The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  He agrees that would save time.

  We have been flying for an hour and sixteen minutes when I cut the engine by the fuel pump in De Land. We have gas to go on to Orlando, but we fuel and oil the plane anyway.

  I put the camera around my neck and we depart heading southwest. I soon turn the plane over to David while I consult my sectional chart. Let’s see. … There is an Airport Radar Service Area in Orlando. The FAA owns the air from the surface to 4,000 feet for five nautical miles in all directions around the tower, and from 1,400 feet to 4,000 for five more miles. If we stay outside that circle with a ten-mile radius, we will be okay. And luckily Disney World is marked on the chart as being southwest of the city, safely outside the circle. Maybe five miles outside it.

  We will fly southwest across the northern approaches to the city to Lake Apopka. That will be a snap to find. Then we will head straight south to Disney World. No problem.

  On the way to Lake Apopka David is busy in the front cockpit, though I can’t see just what he is doing. Then he sticks his right arm out in the wind. A paper airplane is attached. He turns it loose. I sigh.

  Leaving Lake Apopka I see a large silver ball sitting on the ground fifteen miles or so south and point it out to David. “I’ll bet that’s Disney World.” It is. We later learn that’s the geodesic dome at EPCOT Center.

  So we fly toward it. I snap some pictures of David leaning out the left side of the front cockpit, then the right. Then I change rolls of film.

  Over the sprawling Disney complex I search the sky for other aircraft, then gawk at the sights below. We are flying at 1,200 feet now. As David flies I photograph. Then we turn and start back north. Now I maneuver the plane with one hand while I use the camera with the other. The sunlight is streaming through the gaps in the cloud layer a thousand feet above us onto the bright yellow wing, so I want the wing in the picture with the Disney edifices so that everyone will know that this picture wasn’t taken by a NASA Satellite. I shoot the whole roll of film as we fly from sunlight to shadow back to sunlight.

  Heading north back to Lake Apopka, I dial in the ATIS frequency for Orlando Executive. The radio is marginal at best and the transmission is scratchy, which is one reason I don’t like to work with Approach controllers. I often miss a transmission or don’t get their drift. Now I listen carefully. He says something about a TCA.

  A TCA? A huge, sprawling Terminal Control Area? My God, I thought Orlando had a piddling little ARSA!

  I listen to the recording again while I stare at the sectional. Yep, he said “TCA.”

  A shot of adrenaline whacks me in the heart. Have I violated restricted airspace because I didn’t know it was there? I cuss without keying the intercom.

  Holding the stick between my knees, I wrestle with the sectional chart until I find the date information. Lordy, this thing expired in September of last year! I’m flying with an outdated chart! Well, if I’ve just earned my first flight violation, it’s too late to sweat it now. It’s done.

  Flying east from Lake Apopka, I switch to Executive Tower and listen a while. Other aircraft are coming in VFR from the north. David releases two more paper airplanes before I give Tower a call. They answer routinely.

  Will some FAA enforcer be waiting for me on the ground?

  A fine and license suspension would be just perfect. I stew about this all the way in.

  No one is waiting for us. We taxi around awhile and a guy in a truck leads me to a place to tie down the Queen. As I wipe the oil off the fuselage I curse my own foolishness for not checking the expiration dates on these charts more carefully. A thousand details to take care of and I only remembered 999.

  I make a deal with a guy who works for the FBO to wash the plane sometime during the next five days. She needs a bath to get rid of this grime. Hell, so do I.

  Inside the FBO is a pilot shop. I make a beeline for it and latch onto a Jacksonville sectional chart. Outside I unfold it. Relief floods over me. They gave Orlando a TCA all right, one with the usual circle with the 30-mile radius centered on Orlando International. But the airspace that is controlled down to the altitudes where I fly the Cannibal Queen is rectangular, the first rectangular TCA I have ever laid eyes on. And the airspace over Disney World is uncontrolled up to 3,000 feet.

  That was a close squeak.

  “Did you see me release those paper airplanes?” David wants to know.

  “Yeah.”

  “I wrote messages on them.”

  “Like what?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  I scrutinize his face. He wants me to think the messages were obscene, but if I ask him he’ll deny it. He gives me a big, slow grin, his braces gleaming.

  His mother will be here tonight. Thank goodness.

  I throw down the newspaper just as David comes back into our hotel room. He has been downstairs feeding some of my hard-earned quarters into video games. He looks tired. We swam when we first got here, then I tried to nap and read the paper while he amused himself. He stacks the unused quarters on the dresser and falls into bed facedown. In minutes he is asleep.

  We have four and a half more hours to wait before the plane is due with Nancy and the girls, at 10:16 P.M. I turn on the computer and get busy.

  When I turn it off three hours later, he is still asleep. I wake him and we head for the commercial airport a mile away. The terminal is really snazzy, new and modern.

  The plane will be more or less on time. As we eat a tasteless hamburger in the only airport grease shop still open, I thank him for flying with me these past ten days.

  He grins.

  “You glad it’s over?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

  “Yeah,” he admits. “That’s a lot of flying. But thanks for taking me.”

  What a fine young man he is. Walking down the concourse I am still glowing; then he sticks a finger in my ribs. The flying hasn’t changed him.

  8

  DISNEY WORLD WAS BUILT BY PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT BIG. THIS monument to the American credo that Bigger is Better and Biggest is Best cannot be seen in its entirety by any one mortal, not if he is accompanied by youngsters who insist on sleeping until 11 A.M.

  Fortunately, after a day or so of walking and standing in endless lines in the muggy Florida summer heat, you will lose any desire you might have had to see the whole thing. The thought will occur to you that the Disney folks have a lot of people on their staff who think the perfect family vacation resort is a place where everyone can do precisely the kind of things most moms like to do on Sunday afternoons—shop in quaint little doodad stores for worthless souvenirs, wander endlessly looking at faintly amusing architecture (Oh, wow! Here’s the casbah in Tangiers without the dirt and squalor and Moslem fanatics ready to slit your throat), and occasionally invest in a soft drink at movie theater prices to keep the kids pacified. You will survey infinite vistas of manicured, weed-free lawns and flower beds while you recall your scraggly little petunia patch back home. You will listen to zillions of young children squeal about thirst and bathrooms. All this you can do on a smaller scale in any large city.

  What makes Disney World special are the continuous conveyor belts of little plastic cars that carry a cargo of up to eight humans each through dark, winding tunnels filled with weird stuff. So you go from building to building, shuffle slowly through mind-numbing mazes of crowd-control railings, and if your bladder holds out and a thunderstorm doesn’t soak you, you will see more weird stuff than you can hope to remember for more than an hour. And to think the people who thought this up work for a drug-free company!

  Everyone should come here at least once and find they spent twice as much money as they thought they would. Every good parent should give this experience to his or her children, who will grow up warped if they don’t see a million acres of grass without weeds and all the freaky educational stuff in the tunnels. That’s what’s wrong with me—I’m forty-four and this is my first visit, and probably my last unless there’s a procreative accident lurking in
my future.

  The first day of our Disney adventure we “did” EPCOT Center. I don’t know why they always capitalize all the letters in EPCOT, but I think it stands for something abstruse.

  Our hotel was nifty in that the monorail ran right through the fourth-floor shop and restaurant area. From the outside it sort of looked like an ancient Mayan temple, and as I climbed the steps it occurred to me that I was making the pilgrimage with a lot of good sacrifice material—one first-born son and two virgins.

  Anyway, we checked into our hotel, which the desk person said had 1,036 rooms, dumped our bags and drained off the slag, then boarded the monorail.

  At EPCOT we charged through the surging crowd for the geodesic dome, where we boarded a little plastic car and were transported through the ubiquitous tunnel. I have already forgotten what we saw there. We immediately scurried to the next building and had a similar experience. The same in the third and fourth one. Nancy and the kids did the fifth one by themselves while I loafed outside.

  They saw Michael Jackson do something that earned him outrageous bucks and came out groaning. “Now I remember why I detest Michael Jackson,” Rachael whispered to me. Lara and David just rolled their eyes. Nancy liked it though.

  Hungry, jaded with the Disney experience, we found grub in a fast-food joint where everything costs twice as much as it does “outside.” We were smiled at yet again by the gracious employees.

  We left our trash in a can like good citizens and joined the throng outside in the grotesque humidity. A short boat ride across the lake and we were in the midst of the international exhibits, the faintly interesting architecture of which I spoke, full of shops selling knickknacks like you buy a third cousin who is getting married and restaurants selling stuff that doesn’t look like anything your mother ever made.

  We took in a well-done concert by a band called the College All-Stars. They played some Broadway show tunes and a group of dancers cavorted appropriately. Then we went down the walkway and Lara tried her hand at playing a dulcimer. She could learn it if she worked at it.

  Now a sidewalk portrait artist caught Nancy’s eye. In a twinkling Nancy had contracted for three profile portraits, one of each of the kids, which turned out to be four because she was unhappy with the way Rachael’s first one turned out. It was 9 P.M. by the time the pictures were all done.

  We loafed for the next hour, strolling leisurely and sitting on a flower-bed retainer wall, while waiting for the 10 P.M. light show to start. David tried to get us to scoot to the front of the mob and stand for a half hour so we would be sure and see everything, but Nancy and I scotched that. We waited patiently on our retainer wall and watched the human parade while David stewed.

  The light show involved a lot of fireworks and laser lights and classical music. I was hoping they would close with Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA and use fireworks to emblazon the American flag in the sky, with lasers zigging around, but they didn’t. Maybe the Fourth of July.

  Then we joined the mob trying to get to the parking lot and monorail. At 11 we got back to our hotel.

  The next day David, Rachael and Nancy went to the Disney-MGM theme park while I wrote. Lara slept most of the day, not feeling too chipper. When the adventurers returned, I asked David how it had went. “Well, everybody said the Star Tour is the thing to do—‘Oh yeah, you’ll really like it.’ So we did that. But it’s all over in three minutes. It’s kinda stupid.”

  The following day was Saturday and, by mutual consent, water sports day. We rented Water Sprites, little boats with 10-horsepower engines, at the marina in front of the hotel and putted around the lake for an hour. Nancy and I shared one, but each of the kids had one of their own. David’s went the fastest, a happy accident that tickled him no end. Lara’s went okay. Rachael traded hers in twice trying to get a faster boat and ended up with one that ran out of gas in the middle of the lake. The boat Nancy and I shared plowed the water at the speed of a garbage barge.

  Then we packed the car and went looking for a place that rented jet skis or wind surfers or water skis. We found a jet-ski merchant on a little lake in Kissimmee.

  This mogul also refused to let David pilot one. I thought the kid took it well. I would have spit on the man’s shoe.

  Rachael drove one with David up behind and Lara drove the other with her mother as her passenger. Just when I think I know Nancy like a book I wrote myself, she does something to astound me. I should have known. The kids tell me she learned to wind surf in Hawaii last summer.

  We signed up for 40 minutes of jet skiing, but after 15 the merchant waved them in. Storm coming. About the time everyone had concluded the warning was a false alarm, the storm hit, a torrential tropical downpour that reduced visibility to about a hundred yards. After it passed, Lara and Rachael and their passengers rode the jet skis around the little lake for their remaining 25 minutes.

  That evening Nancy thought it would be a good idea to go to Pleasure Island for a sit-down dinner, so we rode the bus over. We selected an Italian joint, Portofino Yacht Club. David thought the sign looked like “Pot Belly Yacht Club.”

  The waiter was a young man from Danville, Virginia, a first-class nice guy. As Lara pondered her dinner selection, he explained about one of the specials, a shrimp concoction. I told him to save his breath—the girl hadn’t let a shrimp touch her lips in 18 years and I doubted if she would tonight.

  She glanced at me, asked about the other specials, then ordered the shrimp. After the Virginian disappeared with the orders, I asked her, “Did you order shrimp just to stick it to me?”

  She ignored me. As I contemplated the magnitude of my faux pas the conversation swirled on, jokes and teasing and wry comments on the state of the universe and man’s precarious place in it. They are acute observers, looking for places for themselves. This fall will be Lara’s freshman year in college, Rachael’s sophomore year. These girls are becoming women before I am ready. They are children no longer, nor are they mature adults. They are somewhere in that gray twilight zone between.

  Babies should gestate for 18 months, childhood should last 40 years, and parents should have time to learn how to be parents before the whole experience is over. If the creator of the universe ever asks my advice, I am going to suggest these changes.

  Moments like this are what family vacations are really about. The essence of parenthood is to see the child mature, and where better than on an expedition to a tourist attraction? Here you see them night and day for a week or so. Here you learn what they really think, who they really are.

  Sunday we went to the Magic Kingdom. It is a first cousin of California’s Disneyland and I understand was the first theme park in Disney World.

  When we got to Tomorrowland all three kids saw the sign, GRAND PRIX RACING, and lined up. They came out shaking their heads. The cars are on rails and the only real control is a foot pedal to make it go, though it doesn’t go very fast. Rachael’s refused to go at all. This ride should be avoided by anyone over the age of eight.

  Warning!

  To enter this ride,

  you must be in good health,

  with no heart conditions,

  motion sickness, weak back,

  or other physical limitations.

  That’s what the warning sign said at Space Mountain in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom park. But the sign is just inches from the place you board the indoor roller coaster for a fast ride through dark, twisty tunnels. It would have been nice if they had added “weak bladder” to their list of disqualifying infirmities and posted the list out front where a fellow could chicken out with a little dignity. Now as I stare at the sign I realize I am committed.

  Rachael and Lara and Nancy are behind me staring at my broad, manly back. David is in front. He turns around with his grin and announces, “You’re going in the front seat.”

  “Uh-uh. You are.”

  “Not me.”

  I try to get behind Rachael. “I’m not going in the front seat,” she tells me with
out a trace of shame.

  Her sister, Lara, says the same thing. So does Nancy. Women! And they want equal rights!

  I merely walk toward the back of the six-person car and stand there. We arrange ourselves so the front seat is empty. At last I come to my senses. I’ll never live this down. “I’ll ride in front,” I announce with simple dignity and move that way. I can just ride the whole trip with my eyes closed—there’s nothing to see in a dark tunnel anyway. The attendant waves me toward the rear, bless him. He says to leave the front seat empty.

  We are quickly seated and pull our safety bars down. Then we are off. A grind up the long incline, then headfirst down the chute in the dark, right, left, up, down, the Gs tugging first one way, then another, David screaming in front of me at the top of his lungs. It’s over in about 90 seconds, about the same as every roller coaster.

  I suspect roller coaster freaks will think Space Mountain pretty tame. Those wooden monsters around the country that have thrilled generations of youngsters—the Twister, the Rebel Yell, the Hurricane—will squeeze the juice out of a stone. Still, it’s the best ride at Disney World.

  Last year my brother, John, got deathly ill on the Body Wars ride in EPCOT. He described the room where everyone sits as a cross between a cocktail shaker and a vibrator bed gone crazy. After almost losing his lunch in that contraption, he staggered out to sit for an hour and a half before regaining control of his stomach. So some of the Disney World rides might be profitably avoided by people sensitive to motion sickness.

  The rides in Fantasyland are all equivalent to the carousel that sits in the middle of the area. Fantasyland is for kids still in diapers. A woman in the laundromat told me that the Thunder Mountain ride in Frontierland is pretty good, but my tribe never got that far. She said her family was from Chicago and this was their sixth Disney World vacation. “But the kids are getting too big,” she said with hope in her voice, “so next year I’m voting for Colorado.” I told her that made sense to me.

  After the Magic Kingdom, we came back to the hotel for lunch, then got our swimming gear and drove to Typhoon Lagoon. I rented a locker and got on my swim suit, then we trooped through the wall-to-wall bodies to the beach. There is a real beach, with real sand, around a giant man-made pool with a surge device that produces one large wave every 90 seconds. I sat down behind a palm tree on the only empty pool chair we could find to guard our stuff while the kids and their mom sported in the water.