Coffe fantasia: Innocence rules the day

This is part two of our trip to the Parque Nacionál del Café:

12:31 p.m. June 28 – They call what we’re about to watch the Show de Orquídeas. It’s a theater in the round, with we audience members sitting on planked seats that rise back from the stage in four equal sections. The room is dark, but we can make out shapes (are they smiling?) that line the ceiling, and where the stage should be more shapes loom … a bit, yes, menacingly.

This is, finally, where the kids come in. Because there are several of them in our audience of 150 or so, ranging in age from preteens to those still riding in strollers. It’s the preteens whom I watch, especially a number of young girls who sit in the first row to my right, laughing and giggling with what I assume is excitement.

Sara, Oscar’s daughter, is here, and she seems pleased, even if she doesn’t seem quite as giddy as her peers.

“How many times have you been to the park?” I ask her in Spanish.

She pauses, as if counting in her head, then answers: “Ventidos.” Twenty-two. “And how many times have you seen this show?” Every time she’s come, she says, so, again, “Ventidos.” Du-uh.

That’s when Oscar explains just how big a deal the Parque Nacional del Café is to many Colombianos, especially those who live in Cali. It’s a place where they can enjoy a sense of their history and pride in their coffee culture – and let their children ride trains and horses and roller coasters (called Montaña Rusa here) and even see a show such as the one that’s about to begin.

We’d tried to get into the 11:30 Show del Café, but the line extended from the entrance, through a dozen or so twisty lane separators out through the makeshift plaza and then down a path that seemed to have no end. So Maribel took us here instead, telling us that we could return for the 3 p.m. extravaganza.

And then the lights go down. And after a voiceover warning us not to take any flash photos, the story begins. If I understood Spanish well enough, I might be able to relate what happens with unerring specificity. But I don’t. From what I can tell, though, the general story line has to do with a bunch of singing, happy flowers – orchids, I believe – who get threatened by another, meaner, bunch of witchy-looking kinds of flowers (don’t ask me what kind because I’m no botanist).

But just when it begins to look bad for everyone, good finds a way to prevail. The bad spirit is defeated, and all the flowers – the happy orchids, their now-happy ugly cousins – are united in a kind of floral chorus, which leads all of them to sing in unison that life is worth living, yes it truly is.

And here, for someone such as me who has spent time as a child, a young adult and as a parent in similar kinds of U.S. theme parks, is where cynicism raises its ugly head. It would be so easy to sit here open-mouthed, aghast at the amount of time and money that has been spent to create such a simple-minded flight of fantasy. I won’t deny it: I do and feel exactly that.

But then I notice the children. I see how, one by one, those little girls on my right creep down so that they can get a better look at the most beautiful (plastic and metal) orchid of them all. And even in this darkened theater I notice the looks on their faces, the excitement that is blended with a sense of wonder and Disneyfied rapture.

And I think of just how short life is, especially childhood. And I think of just how fast life comes at you, how hard it can slap you in the face and demand that you grow up. And I think of how we all, each in our own way, create our own emotional defenses to get through the hard parts. And I think of how those defenses get in the way of our recalling just how much fun childhood can be.

And not for the first time I think that children should be allowed to retain their innocence as long as possible. That they shouldn’t have to emerge from their cocoons of simple joy until they are dragged kicking and screaming into a world of taxes and sex and jobs and wars and drugs and divorce and everything else that adults find themselves coping with.

And it is with that feeling that I get through the rest of the day, the overpriced lunch in an outdoor café (where Sara eats chicken “nuggets,” which she pronounces “noogets”), the train ride that takes us around the parameters of the park, past the unaccountable giant ship-shaped balloon with the name “Titanic” emblazoned on the side, through meeting at least three different mustached men impersonating the one-and-only Juan Valdez.

It accompanies me across the suspension bridge that moves so much with pedestrian traffic that I take to calling it “the borracho bridge” (the drunk bridge), past bamboo groves and so many coffee plants that I lose count, past various stations where good-looking young men and women recite the stages of coffee production.

It stays with me, getting me through the 3 p.m. Show del Café, where a cast of supremely talented dancers, singers and acrobats take us through a Cirque du Soleil type of show that makes the history of the Colombian coffee seem like one long fiesta of happy workers either picking coffee or making love – sometimes even at the same time.

And it sticks around while I stand in line with Megan, Marilyn, Holly and Maribel to take the sky tram from the valley to the heights where, at the end of the day, we’re supposed to meet before we head home. We do take the tram, the four-minute, 27-second ride making the near-hour-long wait almost worth it.

At the end, still buoyed by that sense of child-like compassion (along with the bottle of Poker beer that Megan and I, handing it back and forth, chugged with only a mild sense of desperation), I join the others on the bus.

On the trek home, in the rain and dark, hemmed in on all side by hulking buses and trucks that flash past in both directions, I notice the occasional streaks of lightning that cut through the night sky.

What beauty, I think. What awesome beauty.