My Jungle Cruise

The year that Disneyland and I were both eleven years old I was blessed with a rare vacation from Illinois to California. It was the only one of its kind for our humble family, eagerly anticipated and long remembered. My parents were older, approaching their fifties in an era before health clubs and fitness crazes. They were old beyond their years and were utterly worn out by a long day in the Magic Kingdom.

Early in the afternoon, we headed for the Jungle Cruise, an attraction that was an engineering triumph in the mostly desert-like conditions of Anaheim. Our boat, an African Queen knockoff, was piloted through lush transplanted palm trees and tropical foliage along shores populated by animatronic beasts unlike any that had been seen before. Joking boat pilots recited from a scripted series of silly puns, real groaners, that have now become an expected feature of the decades-old attraction.

 

Modern park-goers continue to enjoy this adventure, albeit a culturally sanitized version devoid of racial stereotypes and cruelty that we never even questioned at the time. How the world has changed! But I’m here to confess my gratitude for having taken a cruise through the early Disney jungle as an uninformed child. I would cringe now were I to voyage deep into 1960s lore.

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