Kumba, R.I.P.

J ohn Lennon once remarked that “before Elvis, there was nothing.” This was not literally true — as Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry, and others might well have seen fit to protest — and yet we all know what Lennon meant: Elvis was the sort of figure to whom one attaches “before” and “after” labels. He changed the game, and nothing has quite been the same ever since.

The same is true of Kumba, an iconic, industry-bending roller coaster, which closed yesterday after 33 years of operation. The United States had played host to some serious thrill rides prior to 1993, but, until Kumba opened, nobody had ever seen anything quite like that. Painted in red and turquoise and woven seamlessly into the palm-tree-strewn terrain of Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, Kumba was strikingly photogenic. (If your high school’s physics textbook had a roller coaster on its front cover, the chances of that roller coaster’s being Kumba were close to 100 percent.) Having benefited from the advent of computer-aided design, along with some well-timed breakthroughs in the fabrication of steel, Kumba was refreshingly smooth. And, thanks to its hollow, undamped box-spine track, which resonated with the vibration of its wheels, it was unusually loud. “Kumba,” Busch Gardens insisted, meant “roar” in Kikongo, and for nearly a third of a century, the attraction did precisely that. You could hear the thing from miles away.

As a nine-year-old roller coaster nut, I was transfixed from the start. Using my parents’ slow-as-syrup 28.8bps dial-up internet connection, I followed Kumba’s construction via locals in Tampa who went regularly to the park and uploaded their photographs to the web. As it grew, I became increasingly astonished. What was this marvelous thing, with its huge vertical loop wrapped neatly around the lift hill, and its interlocking corkscrews, and its cobra roll, and its exquisitely profiled zero-g element that, unlike the clunky attempts before it, rotated the train perfectly around the riders’ heartlines? Today, all of those things are standard on steel roller coasters. In the early 1990s, though, they were the preserve of cartoons — things you would see in a Bugs Bunny short before a matinee performance of a Disney movie, rather than in the real world.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an Englishman in possession of some vacation time must be in want of a trip to Florida. And so, once Kumba had opened, I could not have escaped it if I’d tried. By the summer of 1993, images of the ride stared out from every travel agent’s window in Cambridge, while my friends who had ridden it came home speaking of little else. My family had visited Orlando in 1992 — a year before Kumba opened — and, understandably I suppose, my parents were not thrilled by the prospect of returning immediately so that I could ride a roller coaster. Thus thwarted, I resolved to admire Kumba from afar. I printed out photographs and put them on my bedroom wall. I set a picture of it as the screensaver on the family computer. I even wrote to Busch Gardens to ask if they had any Kumba-related materials, and, to my amazement, they wrote back — all the way from America! — enclosing a T-shirt in my size and a glossy brochure that they had handed out to journalists on press day.

Eight years later, in the summer of 2001, I finally got to ride it. And, sure enough, it was every bit the masterpiece for which I had hoped. In my estimation, the most important feature on a roller coaster is pacing — the key question being whether the ride is relentless from start to finish, or whether it includes a bunch of poorly contrived dead zones that allow the rider to catch his breath — and, to my delight, Kumba’s pacing was superb. From element to element, it just never let up. With my dad, my uncle, and my sister in tow, I rode it over and over again, until the park closed. Dream: fulfilled.

Last year, rumors started to swirl that Kumba would soon close for good, and, having seen some similar rides suffer the same fate, I believed them. It turns out that the steel used in the construction of certain roller coasters has a shelf life, beyond which there are only two options: rebuild the ride from scratch, or scrap it. In Florida, where the air is humid and the amusement parks keep long hours and their attractions run year-round, that shelf life is shorter than elsewhere. Occasionally, as in the case of the Incredible Hulk and Nemesis, a roller coaster is deemed sufficiently important to an amusement park that it will spend the millions of dollars that are necessary to order a completely new version. This, though, is rare, and, as I correctly intuited, it was unlikely to happen for Kumba. If I wanted one last ride, it was now or never.

We went in April. To his disappointment, my seven-year-old wasn’t quite tall enough. But my nine-year-old was, and with the help of a friendly ride assistant, he and I took lap after lap, in the front and the back and the middle of the train, until, eventually, it was time to go and do something else. Happily, he loved it too. How peculiar, I thought, that I began my obsession with this ride when I was nine years old, and I am now saying goodbye to it with my own nine-year-old (now ten) by my side.

It is, in the grand scheme of things, not important — not compared with life and death and war and peace and the general flourishing of mankind. And yet, just as the passing of a famous actor or the closing of a beloved restaurant makes one feel that one has shifted a little in time, so the removal of Kumba removes me slightly from the world I have known. It is tempting to believe that the things we love are permanent fixtures on the landscape — especially when they are made of steel and concrete and bolts the size of baseballs. They’re not, though. The roar has fallen silent, and the world marches on.