bowl at the bottom of my heart as though looking for hot embers. And I’m still sifting through papers and clues so I can make sense of what needs to be recycled, composted, or thrown in the incinerator.
“Was the ride worth the high cost?” people have asked me. And my answer is always yes. Yes, it was. Because I got to see the vista from the top and can I just say? That view - wow! It was fleeting and it lived up to the Fantasyland theme park name, but it was everything.
Just like religious experiences or lofty roller coaster vistas, the adoption search aligns with René Daumal’s words about how once one sees, one knows.
Or at least we think we do but we’re adoptees.
What do any of us know for sure?