Adventureland
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| Pieces of Family, Pieces of History - Oct 2011 [From my Cousin Kelley] |
At 26 years old I entered Disneyland slightly jaded about the supposed 'magic' of the place - scoffing at the overt commercialization of an utterly manufactured Main Street U.S.A.
Those sentiments of superiority were squashed by Indy and our trip through the Temple of the Forbidden Eye. Whether it was looking into "Mara's Eyes," encounters with fireballs, snakes, poison darts, and a giant boulder, or the fun of screaming beside good friends, the fact of the matter is that I left that ride and entered back into the park a different person.
Instantly I was a kid again and saw the world as full of possibility. I was geeking out in Adventureland.
True, the claim that a theme park ride (as impressive as it still is) changed my life is a bit of an overstatement. More accurately, the experience stirred up something deep. It tapped into core narratives, values, and memories that have shaped, and continue to shape, my world view.
On the surface it was an immediate reminder of Sunday nights spent watching the Wonderful World of Disney, snuggled up next to my mother and my brother , completely wrapped up in both a scratchy afghan blanket and tales of the Swiss Family Robinson, Captain Nemo's voyages beneath the sea, and the pirates of Treasure Island.
It brought me back to hot summer nights stretched out on the worn green carpet of my grandparents' living room. I can still smell the air, thick with Wisconsin humidity and the distinct scent of dust burning off the lamp of the slide projector. I can hear echoes of the the mechanical click of the advancing carousel interrupting the quiet hum of the fan as images of their travels to Egypt, Europe, Turkey, and China progressed across the screen.
The thrill ride resonated with those stories and formative moments with my family and I was filled with wonder.
These days, some six years later, when the sun rises it does so over a landscape filled with a completely different kind of 'magic'. The mountains off in the distance, Mt. Kinabalu and the peaks of the Crocker Range, are not made of steel and sculpted concrete but of granite thrust up from the earth's crust. The forest that surrounds me in the heart of Kota Kinabalu is not carefully managed to evoke a tropical locale; it is the real deal and the fauna that fills it is decidedly not animatronic.
Surveying this scene from my balcony every morning, I realize that I'm in the landscape of my boyhood dreams. Sometimes I'm forced to pause and to ponder how this came to be. How did a kid from Waukesha wind up in a real life adventureland?
The spin on the Indy ride holds part of the answer. My life has been shaped by the family that has surrounded me and the stories that have filled me. While 'Malaysian Borneo' and 'Sabah' are phrases I've only learned in recent years, the word adventure, whispered in my ear and from my lips, has been with me for quite a while.
Back in Wisconsin this past month my dad and his brothers had to help my grandparents move from the house that they have called home for longer than I have been alive. By the time I return home in April, that place of formative memories and stories will have been passed on to other hands.
While the good China and Silver have already been dispersed, what caught my eye were two beaten and battered steamer trunks. Affixed to their sides were labels marking their passage from Copenhagen to Stockholm and onward to New York and Ellis Island as they accompanied my Great-Grandfather and Great-Grandmother across the ocean and a thousand miles inland to Racine where the young Harrits family settled in a landscape far removed their own homesteads in Denmark.
With their surfaces marred by the toils of passage by land and by sea, the trunks tell their own tale of travel and bear witness to the adventurers and globe-trotters who preceded me. They lead me to wonder whether this impulse to wander is encoded in my DNA, woven into the fiber of my being generations ago. . .
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