Four minutes to read.
Once again, I’m eight years old. Waiting in the ticket line at Les Machines de l'île in Nantes, France. I am craning my neck, fidgeting, gawking.
My travel secret is that I’m a big kid. Sometimes my wife calls me a big baby, but I don’t think she is referring to my playful side.
Sure, I want to see all the important historical sights. After all I teach high school history. But what I really seek out, what I really crave, is fun, food and fits of laughter. Shhh, don’t tell anyone.
On the Island of Machines, just ten feet away from me a mechanical elephant standing 39 feet tall and 26 feet wide, made from 45 tons of wood and steel, lubricated with 530 gallons of hydraulic oil, lumbers by. Goosebumps.
Its flexible trunk bellows and sprays water. If I stand too close, I need to cover my ears. As far as getting squirted, maybe drenched, well, that’s a matter of chance.
On the elephant’s back, four stories high, sits a canopied platform for carrying me and 47 other passengers. Soon, very soon, it will be my turn. At a top speed of three kilometers per hour, the elephant walk takes forty-five minutes, one way.
From up there, the view of the Loire River is breathtaking. When I look directly down, shouting, squealing children dart in front of the beast, hoping to return to their parents soaked with water from the elephant’s trunk.
With a final trumpet blow, the goliath stops in front of a three-story, triple-decker, circus-like carousel. Disembarking, I have my choice of riding 35 aquatic creatures, sea birds, boats, imaginary sea life or water carriages. The seafaring rides jiggle and wiggle, twist and turn, as if I am in a Jules Verne submarine. Nearby, for smaller people another ocean-themed merry-go-round generates wide eyes.
The elephant and two carousels are part of menagerie of mechanized sculptures. A sloth inches along a tree limb, a caterpillar large enough to eat my entire garden crawls on a branch, a heron with a 20-foot wingspan flies overhead, hummingbirds gather nectar, a spider awakes, leaves and returns to its nest. I am all gasps and giggles and glee.
The aesthetic essence of each animal is portrayed precisely, its movements mimicking nature. Nevertheless, engineering gears and mechanisms are proudly, unselfconsciously visible. Delightfully, the hands of the artist and builder are revealed.
My eyes riveted, I am called to respect and honor the animal kingdom even as I am awed by man’s creative capacity. The natural world and the mechanical world blur.
Laughing, smiling, looking in every direction at once, I’m taken on a voyage into a make-believe world where art entertains, art educates, art revitalizes. Once an abandoned shipyard, the Island of the Machines is the amalgamation of artistic engineering and machinist ingenuity, ecological studies, children’s park, performance art, tourist magnet and urban renewal strategy financed by government.
At any age, the uninhibited, exhilarating, carefree, blissful fun that is the Island of the Machines is a forever memory. I’m already begging myself to return.