My 14-year-old daughter, Jane, makes endless lists. She makes packing lists, homework lists, Halloween candy received lists, and lists of her lists. Last summer, she made an all-timer: a bucket list.
It’s color-coded with immaculate handwriting and boxes for her to check off as she completes each achievement. Every single item will result in joy for her, joy for her friends, or even joy for me, my wife, and our other daughter. This list includes Cardinals games, hikes, road trips, sleepovers, double sleepovers, trampoline sleepovers, tubing, watching fireworks, and making s’mores.
For some of them she needs me, for some of them she needs my money, and for some of them she just needs her friends. To ride a big roller coaster, she needed all three.
That one’s a doozy. It is by far the most ambitious item on her list and the one I wondered when, or even if, she would check it off. Her previous “attempts” to ride big roller coasters were not really attempts at all. She flatly refused to even consider it. Yet as the summer progressed, her goal became even bigger. She didn’t want to ride just any big roller coaster; she wanted to conquer Batman at Six Flags, a beast of a ride that rates among the fastest, gnarliest, and scariest in the state.
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I sometimes think of the rides my kids go on at amusement parks like marks on a door frame, only instead of measuring how tall they are, they measure chutzpah. In that sense, going on Batman would be the equivalent of growing a foot in one year.
To get to Six Flags, she needed me to drive her and buy her a ticket. To find the courage for the ride, she needed the support and encouragement of her friends—and not just any friends, but a very specific group of them—Ella, Lily, and Heidi.
We call ourselves the Blocrossdetters, a smushing together of our last names (Blough, Crossman, Devorss, and Ritter). There are eight parents and 13 kids, seven of whom are teenage girls (including Ella, Lily, Heidi, and two of mine). Together we do holidays, camping trips, backyard cookouts, and as of one glorious Sunday, trips to Six Flags.
We arrived at the park and hustled straight to a roller coaster called American Thunder, where my daughter saved me a seat next to her. I climbed in and asked how she was feeling. She said, “Fine,” and she looked fine … but then a dead giveaway: She pulled our shared seatbelt—OUCH!! TOO TIGHT!!— and pain seared across my waist.
The ride started, and she grabbed my arm and squeezed it. Quickly, she let go of me and her fears. We hadn’t been inside the park for 20 minutes, and already she had completed the biggest (80 feet high) and fastest ride (50 miles per hour) of her life. That would have counted as a bucket list item if she hadn’t talked so much about Batman.
We ran off American Thunder to the concourse, where her smile encompassed her whole face. She proclaimed herself proud that she did not swear as she screamed on that ride.
“Good job, darl—Wait, what?”
She artfully changed the subject and vowed she was ready for something scarier. Hoping to seize the momentum, even if this was happening way faster than I anticipated, I blurted out, “Let’s do Batman then.”
Could she be ready for that already? I thought it would take all day for her to gain the courage.
She is usually an inside-her-own-head overthinker. Not today, apparently, and maybe never again.
As we speed-walked to Batman, I wondered where my timid little girl went and who this thrillseeking young woman was. The presence of the Blocrossdetter girls helped—Ella, Lily, and Heidi are her best friends in the whole wide world, and they are all fearless roller coaster riders. But my daughter was not just swept along by peer pressure. She was leading as we arrived at Batman, and she didn’t miss a beat as she walked through the entrance.
She wanted to ride with her friends—Batman sits four per car—and I pretended like I didn’t care and jumped in the row behind her. We crawled to the top of the first big hill, cut a nasty right turn, and suddenly that bucket list was going to get a great big check mark.
Batman threw us more than 50 miles an hour over the oneminute-and-40-seconds ride covering 2,693 feet. We flipped upside down five times and pulled four Gs, and I yelled so loud for so long that whatever bad words came out of her mouth, I didn’t hear them.
Yes, I was sad she was up there with her friends and not me but sitting behind her worked out because I saw an important detail I otherwise would have missed: her feet kicking in delight as the ride ended.
This article was originally published in the July/August 2025 edition of Missouri Life.
