Shamu Saved My Life. Or Did He?
It’s one of the clearest memories of my childhood: My dad changed our plans so we could go to SeaWorld, and then our original flight crashed. But why am I the only one who remembers it that way?
There’s this episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Heavyweight, in which actor and comedian Rob Corddry remembers breaking his arm when he was a kid — only no one else in his family has any recollection of it happening. Host Jonathan Goldstein interviews Rob and his family extensively, as he’s wont to do, in an effort to try to get to the truth. I’m not going to spoil the ending, but the highlight of the episode is the journey you go on with Rob’s family members while they try to piece together what really happened, everyone with different memories completely. I was reminded of this episode while reading this poignant essay by Angie Chuang, the latest in our Creative Nonfiction Classics series, about the things we remember and why. For both Rob and Angie, they hung on to their versions of the truth for the same reason: because they mattered to them. Angie’s powerful essay is also about an accidental plane crash in which many lives were lost — we would be remiss not to acknowledge that this of course brings to mind the recent plane crashes in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, in which nearly 75 people died. Our hearts go out to the families who lost loved ones on those recent flights and on Flight 759 all those years ago. —Jesse Sposato, executive editor
This is how I remember it:
My father had taken us along on a business trip to Florida that summer, and we had stayed on through the Fourth of July weekend, driving a rental car down the length of the state. In five days, we had traveled from Disney World in Orlando to the beaches of Miami to Key West, where all four of us—my father, my mother, my brother, and I—posed for a snapshot in front of a sign proclaiming that we were at the southernmost point in the United States. We were supposed to drive back up to Miami by the end of the week, drop off our rental car, and leave on a Pan Am flight on Friday, July 9.
But billboards and local television along the way had relentlessly advertised Shamu and SeaWorld in Orlando, which we had skipped in favor of Disney World. But as I watched the friendly looking killer whale jump up to grab fish from his trainer’s hands and slide onto a ramp, wagging his tail as members of the audience petted his large, slick head, I knew I had to go. I enlisted my five-year-old brother, Kelley, into the effort, and soon we were whining a daily mantra: “We want to go to Seeeea World! We want to see Shamuuu!”
Uncharacteristically, my father relented. “It wouldn’t hurt to stay through the weekend,” he said to Mom. Kelley and I looked at each other in disbelief. It was unusual for my strong-willed, mercurial father to change his plans based on our whims. I didn’t want to openly celebrate or thank him, for fear that I might break the spell. Kelley kept quiet, too, as if we were holding our collective breath. From the phone in our Miami hotel room, Dad extended our car rental and changed our outbound flight from Miami to another Pan Am flight a couple of days later out of Orlando. We drove from Miami to Orlando on the day of our originally scheduled flight and spent the night there. The next morning, Kelley and I were extra quiet as we got ready.
“Are we really going to see Shamu?” my brother whispered to me.
I took a deep breath, to muster the courage to ask Mom and Dad.
But they were staring at the television news, murmuring to each other. Images of emergency crews among charred, smoking wreckage—unrecognizable as an airplane, were it not for the blue and white Pan Am logo discernible on a broken piece of the tail—filled the screen. Diagrams of a plane taking off used giant red arrows to show how wind shear had forced the aircraft back down to the ground, into houses. There were no survivors on board. A baby girl was found alive under all the rubble of the homes. The flight had originated from Miami. Its destination: Las Vegas, where we would have caught a connection to San Francisco, our home.
“Miami—we were supposed to be on that flight,” I heard my dad say to my mom in Mandarin. “We’re very lucky.”
I stared at the television. I wasn’t thinking about Shamu anymore. “What about the baby?” I asked desperately. I pictured a lone, intact crib in the middle of the charred wreckage, a little baby in pink footie pajamas, squalling. “Who will take care of her?”
My parents looked at me, surprised I was listening.
“We’re very lucky,” my mom repeated, eyes intent on me. That was all they said. My brother stayed quiet, too young to understand.
“Shamu saved us,” I whispered to him. “But I don’t know what’s going to happen to that baby.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Narratively to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.