There must be marriages that come apart easily, as if they had been perforated from the very start. Mine was not one of those. A judge in a tiny courtroom signed and stamped our divorce decree on a cloudy spring day in 2001, granting us a visa to a wretched new country. But the process of separation had taken almost two years. During that time, my wife’s ongoing depression had driven her first to a clinic in Kansas, then to a separate apartment in Seattle. I didn’t blame her for leaving. It was a matter of self-preservation. But our son, Nat, spent much of that time with me, and I was not skilled at helping a seven-year-old weather a series of separations from his mother.
Wearing his miniature tank top and Hawaiian shirt, a look derived from the Ace Ventura movies, Nat tried to swagger through the days. I would pick him up after work and we would hit the McDonald’s at the foot of Queen Anne Hill, where he liked the floral smell of the air freshener in the restrooms, or heat up a frozen pizza at home. I attempted the non-stop jolliness that will be familiar to many single parents. There was a desire to fill every moment with at least a modicum of emotional energy, to keep the silence and sadness of the situation at bay. But, of course, I wasn’t happy, and neither was he. His mother was going through terrible difficulties and had retreated into a psychic quarantine for his protection as well as hers. I had no satisfactory explanation for him.
“The doctors are helping her,” I would insist. “She’s getting better.”
“Are they giving her medicine?”
“I’m sure they are.”
Medicine was something he could grasp: it was red, syrupy, reluctantly slurped off a spoon. But he couldn’t understand what was wrong, couldn’t make sense of a narrative so vague and open-ended, so he nodded and said nothing more, practicing his own form of self-preservation.
He did his homework. He laughed, he played, he dunked his head in the bath and then frantically blotted his eyes with a washcloth. He cried, too, often over minor things—when I couldn’t make him a B.L.T., when I missed the school play—since children are fabulously adept at redirecting great pain into small containers. I made it to the next play, about that perennial second-grade problem, Getting Lost, but this was a temporary solace.
At some point, I decided that we should go to Disneyland. It felt like a brainstorm. We’re programmed, as Americans, to love the place. Our attachment to all those Disney characters was striking because it was, somehow, sincere. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Dumbo had been grandfathered into our affections, not as mere products of the industrial-entertainment complex but as real companions. They transcended time and brand consciousness. Hell, Mickey was a creation of the twenties, before focus groups were even invented. His white gloves were not product placement but something your weird friend might wear, and in the old hand-drawn animations he seemed to quiver a bit, like a genuine neurotic in tight red shorts.
I booked a weekend package, and we flew down there on a Friday. At the Disneyland Hotel, my sentimentality about Mickey Mouse waned. There were Disney characters blazoned on the curtains, the soap, the armoire. When we went downstairs for dinner, costumed versions of those same characters paraded through the restaurant, pausing for photo ops with awestruck children. I wondered how it felt to wear one of those costumes—was it dark inside the headpiece?—and to dispense so much joy.
After dinner, Nat steered me toward the video arcade. I doled out some quarters and perched on a low wall nearby while he played something called Crazy Taxi, which involved lots of car crashes. He laughed at the mayhem. He knocked over street signs, picnic tables, bus kiosks. I watched the tumult anxiously. I was a terrible driver and had caused numerous scrapes and fender benders. His ineptitude was a parody of mine, his gleeful desire to smash things apart the flip side of my desperate need to hold them together.
“Dad, look!” He seemed to be driving across a lawn, toward some kind of strip mall. “It’s a shortcut!”
Our package included early admission to Disneyland proper. When we boarded the monorail, the place was almost empty. It was an eerie sensation, as if a neutron bomb had been dropped on the Happiest Place on Earth. Some of the rides were already open for business, though, and we checked them out. Autopia, I later learned, was one of the few attractions dating back to the original construction of the park, in 1955. Since the Interstate Highway System hadn’t yet been built, freeway driving—the most boring activity on Earth—was considered fun, even futuristic. I piled into one of the gas-powered cars with Nat, and we took a sedate little spin. The vehicle ran on a track. You couldn’t deviate. He seemed O.K. with that.
We moved on to the Mad Tea Party and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. I was uneasily aware that I was steering us toward the wimpiest attractions. The fact was that I was afraid of the white-knuckle stuff like Splash Mountain, with its hairpin turns, dizzying heights, and vertical drops. I didn’t need any more fear in my life. Still, I wondered if I should be modelling courage for my son instead of sitting beside him in a giant teacup, surrounded by blasé toddlers.
And so, out of shame, or bravery, or shame-induced bravery, we wound up at the Pirates of the Caribbean. This was a jewel in the crown, even before Disney reverse-engineered it into an ultra-lucrative film franchise, built around the implicit equation of lawlessness and freedom, theft and pleasure. P.O.T.C. made you adore the bad guys—no ordinary feat at Disneyland. Also, and crucially, it was a dark ride.
“Dark ride” is a term of art in the world of amusement parks. Classically speaking, such a ride requires a narrative arc, physical movement, low light, and some ingenious tampering with the viewer’s sense of reality. No wonder it came into its own during the second industrial revolution, machinery being a great spur to fear and titillation.
The first great architect of the dark ride was a man named LaMarcus A. Thompson, who made a fortune in seamless hosiery before turning his attention to the roller coaster. His initial triumph, the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway, was built at Coney Island, in 1884. The ride, which sounds to the contemporary ear like a sex toy, cost a nickel and was a big success. But Thompson truly hit his stride three years later, with the Scenic Railway, in Atlantic City. This time, he intended to mess with the customer’s head in a serious manner, shunting the cars through a series of dark grottos and tunnels. Along the way, floodlights would suddenly reveal natural wonders or Biblical tableaux, after which the stunned viewers were plunged back into darkness.
Thompson designed his rides to gladden the lives of his urban clientele, to be a form of “sunshine that glows bright in the afterthought and scatters the darkness of the tenement for the price of a nickel or dime.” The actual effect was less poetic. His creations scared the crap out of groundlings and aristocrats alike, including the Queen of Denmark and the Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Meiningen. In their heyday, such rides were doubtless the most frightening thing that you would voluntarily pay for.
But even as Thompson was concocting his thrills-and-chills approach, another, quieter tradition sprung up adjacent to the dark ride. This was the Tunnel of Love. It tended to be humbler in conception, which was fine because it was mostly designed to shield couples from the prying and prurient eyes of society. In the dark, as their boats glided over the cool water, customers could hold hands or nuzzle or even leap into one another’s arms. The scariest thing here was intimacy: the great adventure of the other person.
That sort of adventure has yet to lose its charm. An attraction like Ye Old Mill, built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in 1915 and still operating at the Minnesota State Fair, remains true to the old principles. The gentle current, kicked up by a creaky paddle wheel, terrifies nobody. The suspense comes from just waiting, in the crudest sort of sensory-deprivation tank, for something to happen. In the absence of light, this charge of expectancy intensifies, creating what one of the proprietors, in a 2012 interview, jokingly referred to as the “special Old Mill dark.”
Nat and I climbed into the boat. After a brief bayou detour, heavy on the crickets and Spanish moss, there was a sudden drop in the dark tunnel. Nat gripped my arm, I gripped the edge of the boat, and we plummeted fifteen vertical feet down an incline.
I didn’t want Nat to be too amused, at least not in a skeptical way. I didn’t want the curse of premature irony to ruin his fun. I needn’t have worried. We rounded a bend, and there were talking skulls and caverns and skeletons and treasure chests, all of which he regarded with the saucer eyes of a seven-year-old boy. This stuff could have come straight out of one of Thompson’s extravaganzas. But the lifelike pirates would have stunned him, and so would the exchange of artillery fire between a ship and a distant fort, with its cunning manipulation of scale and perspective. This was better than kitsch. It was a mind game. It made you feel omniscient, like God’s emissary on an inspection tour.
Around the next bend, some drunken pirates were dunking their captives in a well. Other captives, all of them female, were being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Sticking to its original vision, Disney had declined to tweak these frat-house follies. (In the years since then, the park has sensibly scrubbed the prisoner auction and allowed the pirates to sell off treasure instead.) I was glad that Nat didn’t ask me for details. I was even gladder to see his look of awe, his happy suspension of disbelief in the face of such adult wizardry. It was magic. You weren’t supposed to figure it out.
I let out a sigh of relief. Nobody heard me: there was too much singing, too many random discharges of old-timey firearms. To see your child entranced after a long period of misery—misery for which you bear some responsibility—is also a form of magic. It produces a lightness in the heart, a welcome levity in the brain. For just a moment, I felt that I had been forgiven.
We approached a burning tavern—no explanation provided, except that it looked fun. There was another drunk, this one engaged in comic repartee with some pigs, marvellously realistic, down to the coarse hair on their snouts. Then our boat, and all the other boats in our little convoy, lurched to a stop.
“What’s happening?” Nat said.
“Maybe it’s part of the ride,” I said.
Why not? There was no particular logic to the narrative, unless it was increasing levels of dissipation. Maybe there would be a soliloquy from the pirate, or from the pigs.
But now the lights came on—not flaming torches but incandescent bulbs, accompanied by a hideous collapse of the whole illusion. We were inside a giant building, a hangar-like space whose ceiling was now visible. You could see the infrastructure, and the other customers, and there was something faintly shaming about it, as if we had all been caught in some furtive act.
“Look, Dad!”
He was pointing. Something strange was happening. They were powering down the pirates, who slowly ceased their partying—which, under the harsh industrial lighting, looked a little melancholy. It all stopped: the cavorting, the skirt-chasing, the brandishing of rum jugs and scimitars. The company grew still. It may have been at this point, too, that the sound was cut. The pirates fell silent as their Audio-Animatronic souls left their bodies, an oddly upsetting spectacle.
“Stay in your boats!” a Disney staffer called out in the midst of this chaos. A bunch of them were approaching our convoy in waders. You could see that the water was just two or three feet deep. I looked at Nat, who was tickled by this development but disappointed, too, that the spell had been broken.
An evacuation was under way. The staffers, who were kind and reassuring and made no pretense of maintaining the whole pirate thing, pushed our boats to a spot on the opposite bank. There we were helped ashore and guided to the foot of a metal staircase—yet another affront, so scuffed and functional. Nat held my hand and we exited the meticulously groomed reality, with its 1,838-foot-long channel and four hundred thousand gold pieces of eight, all of them fake.
There was a door at the top of the stairs. I expected to emerge, blinking, into bright sunlight, surrounded by princes and princesses, beauties and beasts. But on the other side of that magical door was a gray, fluorescent-lit hallway. The transition was rough. I took Nat’s hand, which seemed very small at that moment, and guided him toward the exit sign.
Now he was pointing again. Through a set of double doors at the end of the hall, I saw a cafeteria. It had that corporate look, and that corporate smell of tomato soup and grilled cheese. As we approached, we saw that it was full of Disney employees, eating lunch or enjoying a coffee break.
These employees, I have since learned, are governed by a great many rules and regulations. For starters, they are never called employees. They are “cast members”—always in character, always advancing the narrative, even when there are no customers in sight. The illusion must never flag; the fourth wall must never be breached. Men can wear a wedding ring, but no earrings. If asked for directions, cast members can point with two fingers, but never with one. And since eating at one of the official restaurants would be awkward for, say, Cruella de Vil, cast members tend to congregate in various backstage break rooms and in cafeterias like the one we found.
There is a famous photograph of a Disney cafeteria that was taken in 1961. At one table, cowboys are drinking coffee, while Snow White, an Indian brave, an astronaut, and Goofy are standing in line with their trays. Everybody is in full regalia. Everybody looks happy, in accordance with the great Disney dictum: “You get paid for smiling.” But they’re all in on the joke, the fakery, the sleight of hand. They’re working stiffs in fancy costumes, and they don’t care if you know it.
Nat studied the scene and said nothing. Could a child be more swiftly thrust into the world of adult pretense, adult prevarication?
T. S. Eliot tells us that human beings cannot bear very much reality. Neuroscience tells us not to worry—we’ve never confronted reality in the first place, just a mental simulacrum, assembled on the fly and no more real than a game of Crazy Taxi. I resist this sort of thing. It seems like an effort to stomp out every last ember of poetry in our conscious existence, to treat grief and love and regret as data-driven accidents. I prefer the model of the dark ride. I prefer the confusion, the sudden disclosures, the blaze of light and the plunge back into darkness, the sensation of moving very fast and the warmth of another human body beside you. We seldom know how the story ends, or begins.
Nat and I flew back to Seattle. The small struggles continued, as they would for many months—as they always will, perhaps. I didn’t yet know that Nat would grow very tall, come out to his mom as bisexual at age fifteen, and make himself comfortable in the labyrinth of Latin declensions and German verbs. I didn’t yet know that my ex-wife would remarry, divorce, minister to opioid-addicted veterans in rural New England, and end up in Montana, not far from a river bend where the two of us had once observed an osprey swoop down and make off with a glittering prize in its claws, a small vignette of victory, although not for the fish. I didn’t yet know that the woman I already loved would be here beside me all these years later, in what the Old Mill staffer called the special dark. Love entails a kind of limited visibility, as we peer into the penumbra of the other person and wonder exactly where we’re going. But that, too, is a victory, as is simply staying afloat.
