by David Smith
“Man! Guys, you see that?!” Jimmy shouted, watching the smug look on the canoe operator as the slender boat continued past them. The muscular arm of the ride operator came up and tipped his coonskin cap in the boy’s direction before reaching forward to take two long strokes with his paddle, making the canoe propel forward a little faster.
“That was SO COOL!” Mark added to Jimmy’s enthusiasm. “Blain, did you see that?!”
Blain was still watching the ride operator’s back as the canoe was now moving towards the next bend in the river.
Jimmy looked back at Blain and saw a strange gleam in Blain’s eyes. “Wasn’t that totally awesome?” Jimmy asked Blain.
Nodding slowly, the only words that came out of Blain’s mouth were, “Someday, Jimmy...”
Jimmy and Mark looked at Blain together.
“Someday, guys,” Blain repeated, still staring out at the wake of the canoe that had passed the trio of friends. He then added, pointing his lemonade in the direction he was looking, “That’ll be me.”
“Perhaps he knows too much. He’s seen the cursed treasure. You know where it be hidden. You may not survive to pass this way again. Dead men tell no tales…”
Original Transition Tunnel Narration,
Pirates of the Caribbean
CHAPTER 2
Hidden Secrets
Wednesday, June 15th, 1966
1:15pm
Thirty-one years before Blain, Jimmy and Mark were hunting for each other and drinking lemonade on Tom Sawyer Island, landscaper Nathan Duncan was finishing the last of his eight-hour shift working at Disneyland, pulling weeds in the exact same area in front of the fort where Blain would eventually tag Jimmy. The surrounding trees were much smaller and less dense as they would be decades later but the weeds would always be present. A number of guests were strolling along the gravel trails; some said hello to Nathan and he would nod and smile a gestured hello back.
At the moment, Nathan couldn’t possibly anticipate nor imagine the changes that would take place on the little island or fathom even the changes that would take place over the next few months, years or even decades, there at Disneyland. Soon, there would be events that would help dictate the course of other events; events that would change the course of history for some. Of those events, Nathan Duncan would be responsible for two specific events that would change the lives of many people. Paradoxically, those events would have a most significant impact on people decades later. And, impossible as it may have seemed, his actions would also have an impact on the past.
His day was almost over but his thinking was in full gear. Earlier that morning, Nathan witnessed something important, something amazing. Nathan had more than just weeds on his mind that afternoon. He was going to change HIS history.
Unfortunately for Nathan, his history was going to be short-lived; he was going to die in six months.
Having been hired as a landscaper at Disneyland almost four months prior, Nathan Duncan felt he was already a seasoned employee, or “cast member” as the Magic Kingdom employees were referred to.
Because Walt Disney wanted his guests at Disneyland to have the same feeling as seeing a theatrical movie, (albeit as active participants in experiencing the “magic” at Disneyland as opposed to sitting in a darkened theater), not only were employees called “cast members,” but the areas of the Park where the rides, shows, shops and restaurants were, were labeled, “onstage.” And just like a theater, behind those onstage areas was called, “backstage.” Indeed, even the people visiting the Park were not ‘tourists’ but referred to as ‘guests.’
Nathan Duncan was as nondescript a cast member as one could be. Within the all-white uniform, all-white Disneyland-logo baseball cap, and a beat up pair of no-name leather work shoes, Nathan Duncan wore perhaps one of the few costumes which were actually designed to not attract any attention. It was a toss-up between the similar all-white janitorial uniform and those in landscaping for the least memorable costume. The only time he may have stood out is when his pants or shirt got a dirt smudge or grass stain on them.
Standing at a nonthreatening five-foot six, Duncan’s slender build and slight slouch would score him even lower on the peculiar-meter of individual significance, contributing even less to his overall appearance. Nathan’s hair looked as if he trimmed it regularly with regular scissors without the aid of a mirror…which is exactly what Nathan did every other week. An uneven contour of trimmed hair bordered each ear and a slightly off-center widow’s peak pointed down to the left of his nose which, due to a deviated septum, angled to his right side. Because all men who worked at Disneyland could not have hair longer than their shirt collar or over their ears, Nathan maintained his standard operating appearance by hand rather than have one of the four on-site barbers do it. Saving the paltry seventy-five cents charged by the Disneyland Barbers was incentive enough for Nathan. Having no sense of style or personal appearance didn’t hurt this desire for him to cut his own hair.
It was earlier that morning that Nathan made his significant discovery.
Moving about with ease and a sense of belonging during the early morning hours and within the empty Park helped contribute to a slight degree a level of confidence for Nathan. Because most of his shifts began well before the Park opened to the public, Nathan experienced what few got to enjoy: being inside Disneyland when no one else was there. Except for the small shift of cast members who, like him, worked to ready the Park each morning—and most of those usually worked behind the scenes maintaining rides, shows, or restaurants—the Park took on an eerie, ghost town feel at 5:30am; it was like being in a city after some catastrophic plague had wiped out all human existence. Yet, even within all that eerie emptiness, Nathan could also feel electricity in the air. There was a palpable feeling of expectancy and anticipation within the empty Park, that in just a few hours, thousands of excited and happy guests would pass through the Main Gate, each bringing with them a certain level eagerness, of pending adventure.
It was easy to envision the empty rides, facades, and streets like an empty movie lot—which, in essence, was exactly what they were. Even the scaled-back Matterhorn Mountain seemed to Nathan as nothing more than a huge movie prop, its bobsleds sitting quiet on the tubular steel track, each lined up at the loading zone as if beckoning imaginary riders. Inside the detailed mountain—with its snow-covered peak, scaled-back trees and realistic granite facade—steel beams crisscrossed the interior like a giant Erector Set; again, reminding both riders and workers alike that the mountain was man-made and only made to look like a real mountain on the outside. It would be another fifteen years before the interior of Matterhorn Mountain at Disneyland would be finished, eventually hiding the superstructure from riders.
The Skyway buckets above, suspended high up on the thick cable that stretched from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland, hung like hangman’s nooses, dangling empty in the slight morning breeze. Everything about the park reminded Nathan of the trip he took with his family when he was ten to the Bodie Ghost Town in Mono County, California, just east of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Looking in the windows of that true ghost town, Nathan remembered seeing the interior of those buildings looking much like they did during the gold-rush days…except instead of being filled with people they were now occupied only with dusty relics of those days-gone-by.
That is how Disneyland felt at five in the morning. By nine o’clock every morning, that would all change, of course; daily, the Park would go from proverbial ghost-town to boom-town with tens of thousands of guests entering the Main Gate.
Starting his shift at five in the morning, Nathan arrived at the Landscaping Office at 5:20am after changing into his landscaping uniform. Just inside the office door, there was a plywood wall where the landscaping crew clipboards were hung; Nathan pulled his clipboard off its hook and started looking over his work list. His clipboard was one of eight and it bore his name which was printed across the metal spring-loaded clip on a strip of white tape. These clipbo
ards, usually with several pages each, were the daily “to do” lists for the various landscaping crew members that were responsible for maintaining the beauty of Disneyland…as it pertained to plants, trees, shrubs, grass, sprinklers, planters and other landscaping issues. These lists were, in turn, prepared by the Landscaping Supervisor, Willie Riggio, who had his own set of checklists that he generated each day by going through the Park each previous morning and again in the early afternoon. Unlike the tens of thousands of guests who looked at everything either with appreciation, awe of perfection or, for some, just plain indifference, Willie Riggio looked at everything with an opposite perception: what needed attention, what was dying, what was out of place, and what was missing…Riggio’s eyes were focused on the imperfection, wherever he could find it.
The first ‘to do’ item for Nathan on this early Wednesday morning was to prune back the tallest trees in the Park behind the Fire Station on Main Street. On the page next to the line describing the work needing to be done, there were several columns on the right side of the sheet. In the column headed, “Equipment” the letters CP was printed in the space next to Nathan’s instructions for the tree-trimming. A smile came over Nathan’s face as he knew he would be able to use the new “Cherry Picker,” a hydraulic, remote-controlled basket that could be raised nearly fifty feet by the push of a small lever within the basket.
Having used the CP a couple times in recent weeks since the Park purchased the machine, Nathan had enjoyed the view that the picker provided, looking out over the tops of the buildings on Main Street; when fully extended the basket was actually tall enough to see across almost the entire Park. But the vehicle also provided a sense of domination for Nathan, the chance to be higher than nearly anyone or anything else in the Park—except three things: the one hundred and forty-seven foot tall Matterhorn, the top of the tallest Sleeping Beauty spire, or the tops of the Skyway towers.
Sticking a pencil behind his ear, Nathan took off to the back of the Landscaping office where the cherry picker was parked.
Working in—and on—trees, Nathan often reminisced, remembering himself as a youngster. Trees, in one way or another, seemed to always be in the Duncan family history. When Nathan was twelve, his father, Paul, who was an inspector at the Sunkist Packing House in Santa Ana for ten years, was fired from his job after coming into work with alcohol on his breath—at least that was the story that Nathan had heard.
As a kid in the late thirties and especially during the depression, Paul Duncan, Nathan’s father, worked the many orange groves in Anaheim, Orange, and Garden Grove, picking oranges that would eventually be purchased by Sunkist or various markets and produce stores in the area. Most fields offered either fifty cents an hour to pick oranges or ten cents a sling, with a sling of oranges holding about eighty oranges. Paul always took the sling rate since he could average eight to ten full slings per hour, nearly doubling the hourly rate that was offered.
Not long after Paul Duncan was fired from Sunkist, Nathan’s mother, Elizabeth, left Paul Duncan. Nathan was too young to understand but while Paul Duncan was an abusive husband and father, it took his firing from the Sunkist Packing Plant and the aftermath of that event for Elizabeth to finally leave him.
When it came to trees, it would be father-like-son, for Nathan, who also started out as an orange picker when he was a young boy; in the mid 1950’s, the pay was slightly better, with wages on an hourly rate set at $1.25 and twenty-five cents per sling. Since Nathan didn’t have his father’s stamina, strength or drive to want to be paid by the sling, Nathan would only pick the minimum lot of oranges to make the hourly wage.
Trees would play an important part again for Paul Duncan not long after he was asked to leave his job at Sunkist. After two months of taking handouts from the local Catholic Church, Nathan’s father, on a whim, started up a tree cutting business. In his garage, Paul Duncan repaired a used Hoffco chainsaw his brother Bill had given him and got a flatbed ’51 Ford pickup truck that he had traded his ’52 Ford sedan straight across for. The timing couldn’t have been better for Paul Duncan when the sudden growth of Orange County and the post-war population boom established a need for trees to be removed by the thousands to make way for expanding freeways, housing tracks and retail and commercial properties that were springing up all over the county.
Unfortunately for Nathan and his younger sister Evelyn, Paul Duncan found that he could buy more beer—and better beer—when money was more abundant. While Elizabeth and Paul shared joint custody of Nathan and Evelyn after their divorce, Nathan spent most of his time with his father working each summer, cutting the various types of indigenous trees growing in southern California. Occasionally after school, and especially on weekends, Nathan would be recruited to work with his dad. Sometimes they worked together and sometimes Paul would hire a few day-laborers, depending on the size of the job.
When Nathan was eighteen, his father was killed in a freak tree-cutting accident that left an impression on Nathan. It would be an event that would haunt Nathan for the remaining few years of his own life.
Working on the trees here at Disneyland was a bit nostalgic for Nathan. One of the reasons he was hired was because of his extensive experience cutting trees with his father. He learned to use different saws when he was thirteen, and, he had worked with several partners later using the large two-man chainsaws that were the means to making speedy cuts in bringing down larger trees. But now, instead of his “boss” swearing at him if he did something wrong, as Nathan’s father often did while on a job, Nathan now enjoyed a more stress-free working environment at Disneyland and a more understanding—if not more patient—supervisor.
Willie Riggio, Nathan’s Landscaping Supervisor, worked the early mornings to oversee his landscaping staff as they prepared the Park before opening each day. Riggio worked until noon most days so he could spend part of each morning without guests in the Park and, conversely, spend part of the mornings with them. Riggio believed he saw things differently when guests were in the park than when it was empty. From his daily observations, and occasional suggestions from area supervisors, managers and even from Walt Disney himself, Riggio generated the daily lists and then delegated the work to his crew in relatively impartial distribution or within the specialized training each member of his crew had.
Riggio was only twenty-seven years of age with a degree in Horticulture and a minor in Landscape Design from U.C Davis in northern California. He was younger than four-fifths of his landscaping staff but his likable demeanor and organizational skills allowed a real sense of camaraderie among the entire landscaping crew. It was Riggio who knew all of his men—and two women—on his staff not only by name but he had an uncanny memory for remembering birthdays, names of his crew member’s children, and even what their spouses or girlfriends names were.
For Nathan, coming to work at Disneyland each day was actually pleasurable, as much as manual labor could be. While the work itself was sometimes laborious, he found that working alone was therapeutic for a guy like him. With virtually no friends, except his sister Evelyn, Nathan did not mingle, mix, or associate with anyone before, during or after his scheduled shifts at Disneyland. Nathan did a lot of things that were not typical. For one thing, Nathan always took the bus to work. The stop just down the street from his Anaheim rented room was a route that took him right to the bus stop in front of the main entrance of Disneyland, making it easy for him to commute. Perhaps because of his limited transportation means or that many of his co-workers only spoke limited English, Nathan didn’t hang out with anyone at work.
It was very rare—and, in reality, very difficult—for someone working at Disneyland to not have developed any friends there. In fact, perhaps the one thing that did make Nathan stand out was that he had not made one real friend while working at Disneyland.
Nathan’s father, Paul, died four years earlier when he was electrocuted cutting down eucalyptus trees next to some high voltage lines in the city of Santa Ana; the sixty-foot ta
ll tree fell in the wrong direction, taking with it several power lines and damaging the power pole. It had been later in the afternoon, after his typical lunch of ham sandwiches from the daily catering truck and several beers. Because it was a hot, humid day in July, it took two additional beers for Mr. Duncan to quench his thirst…which could have explained why he didn’t see that he had not correctly pre-notched the tall tree he was working on after lunch. In addition, the additional beers probably contributed to the fact that Paul, in his state of panic after the tree fell, couldn’t distinguish between the fallen branches and the broken power lines that were intermingled on the ground. In his haste to pull the tree out, Paul tried to pull several branches away from the now damaged power pole. Because he seldom used gloves in operating his newer Homelite Zip chainsaw, Paul Duncan absently began pulling branches out from the jumbled mess barehanded.
Twelve hundred volts passed from his bare hand, through his body, and then to the ground in a flash, the moment he grasped the large, brown cable. His heart stopped beating on the spot as a discharge of sparks ignited against his hand and feet when the electricity arced from his skin to the ground. If someone could interview a dead man, Paul Duncan would have mentioned that he had one of those moments when he saw himself starting to grab the live wire but could not redirect the nerve impulse controlling his muscles to stop.
No one saw what had happened for nearly thirty minutes. Working a half mile down a dirt road, by the time Nathan found his father among the fallen branches, it was too late. It was lucky Nathan noticed his father’s charred hand still holding the thick power line; had he touched Paul’s body, he too, probably would have been electrocuted.