Cruisin'

Today I found myself telling my students about my adventures in the late 1980s working at Disneyland as a Jungle Cruise ride operator. It's been so long now since I worked there I sometimes forget it makes a great conversation starter, or RE-starter, if conversation lags, to mention the job I had one summer about 2 million years ago now.

I told my students the usual--how some guys would say to people leaving the boat, "And don't forget to watch 'Fantasy in the Sky Fireworks' tonight, where we toss Tinkerbell off the top of Sleeping Beauty's castle and try to shoot her down with fireworks!" I suspect they no longer say such things on the Jungle Cruise ride, or any ride for that matter; I think it goes without saying it was a vastly different time.

We weren't supposed to say things like that (and to be fair, I never did) but there were some "approved" bits of improvisation, and you did have to have some "backup spiel" for when things lagged, like if a boat broke down. I got in trouble for that once actually. I was stalling for time on a broken ride with a loaded boat in the heat of summer...I panicked and said, "Any questions?" then quickly said, "...and yes, the boat is on a track and no, the animals aren't real." My supervisor rushed over and shook his finger at me, scolding. Oh well.

But my favorite story was when I had a kid in a wheelchair brought on board with his parents...it was a slow day so he and his mom and dad were the only ones on the boat (at least in my fading memory). I told the kid to come over where I was and take the wheel and "drive" the boat. He wasn't sure at first but he tentatively made his way in his chair and I showed him how the wheel (which actually did nothing, it was just for show) worked. I ran the gas peddle obviously, and kept my spiel going (including shooting above the wild hippos--we didn't shoot at them in 1988, they were endangered species by then).

The kid was entranced. He took his job Very Seriously, trying to bank just right around corners and steer us away from the scary gorillas. He looked at me a few times to make sure he was getting it right, then finally settled into a groove, I could see his confidence rise.

All too soon the ride was over and my coworkers on the dock were helping the kid out of the boat. I saw the little boy ride off in his chair with his parents. Dad looked over his shoulder and gave me a thumbs-up. The kid was lost in revery, rolling off to the next ride with a big grin on his face.

I've always wondered whatever happened to that kid. I hope he remembers that day vividly, latched on to it as a Good Time to remember, told it to people through the years. I think that's how it works--that's how my memories are anyway. I store up those Good Times and pull them out when I'm not doing so well. I confess I've been known to re-coat the memories with the paint of optimism if there was anything shady in them. And I use my memories as a shield against a busy, scatterbrained, nonsensical world when required.

So I hope that kid really did have a Good Time that day, and remembered that ride around the jungle often; it makes me feel good to at least think he did, and that I had a part in it.

Meanwhile, it's been many, many years since I worked on that ride that summer, many years since I've been back to even visit Disneyland again. Millions of people have ridden that ride, thousands have worked it, it was going before I was around, and possibly, after I'm gone, it'll still be going--the ride has changed, people have changed. But for a minute or so I was a part of the history of something that's been around for eons and has touched the lives of millions of people. It's possible I was maybe even a kind of magical figure in some kid's world, and created the kind of special moments Disney advertises and sells (at increasingly higher prices each year) coming to pass on a rickety boat in a fake river on summer at the end of the 80s, surrounded by plastic animals and enjoying a breezy ride on a fake Amazon river. And what else is there, really?