HOW HIGH CAN YOU GO.

The Midwest is often spoken of as if everybody there were sane, but the weather makes up for it. The weather often changes its mind, drastically, within minutes. On the road through Ohio, you pass towns like Berlin and Milan, that really should be somewhere else, take the exit for Edison's birthplace, and head north to a sign that says "Sandusky Welcomes You: America's Roller Coast." Then, as you head toward Cedar Point amusement park, on Lake Erie, crossing the slim causeway over Sandusky Bay, you can see bright blue sky, huge lake-country thunderheads, the cars ahead of you hydroplaning on the blacktop, and the pleasure craft on either side already taking advantage of the latest break in the storm.

When the causeway doglegs and all of a sudden you spot sixteen roller coasters in the same place, it can take your breath away. Manhattan has a great skyline, but when you see it for the first time, you can't say, "Everything out there I'm going to the top of--today." At Cedar Point you can, and you can do it in your bathing suit, screaming, with a gang of friends. There's one rule, though: no spike jewelry.

The main reason for the rule is Top Thrill Dragster, which is four hundred and twenty feet tall and reaches its maximum speed of a hundred and twenty m.p.h. in less than four seconds. At that rate of acceleration, the flesh on your face begins to flatten and spread back toward your ears, tears stream out of your eyes, and your average ten-pound head feels like it weighs forty-five pounds, making it difficult to dodge any spike earrings or septum spikes or spiked tribal chokers that might fly loose.

Top Thrill Dragster is one of a new generation of roller coasters that generate their own publicity by setting world records--the tallest, the fastest, the longest, the loopiest, the highest g-force, the most time upside down. Chains like Six Flags, the country's largest, with twenty-nine parks, and Cedar Fair, which owns Cedar Point and eleven other parks, have been engaged in their own version of the arms race, putting up one big-ticket coaster after another in the hope of luring in riders. Cedar Point, which holds several records, has become the most famous front in that war. But by some measures Six Flags is ahead: eight of the twenty fastest coasters in the country are at one or another of its parks, and all of them have opened in the past five years.

Coaster enthusiasts are calling it a new golden age, but today's high-speed steel coasters don't have a lot in common with the old wooden twisters of the first building boom, back in the nineteen-twenties. Top Thrill Dragster is typical of the extreme nature of the latest rides. Once you're locked into your seat--with a simple one-person lap bar in cheerful yellow--the car moves slowly along the track and parks there, leaving you to look out and up for much too long, maybe fifteen seconds, feeling the high-decibel rumble of a revving dragster engine. Yellow, red, and green lights flash in sequence down the tower--they call it the Christmas tree--and you're off. Under normal operating conditions, one trainload of eighteen passengers goes every ninety seconds, straight up, with a pause at the top--a brief, lovely view of the bay and the park, far below--followed by a dive straight down, a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree barrel roll at seventy miles an hour. The whole thing's over in twenty-five seconds of almost pure g-force.

When it opened last year, Top Thrill Dragster replaced the three-year-old Millennium Force, some three hundred yards to its west, as the country's tallest and fastest. The difference between the two is a fair measure of the direction of the coaster wars. Millennium Force has its terrifying touches--before launch, a cable block that pulls the train up the three-hundred-and-ten-foot lift hill slides down the track toward you, frictionless as a guillotine--but after the first huge eighty-degree drop the train glides and swoops through a succession of steep hills and smooth, sharply banked curves. On Millennium Force you feel like a bird. On Top Thrill Dragster you feel like a veal chop.

Nobody at the Walt Disney compound in Glendale, California, the headquarters of the company's theme-park "Imagineers," takes advantage of the division's relaxed dress code more than Joe Rohde. On a typical day in June, he wore sandals, amulets from Kathmandu, and a light cotton shirt with yeti footprints which he bought in Bali. His beard was trimmed in a style just shy of topiary, and his left ear was decorated with a collection of sculpted earrings so heavy as to turn his earlobe into a low-hanging pendulum. It registered his excitement as he talked about Expedition Everest, the new roller coaster being built in Walt Disney World's Animal Kingdom, in Florida. The two-hundred-foot-tall coaster, expected to open in 2006, will reportedly cost Disney a hundred million dollars.