Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Island of the Machines
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Once again, I’m eight years old. I’m craning my neck, fidgeting, gawking. Waiting in the ticket line for the ride at Les Machines de l'île in Nantes, France.
My travel secret is that I’m a big kid. Sometimes my wife calls me a big baby, but I let that go. I’m sure she only means that I’m playful.
Of course, I want to see all the important historical sights. After all, I am a high school history teacher. 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 where I’m standing a mechanical elephant 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, then 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 up to the Pachyderm Gods.
On the elephant’s back, four stories high, sits a canopied platform for transporting 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 will take 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 mechanical 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 and water carriages. The seafaring rides jiggle and wiggle, twist and turn, as if I am inside a Jules Verne submarine.
The elephant and carousel are part of menagerie of mechanized sculptures. The aesthetic essence of each animal is captured precisely, the movements mimicking nature.
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.
Transparently, engineering gears and mechanisms are proudly, unselfconsciously visible. The joined hands of the artist and builder are revealed. The natural world and the mechanical world blur.
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. Laughing, smiling, I’m taken on a voyage into a make-believe world where art entertains, art educates, art restores my youth.
At any age, for every age, the exhilarating, carefree, blissful fun that happens on the Island of the Machines is a forever memory. I’m already begging myself to return.
No shame in wanting to be eight again.
