This was the last time Jonah eloped on us. It happened in the worst possible place you can imagine as a special needs parent.
Disneyland.
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[October 4, 2019]
I casually walked around the corner of a play area expecting to see my 5-year-old son Jonah at the bottom of the slide. It was a big slide. A covered slide. It spanned two different levels of this play structure and was made to look like a redwood log.
Jonah had gone down this slide dozens of times and after each time, he would come back up the stairs to go down again. He had been doing this for probably half an hour.
But that didn’t happen this time.
This time, he was not there.
I rushed down the stairs to the landing, looking every direction but I did not see him.
Why could I not see him?
I started to panic. How was he not HERE? Where could he have gone? My mind reeled thinking about the implications. There were people everywhere.
Out of instinct, I called his name, trying to keep the panic out of my voice, but I knew the gesture was futile. Jonah wouldn’t answer even if he could hear me.
We were at Disney’s California Adventure Park, part of the vast Disney Complex in Anaheim, California, with THOUSANDS of other park-goers and my autistic 5 year old who was virtually non-verbal was GONE.
He had eloped… AGAIN… At the WORST place I could possibly imagine.
This is a nightmare scenario, one that has been all too real for so many special needs parents. You see, Jonah, being nonverbal, cannot inform park attendants or other park-goers that he is lost. And even if he could, I’m not sure that he would.
For Jonah, it would just be an “adventure.”
The kid is a RUNNER. By 5 years old, Jonah had gone on 6-mile hikes with us without any issues. On flat ground, he could probably make it a mile in just over 10 minutes.
It was only about a quarter-mile to the park exit.
The good news was that we were at the Redwood Creek trail, which only has two entrance/exits.
The bad news was that Jonah is also a climber, and deterring walls to keep people in/out would be merely obstacles to him if he had a mind to climb them.
We knew Jonah getting away from us was a possibility when we came to Disneyland. We were not entirely unprepared. In addition to me and my wife, we brought both my parents as extra sets of eyes and extra bodies in case we needed to split the boys up for any reason.
Which is exactly what had happened. Jonny did not want to play at Redwood Creek, so Grammy and Papa took him. Mama and I stayed with Jonah.
Two sets of eyes really ought to be enough to keep an eye on the little guy. Except, the slide at Redwood Creek was monitored by a “cast member” to make sure the kids were safe, were behaving properly, and took turns correctly.
“Turn-taking” has always been something of which Jonah has not been great.
Sometimes it only takes one person to remind him to “wait.” Other times, it might take more than one person to FORCE him to do so.
Most the time, there was nobody waiting in line so Jonah would get into the habit of just “not waiting.” But when the slide would occasionally get busy, Jonah would try to “cut the line/jump the queue.”
So Mama and I had to wait with him until it was his turn.
There was a visual line of sight from the top to the bottom of the slide, but in order to walk to the bottom, you had to go around the structure and down a set of stairs, where you temporarily lost that line of sight.
Jonah could conceivably sprint away or he could try to climb back up the slide while we were on the stairs and we wouldn’t know it.
All I knew is that Jonah was not at the bottom when I looked for him.
He was outside my care… AGAIN.
This was the fourth time he had eloped. Two of the times, I didn’t even know he was gone, before a stranger or a neighbor brought him back.
The first time, he had kicked out a fence board in our back yard. The second time, he had sprinted away in a crowded stadium. The third time had occurred only a week earlier when a stranger had brought Jonah back from a busy McDonalds parking lot.
And so while I dreaded this “feeling” of unbridled, sheer panic, it was not entirely unfamiliar to me, and I had learned from my mistakes.
I had purchased a wearable GPS tracking device from a company called AngelSense and Jonah was wearing it.
It had just become our lifeline.
As I opened the Angelsense app on my phone, I became conflicted. Every parenting instinct in me told me I needed to RUN. I needed to look for Jonah with my own two eyes. I needed to scour high and low, block the exits, and start asking EVERYONE nearby if they had seen a little boy with a black shirt that aptly read “autistic ninja.”
I was on the clock and every second counted. If Jonah had a mind to leave the Disney park and took off at a dead sprint, he would be at the exit in under 3 minutes.
But I stood there, waiting for the Angelsense app to connect to the internet. It is a very surreal feeling when the WiFi you were just cursing for being so slow as you tried to reserve a “fast pass” for a ride at the happiest place on earth now held your son’s life in its proverbial snail-paced, molasses hands
When I finally pulled up Jonah’s location, it showed that Jojo was somewhere on a “big green blob.”
😒
That must have been the Disneyland resort. Jonah was somewhere at Disneyland. Great.
I zoomed in, but it did not give me many more details other than that and I had a feeling it was dependent on my internet connection because his location seemed to move erratically (it could just as easily have been Jonah moving erratically I guess).
One of the perks of an Angelsense tracker is that you can also “hear” what is around it and speak through it. But it was so loud inside the theme park, you couldn’t really decipher anything on either end.
It would have been helpful to see my location on the app in relation to Jonah’s, and I’m sure Angelsense has that capability, but as a default, my location was not shown, so I could not decipher which direction I should look. And frankly, I did not have the time to figure it out.
I had to find my son.
So I put away my phone and started looking the old-fashioned way.
I had to think like Jonah.
The Redwood Creek trail was probably his favorite spot in all of Disneyland so the probability of him leaving it entirely was very low.
We ran to the trail entrance. I started scouring one side. Mama scoured the other.
We went methodically, mentally weighing the odds and probabilities of Jonah’s whereabouts, blocking out the slim but VERY REAL possibility that Jonah had completely left this area and was now somewhere “out there.” Somewhere on this 72-acre property amongst thousands of people, lost and completely unable to verbally communicate with anyone.
I don’t actually know how much time passed. It could have been a couple minutes or an hour. I kept praying and reassuring myself under my breath that “He couldn’t have gone far. He couldn’t have gone far. He couldn’t have gone far.”
It was Mama who finally found him.
Jonah was standing at the top of a 4-foot retaining wall, on the other side of the Redwood Trail park, a big grin on his face.
He was fine.
We determined that Jonah had gone down the slide and then immediately sprinted under an adjacent “cast members only” barrier.
We watched (Mama at the top of the slide, me at the bottom) as he tried to sprint away under it again, the very next time.
I didn’t let him. The little bugger!
The rest of our time at Disneyland was thankfully (comparatively) uneventful. Jonah spent most of his time either in the resort pool/waterslide, at the Toy Story ride, or right there at the Redwood Creek Trail. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
It was a very special trip, particularly for me.
In addition to it being my kids’ first visit, it was also my first ever trip to Disneyland and I got to see so many things I’ve always wanted to see.
But it wasn’t the shows, or the rides or the Disney attractions.
I got to see Jonny overcome his fear of rollercoasters. I got to see Jonah having the time of his life, discovering literally a whole new world. I got to see my kids spending quality time with my parents.
It was fun. It was with family. And it was full of only fond memories.
And though losing Jonah at Disneyland is something I will never forget…
Our 2019 family vacation is something I will always remember with fondness.
For me, being at Disneyland, in a time when we could still gather without worry, being with the people I loved the most…
…in that time, at that place, with those people, for me it truly was the “Happiest Place on Earth.”
#autism #elopement