A Voyage Outside the Box
By: Cara Walker
Photos: Hanna Curlette
(Audio Enhanced Page)
The sound of a bell echoes down the silent streets of Isla Negra as passengers wait on the sidewalk for the bright orange door to creak open – a signal that it is time to board the ship.
But this ship, which sits in the middle of a tightly packed neighborhood where the Captain and his family live, doesn’t sail the waters of the nearby Pacific Ocean. Instead, as each passenger crosses across a wobbly rope bridge into La Nave Imaginaria, Captain Rodrigo Parra appears to guide them as they set sail for a journey into their own imaginations.
At the Captain’s orders, all personal belongings are piled into the corner of the dimly lit room –he allows no photographs to be taken inside.
“Take this moment only for you,” he says. “It’s a secret only for passengers.”
With a stomp of his foot and a loud cry of “Muevete!” (“Move on”), he ushers everyone to climb down a makeshift ladder into a damp underground room.
After he slams the hinged door shut behind them, passengers must find their way out of the dark room with only the light streaming in from an overhead grate.
“You cannot come out the way you came in,” the Captain says, as he ominously pulls chains across the floor above and sprays water down through the opening.
Wooden planks disguised on the wall lead up to a trap door that opens back up into the main room, glowing with the reflection of the green, yellow and orange glass pieces embedded in the walls of the ship. Though the exercise is unconventional, the Captain says the room is meant to represent the fears that develop as people grow older. The most obvious way out is not always the best way, but facing fears is the only way to escape.
The Captain, who then leads his passengers up ropes and ladders to go head first down a smooth, wooden slide on the next floor, says the key to escaping these fears is to remember what it was like to be a child. He sees these tours as a way to teach his passengers to grow by helping them return to a state of childlike whimsy.
After heading down the slide past walls adorned with children’s drawings and old photographs ofthe Captain’s family, each visitor is coaxed back into a time of childhood pleasures.
“You grow smaller when you become an adult,” he says. “Now you’re more serious, more subdued…You don’t remember the last time you went down a slide.”
As he gathers his passengers to sit and swing their legs over the side of the second story loft – a very important part of the journey, he says – the Captain orders everyone to close their eyes.
“Go back to the time when you were a child, when you played all day every day. Did you climb trees when you were a kid?” he says. “Do you remember when you looked down and discovered things for the first time? And you trusted and believed in everything?”
Leaning far over the edge as he holds on to the rafters, he tells the story of how he rediscovered this feeling 16 years ago as he built the ship out of recycled and found materials. After working for an architecture company in Santiago, he says he got tired of living the same day over and over again. He decided to create La Nave Imaginaria and offer the tours as a way to open minds to his new found happiness, urging them to escape “the box” he says the world puts people in through their everyday routines.
“What made me want to leave normal life was every day having to run, run, run, and nothing was ever enough,” the Captain says. “It just built up and built up and built up, until one day it was too much that I had to pay, pay, pay, and it was too much. I decided to unplug myself, to disconnect from everything.”
Although he says that rediscovering his dreams through the ship made him happy again, the Captain has faced many trials since making this decision.
As his passengers stand on the edge of the roof near the crow’s nest with their arms spread wide and their head tilted back, the Captain sounds a conch shell that rings throughout the outside air, across the quiet neighborhood.
“The neighbors don’t understand,” he says. “They think I am a devil man. The people come out of here swimming in happiness, but [the neighbors] call it witchcraft.”
The Captain doesn’t shy away from the controversy. While they stand atop the home-turned-ship, he orders his visitors to scream toward the neighboring homes. Pretend to be afraid, he says. Later, the passengers stand in the yard – what would be water if it were really a ship – and pretend to swim. An old man stands across the street, mouth agape, watching the adults doggie paddle and pretend to float.
Since its creation, La Nave Imaginaria has been accused of being too bizarre, too creative by the city, and the Captain says there was no law that could protect the boat.
“We are taught to be afraid of things that are different,” the Captain says.
Aside from the Pablo Neruda house, a nearby tourist attraction which was once home to the famous Chilean poet, Isla Negra, a small village in the region of El Quisco, is merely a small fishing town 68 miles from the capital of Santiago. The massive sails of La Nave Imaginaria cut the skyline, towering above the tiny homes surrounding it, and the brightly painted exterior, although full of originality, does seem a little out of place down the dirt road of Avenida Central.
“We are taught to be afraid of things that are different.”
But in 2011, after the city sent an official order for demolition, the Captain says three sailors from the Chilean Armada came to inspect the ship. He says he remembers looking down from a porthole as they called up, “Captain! Permission to board?”
He says one officer, who hadn’t traveled in a long time, began to cry as he climbed to the top of the ship, and declared, “This is a ship, not a house.”
On October 18, 2011, the Chilean Armada granted La Nave Imaginaria permission to launch as a symbolic gesture, assigning it the number RBO-004 and officially recognizing it as a ship. The declaration was so important that the lawsuit to destroy the ship was dropped.
The Captain says that many others who come aboard the ship are affected in the same way that the sailors were, with about 120 passengers coming through each day in the summer. The voyage is free, and the Captain runs the ship completely by solar power and donations.
“What we want to promote here at La Nave Imaginaria is a kind of education,” he says.“Pedagogically, it’s very attractive for the kids, but for the adult, it’s an emotional shock that’s produced. The adult can’t remember the last time he or she played.”
While his passengers slide headfirst once again down the slide on the way out of the ship, the Captain yells for them to make a sliding train, stopping some passengers mid-slide while the others catch up.
“Different people from different countries, different worlds, different planets have come to La Nave Imaginaria, and the common language is play,” he says.
Captain Rodrigo Parra began building La NaveImaginaria in 1999 after leaving his job in architecture and rediscovering his happiness byhelping his passengers live “outside of the box.” He lives aboard the ship with his family – twoof his sons and their mother, Monja “Tinkerbell” Eigner.
Although this ship, with its engine made out of toys and its foundation firmly on the ground, will never set sail on real waters, the Captain says traveling by imagination is something his passengers must remember as they leave.
“Imagination can go a longer way [than sailing the seas],” he says. “Go beyond the box. Imagination is stronger.”