Ride the Titanic! (31 page)

‘She’s done for, and so are you, unless you get moving. NOW!’

The scene pans to the left as we swing to the right and leave the steam and heat and chaos and plunge into pitch black nothingness – quickly replaced by ice-cold air, shouts, screams, and string quartet music as we burst onto the
Boat Deck II
scene, where panicky passengers race back and forth along the deck trying to find safety in a world where no such thing exists.

Only a few minutes earlier we were at this same location for the
Sailing from Southampton
scene. Back then it was all warm sunshine, happy promises and ‘bon voyage’s.’ Now a pitch black sky greets us, filled with stars above and an empty sea; silent witnesses to what’s about to happen.

‘Over here!’ someone shouts. ‘Loading now!’

The passenger tide swells to a stop, reverses direction and moves toward the sound of his voice. We follow just in time to see a ship’s officer shouting, ‘If you please, sir, women and children.’

A middle-aged man starts to leave the lifeboat. ‘Of course. I had no idea.’

His wife clutches his arm. ‘Darling, stay with me, please!’

The man’s voice is too soft to hear, but whatever he says has an effect. The woman releases him, buries her face in her hands and weeps as he climbs out. He gets as far as the deck before she jumps as if slapped and shouts, ‘Wait, I’m coming!’

We drift beyond the commotion caused by the other passengers in the lifeboat who try to stop her from leaving, but to no avail. The last thing I see is their embrace.

‘Teddy!’ a woman screams. ‘Teddy, where are you, darling?’

It’s the same mother we saw when the ship sailed. Earlier she wore a flowing, ivory-toned travel outfit. Now a bulky kapok life vest covers the robe thrown over her nightgown. She turns to us.

‘Have you seen my little boy? He was here just a moment ago. I told him not to move, but he did.’

An authoritative voice shouts. ‘Prepare to lower away!’

‘Wait! Please! I can’t find my baby!’ Then back to us: ‘Please, PLEASE tell them to wait!’

As we drift closer to the loaded lifeboat, the officer snarls. ‘Stand back, we’re lowering away.’

‘Mamma!’ A child’s voice cuts through the squeal of the davit blocks as its line starts paying out to lower the lifeboat.

‘Teddy!’

But before we can see their reunion the EMV moves forward, and as it does the milling passengers increase in number, another rocket soars into the air and explodes overhead, adding more stars to the firmament, which seems to act as a signal for the crowd’s mood to shift from hope to desperation. The lights flicker, go out, and then come back again but slightly fainter this time, casting deep shadows, inside of which the people huddle. Unable to find refuge in lifeboats, they take refuge in the shelter of a ship that will offer them a grave instead.

‘Here it comes,’ Lewis warns.

A sharp TWANG as one of the steel cable guy lines for Stack #2 two snaps from the increasing strain of the ship slowly sinking by the bow. Her increasing down-angle causes people to lean as they move instinctively toward the imagined safety of the stern. A chorus of shouts and gunfire, then shocked silence from the crowd, but only for a brief moment before the murmuring begins again, growing louder and louder. What once was civilized order and carefully maintained distance between classes of people, dissolves into the singular, desperate goal of somehow, someway, staying alive despite impossible odds.

‘Cue the band,’ Lewis says, as the faraway music of the ship’s string quartet begins playing
Nearer My God to Thee
.  

I feel an involuntary shudder. ‘Thoughts?’

A long pause. Lewis’s voice is unnaturally quiet, almost reverent. ‘Works for me.’

Seconds later an officer works his way out of the crowd.

‘Over here, last boat leaving, hurry now.’

Davits swing out of the darkness and sheave blocks drop down and attach to our bow and stern. The line pays out and the blocks squeal as our EMV descends alongside the ship’s hull, past decks where different dramas play out:

Two men help a third struggle into his life vest.

A family moves toward the stern.

A young man, legs hooked onto the railing, holding a weeping child, kisses him and hoists him over to a passenger in a descending lifeboat.

More distress rockets soar upward, while portholes drift past, behind which, eye-blinks of life play out:

A couple sitting on their bunk holding hands.

A man kneeling in prayer.

Two lovers kissing passionately.

Faster and faster the vignettes sweep by until they become a blur that vanishes into pitch blackness as our EMV comes to an abrupt halt. A spray of salty mist and a wave of chilled air adds sensory cues to the gently bobbing motion of a lifeboat now floating in the open sea.

Another rocket bursts in the air, this time its light reveals the faraway sight of the
Titanic
in her final death throes, sinking faster and faster. As her stern rises into the air, her keel can no longer withstand the strain at the bending point and explodes deep within her hull, breaking her back, causing her bow section to vanish and her stern to rise even higher in the air, exposing her massive, motionless bronze propellers, almost obscene in the starlight as they drip water onto the hundreds of passengers now desperately swimming for their lives.

The stern section remains upright only briefly before the rest of the broken ship pulls it down along with it, faster and faster as the
Titanic
transforms itself from elegant ocean liner to a sinking hulk, from hope to despair, from tragedy to myth.

A twenty-second fade to black accompanies the last moments of the ship’s life. But instead of the horrific shrieks that must have rent the air on that fateful night, a dramatic, full orchestral score takes its place. Historians will disdain us for softening the truth, but better a crabby critic than a terrified rider who, instead of wanting to see what happens next, can’t wait to get the damn thing over with.

What happens next is ten seconds of utter darkness as we bob in an imaginary ocean, processing the tragedy of what we just witnessed. I argued for a fifteen second pause but settled for ten after Lewis showed me how much those extra five seconds would cost us in lost revenue over the course of a single day. And since flow-through is king I bowed before our bean-counters, but not without a fight, which I feel necessary to start again.

‘Five seconds more,’ I moan. ‘We need to process this stuff.’

‘Too late, here comes the cavalry
.’

A thin sliver of red light along the horizon pulls us out of the pitch darkness, immediately followed by the welcoming gleam of sunrise on a sparkling sea that signals both the dawn of a new day and salvation for the survivors lucky enough to see it. The distant, haunting cry of a ship’s steam whistle announces the approach of the Cunard liner,
Carpathia
. Its single-stack silhouette turns toward us just as we turn away to enter the final part of the ‘day ride.’

Unloading rides is always harder than loading. The customers are often tired, worn out, and impatient to do other things. In our case we knew from the first they’d be emotionally drained as well, and we’d need crowbars to get some of them out of the boats. That is, until during our early days of planning back in Orlando, Joe said four words that instantly solved the problem.

‘Keep telling the story.’

Instead of our EMV lifeboats arriving at some functional, sterile-looking exit station with bored attendants unlatching seat restraints and herding folks into retail like cattle into the slaughterhouse, our lifeboats arrive on a life-sized replica of the
Carpathia’s
deck, complete with sailors – male and female – but nobody will notice since they’re wearing the same uniforms. Each attendant has a specific monologue to follow. In our case, two ‘sailors’ tut-tut’ us with great care and concern and in perfect British accents.

‘Easy getting’ out, ladies and gents, watch your step.’

‘Nice warm blankets for you an’ a good mug o’ tea.’

‘Mind you, take your time, you’ve been through a lot.’

‘God bless you, but you must be freezing.’

‘Easy now, just over here and through that hatch there. There’s a love.’

Even though Lewis and I are the only riders for the test run, the team of ride attendants soothe, comfort and assist scores of imaginary passengers out of their EMV’s and across the ‘deck’ to a series of exits disguised as open hatches leading to retail.

As we pass through the shopping area, Lewis sweeps his hand in a grand arc to take in the racks of still-empty shelves and rows of glass display cases barely visible in the dim gleam of the caged construction lights. The deserted space looks like a looted tomb. But ninety days from now, the opposite will be true, because here will be stacked, piled, arranged and displayed, every conceivable gift, poster, paperweight and T-shirt remotely related to the
RMS Titanic
. Here will be proof positive that you actually did ‘ride’ the
Titanic
, and with souvenirs in hand, you can brag all about it to your friends back in Wisconsin or Maine or Idaho.

Some of the media outlets are criticizing us for ‘exploiting such a great tragedy,’ but that’s to be expected. Ever since Bob Ballard discovered the wreck and made the mistake of telling the world about it – instead of sailing away and keeping it a secret – the lid on Pandora’s Box didn’t open, it blew off its hinges.

We’ve dodged this particular bad-press ‘iceberg’ with a website and social media counterattack, because we’ll be donating a generous percentage of profits to a variety of worldwide
Titanic
historical societies to use as they see fit. We’re doing our part to keep the story of man’s folly alive.

Lewis brushes away crumpled wrapping paper from the souvenir shelves.

‘And God said, let the feeding frenzy begin.’

Since most people are right-handed and ‘reach right,’ our ‘purchase flow’ is to the right with special attention paid to the ‘bulls eye’ center, the place where you want the customer to look first. In our case, instead of merchandise, a dramatic, three-dimensional model of the
Titanic
will be sailing proudly toward you, just like it does on the famous
White Star
travel poster (available in shipping tubes to avoid creasing). No sinking ships for us. No panic and chaos on the tilting Boat Deck. No stern stuck in the air, no death, no tragedy. Instead, we’ll rewind the myth to the beginning. Like Ulysses sailing forth to meet the Cyclops, David to meet Goliath, Christ being born in Bethlehem, re-telling story is re-living it, and as long as we live inside stories we do not contemplate our own ending.

Lewis says, ‘The full-length mirrors go here and here.’

‘Not too many. They need to preen not park. Make a note.’

‘Done and done.’ Lewis’s fingers tap-tap-tap his notebook.

‘Wait a second. Turn that way and face the shelf.’

As he does, I pivot the other way and in doing so bump against his backside. ‘Butt-brush. Feel it?’

‘Felt it, loved it.’

‘The instant a woman gets butt-brushed while shopping she moves on. Make these aisles wider.’

‘But we want flow-through.’

‘Not non-stop.’

‘Point taken.’ Tap-tap-tap. ‘Keep asses apart.’

‘So, who are you inviting for the Maiden Voyage?’

‘Nobody.’

‘C’mon, it’s the golden ticket. Everybody at ISM gets to invite their families. What about your mom?’

‘When I told Fat Mary she said. . .’ Lewis shifts his voice into a smoky, New Orleans drawl, ‘Honey, last time that sorry ship sailed it sank.’

‘Did you tell her ours comes back again?’

‘Never argue with Fat Mary when she starts a sentence with ‘Honey.’ It means case closed.’

‘So. . .honey,’ I drawl. ‘Do we green light this here ride of ours?’

Lewis ponders this a while. ‘No going back if we do.’

‘No going forward if we don’t. And remember, we still have to sink this thing in real water.’

‘How could I forget?’

The ‘day ride’ functioned flawlessly. But this is just the ‘appetizer’ that will cycle during the daytime and early evening hours to make the numbers work. Come ten o’clock and midnight we’ll serve the ‘main course’ with EMV’s escaping the sinking ship and kicking up a huge spray as they swoosh down into the ride basin in front of thousands of onlookers.

‘Good to go?’ I say.

Tap-tap-tap goes Lewis’s fingers on the screen. ‘Done and done.’

‘We’ll show Fat Mary, won’t we?’

‘Honey, we’ll just have to see about that.’

Ocean liners are impossible to comprehend as a whole unless your vantage point is a couple hundred feet in the air. Any nearer and they start turning into steel-sided skyscrapers so high you get a crick in your neck looking up, which is what I get later that day, after measuring the relationship of the
Titanic’s
towering bow and her seemingly endless hull to the massive, gunnite-sprayed canyon, still empty of water, inside of which she rests, currently a ‘dry-dock queen.’

Unseen at ground level, a massive, machined-steel pivot mechanism penetrates the ship’s hull just aft of amidships. Upon this rotation point, during phase one, the
Titanic
settles by the bow into millions of gallons of water. Phase two involves the actual sinking, where the ship tilts more sharply downward and settles lower in the water, thanks to the pivot jack moving down along a geared track, literally pulling the ship along with it. Otherwise the pressure hull’s positive buoyancy would keep the ship afloat like a cork.