National Park visitors

It turns out that Americans cannot decide whether they want to commune quietly with nature or have their spines compressed by mechanical forces, and they want to do both at precisely the same rate. Between 2015 and 2022, as more people wandered into Yellowstone and Yosemite to stand in front of something larger than themselves, an almost identical number were being flung upside-down by roller coasters at Six Flags, as though the two activities were merely competing versions of the same urgent need. One involves bears. One involves G-forces. Both, apparently, involved us.

2020 did something unusual to American leisure: it split it in half. National parks became the one socially acceptable destination — visitation whipsawed as the only outdoor escape — while amusement parks shut their gates entirely, taking ride injuries down with them. The correlation is the shadow of a year when fresh air was medicine and queues for roller coasters were reckless.

The correlation is almost certainly not causal—visiting a geyser does not make you statistically more likely to be ejected from a Tilt-A-Whirl—but rather a reflection of two entirely separate human desires moving in tandem because they respond to the same economic and social currents. It is a reminder that perfect correlations often tell us less about cause and effect than they do about how comprehensively our behavior is driven by invisible forces we barely notice. Which is either comforting or deeply unsettling, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity.