Fishing at Disneyland
By Ryan Gossen
I began my morning vomiting grape juice into a blue plastic bowl in the back of the camper. Something was going around our four-person family and I don't remember if it started or ended with me, I just remember it was my turn on the day we got to Disneyland. It was hot, people were grumpy, and, as much as I hated throwing up, it was good to be the focus of sympathy.
There were no relatives in southern California, and prior to this, road trips were undertaken solely to visit family. We were here as the result of a multi-year lobbying effort by me and my kid sister. It was only four hours away, we argued. There were kids who traveled around the world to visit Disney. They showed them on TV arriving by monorail. Delirious winners of a game show or early stage cancer victims, etcetera.
Space Mountain, Disneyland
I understood there would be “characters” walking around. Mickey Mouse, for example, the REAL Mickey. Not the real Mickey, but not a picture on the TV. You could touch him. Like Santa at the mall. Meeting a fictitious person in real life can lift them out of the ocean of mythology, raising them as a texture on the smooth surface of imaginary worlds. But Santa was a person and Disney is a place. Physically entering a fictitious place is no longer about the possible reality of a character. It's about you, and your existence in the imaginary world. The storytelling escalates like an elaborate practical joke, as if the intention were to make children psychotic, or to preserve their natural psychosis.
My sister had been my ally in the push for Disneyland, but we wanted different things from it. My primary objective was Space Mountain. I had been told that most of my generation would probably be traveling to outer space at some point, but as far as I could tell, nothing about my childhood was preparing me for this. Space Mountain was the only thing I was aware of that attempted to simulate the emotional and physical stress of space travel. So it wasn't just about fun, it seemed prudent.
The Pirates of the Caribbean would prove to exceed my sister’s tolerance. She had to be held, screaming, as we made our way through the tunnel. I shook my head and struggled to accept her with her flaws, but it seemed obvious that unless she started making some very intentional changes, she would not be among the vanguard of humanity in our march to the stars.
My dad went with her to the teacups and I got in line for Space Mountain with my mom. My nausea was gone and I was declining snacks. I had reached a zen-like state of light-headed focus. The line was long and went through dark hallways with eerie futuristic lighting. I still had some basic unanswered questions about the ride, which were starting to feel more urgent.
I could see it was a building. Is it a domicile? A space port? A nuclear reactor? The Matterhorn Bobsleds ride was an easy concept to grasp, but what even was a Space Mountain? A mountain in space? Did Space Mountain send you into space, or was it about the space inside of Space Mountain? I was, as yet, unfamiliar with the kind of meeting where designers point at mood boards and talk about the feelings they can make a consumer have. They probably concluded that Space Mountain worked well as an evocative, if opaque, concept. To me, the incompatibility of the concepts Space and Mountain generated literal expectations that the ride must break basic metaphysical laws.
It bore some resemblance to The Hall of Doom in the opening montage of Super Friends: cartoon brutalist architecture rising from the swampland. Both buildings were sheer and stark, and stood for a transhumanist ideal. The Hall of Doom, obviously, stood for Evil. What did Space Mountain stand for? It looked like the big modernist sanctuary of the church we went to, but instead of crosses there were antennae.
Kids at school described the ride as an experience roughly equivalent to leaving the Earth and sliding around outer space in a state of transcendent terror. The boy who waited all day in that line would come back a man, or if not a man, then at least a boy who had the calm, hard eyes of someone who had seen some things. The TV advertisement involved a young couple being shot into space on a rollercoaster. They both wore turtlenecks and the young lady screamed, predictably. What affected me most was the radio banter with mission control, a launch sequence that felt very serious.
Standing in line, the prospect of being abruptly terrified into manhood by Space Mountain seemed like a lot of growing up all at once and I questioned the hubris of rushing into my own future via self-inflicted trauma. I persevered because of the sunk cost of the effort it took to get here and the hour already spent in line.
In fact, it was a very brief rollercoaster, in the dark with lights and stuff. Back on the street in the sun, I realized I may have read into it too much. This was not my first disillusionment. It was the same sort of let down I got from the mall Santa. You had to somehow play along with these things while not getting too far ahead of them, and if you should happen to lift the curtain during the performance, it's best to be polite and sit back down. Still, I was prepared for the letdown of Space Mountain, in a sense.
On the other hand, I really couldn't have been prepared for the fishing.
The line for Tom Sawyer Island went slowly around corners and through scenes designed to look like the woods. It was not possible to know what kind of time commitment was required until you were near the end. Finally, my father, my sister, and I were escorted to the fishing area under a canopy of trees or sculptures of trees by an employee dressed as Tom Sawyer whose job it was to equip us. Who was fishing? Just the two kids? Two rods loaded with colorful, implausible bait were handed to us, and we were guided to the edge of a pond writhing with catfish.
We were shoulder to shoulder with other parties, parents and children. It was chaos, but I was focused by the rod I held in my hands.
I had never been totally satisfied with fishing. It required patience, there were parts of the process I was not comfortable with, and it centered around an unseen world, sparsely populated by creatures whose behavior was totally inscrutable to me. There were tasks within tasks. First, there was tackle and line to be untangled from an accordion box. Then soft fingers negotiating menacing hooks, shining in the packaging or gnarly with the dried scum of whatever bait had been impaled there last. Then it was necessary to construct a combination of line, tackle, hook, and bait, and deploy it against the sort of fish believed to exist in a given body of water like a scientific experiment. I knew how to do all this. I was not good at it, and once I tossed the thing into the water, I lost all faith in its existence, and wondered what I was doing there at the edge of the lake.
Until I got a bite. If I got a bite, my world changed. In modern terms, the vibrations generated by a fish on the end of a line can deliver dopamine equivalent to a week’s worth of iPhone scrolling. People who are not used to it may simply go to pieces and have to pass the rod to someone else.
After we were handed the poles, we were instructed to cast immediately. In seconds, I felt the frenzied morse code of a medium-sized fish. I carefully lifted the thing out of the water. Before I could ask what came next, Tom Sawyer grabbed it.
I looked over to see the same thing happening to my sister. We were presented with a choice: One, throw the fish back in the pond to be caught minutes later by the next rube. Two, we could have them put on ice in the back and come get them later (for dinner or something). Three, and most expensive, we could take them over to the adjacent restaurant, where they would be cleaned and cooked for our consumption sometime later that day. Or we could, if we wished, just take our fish with us and walk away. After all, we caught it. It was ours.
Our fish were not especially charismatic, but they visibly struggled to obtain oxygen from air while we deliberated. It was a forced choice and there was no way to abstain. We had somehow made ourselves the arbiters of a life or death decision, like a Roman emperor overseeing an arena of gladiators, right here in the middle of Disneyland. What was it about fish that made their lives so inconsequential? Would they do this with a puppy? I tried to imagine an animal control attraction dreamed up by a psychotic Disney Imagineer.
Sending it back felt wrong, too. I was not a catch-and-release person. I liked my fish to stay caught, but my parents didn't hesitate. Tom Sawyer carried the fish by their lips back to their bizarre lives, and we were escorted to the exit and out onto the “street.”
It was a lot to process. What had been the point of that? To remove fishing from nature? I assumed that what the designers of the attraction intended was to package the moment of catching a fish, and that it, rather than the execution/pardon, was supposed to be the climax of the experience. The magic moment was cornered and placed in a box, the box was opened and the thing was gone. It was a magic trick where the magic itself disappeared.
The next day I felt much better, and kept my breakfast down. We went to Knott's Berry Farm, which I decided was superior to Disneyland. It lacked the utopian vision, world-class design, media integration, and playful reweaving of the fabric of reality. It was rides and decoration in exchange for money. I found a ride I liked, a basic eggbeater carnival ride where you sit in a pod in a circle of pods that spins with other circles of pods like a wheel within a wheel. There was hardly any line at all, and when the ride ended, I got off, exited the ride area, and ran back through the rope chutes to the front where they waved me through for another turn. I rode it over and over, and never got sick.
When I remember Disneyland, I remind myself to call my parents. It’s one of the only things I can give them that they really like, and having raised a child myself, I can see how brutal that trip was. One of them was probably nauseous, and both were sleep deprived. I wouldn't know, because I did not care. They understood how little I cared, and still did things like this.
Later that summer, we took the camper on a longer trip to visit family in Canada. One morning in a river by our campsite, I saw a fish I still see in my dreams. It was dark, as big as my leg, moving with slow power in deep, clear, green water. I ran back through the campground for my pole, but when I got back, it was gone.
Ryan Gossen is a writer living in Austin, Texas, where he also pursues dance, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and climbing, and is an active member of Texas Search and Rescue. He has had many vocations, including user experience (UX) designer, experimental psychologist, construction worker, arborist, and ski bum. He writes mostly about man’s interaction with nature. More of his writing can be found on his website.
