Desolate in Disney World

I just returned from spending 4+ days in sunny Orlando, Florida, and as I noted on Facebook, I was never once even tempted to preserve a moment with a picture or even a note.  I was there for work and had essentially no time to explore, but I was staying in a resort in the heart of the Disney parks and one would have thought I would have at least felt some nostalgic desire to relive my childhood, which appears to be the main appeal for adults returning there.

But as it turns out, my memories of Disney from my past are not of the magical type, I suppose.  A few points of background.

• My parents virtually NEVER took me to see movies as a child.  i can tell you the name of every single movie I saw in a theater before I graduated from high school:  Gone with the Wind (at the Lincoln Theater when I was about 5), Oliver! and the Reader's Digest Tom Sawyer with Johnny Whitaker (at the BAC Cinema, now sadly gone), Blackbeard's Ghost and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken at the Saturday matinees they used to run at the Ritz in Belleville (now a Baptist church), Rocky with the Belleville West Social Studies Club (yes, there was a Social Studies Club to which I belonged but of which have no recollection except going to play miniature golf and then seeing Rocky at the end of the school year), Young Frankenstein in its original run (for which I was too young to actually find very funny even though I pretended to think it was), and Grease (at summer music camp in Champaign, IL at the Co-Ed, also now destroyed). So I have no references to any of the classic Disney movies ingrained in my psyche.  To this day, the only two I have actually seen are Snow White and Beauty and the Beast. 

• I did have a dog-eared copy of the novel 101 Dalmatians from the Memorial Hospital Book Bazaar that I read about 40 times in immediate succession.

• I had these odd little figurines that we must have gotten by saving boxtops called Disneykins.  They were mainly broken, and of characters from seemingly uninteresting movies like The Jungle Book and Pinochio, but I remember playing with them very much imagining some sort of impossible world fantasy world that I can no longer recreate.

• I read a book in the Belleville Public Library's summer reading program called Mickey Sees the USA, in which Mickey is on vacation and gets his camping trailer stuck when trying to drive through a giant redwood.
• My classmates would talk about Disney things ALL THE TIME.

This all added up to a huge craving to drown in the magic of Disney, based solely on knowing that it was something from which I had been excluded.

Also, I had never been to any sort of amusement park.  I had been taunted by visions of the wonders of Dutch Wonderland in Pennsylvania on a family trip some years earlier but denied entry by my parents.  (Details will have to wait for another blog entry).

So finally, in 1974, when I was 12, we took a family vacation out west, primarily to see the great National Parks.  In my mind, it was going to be the best of both worlds, we would see Disneyland--my first every amusement park, and then, like Mickey, drive through a California redwood!  We got to Los Angeles and I don't think my parents, even then, were going to take us to Disneyland until we visited a distant relative who lived in Long Beach and who visited Disneyland often because of discounts offered through his work.  Back then there was no admission charge (or it was a nominal fee) and instead, the public bought individual tickets for rides.  So we were given a bunch of partially used coupon books which convinced my parents that we could get by without spending too much.

First off, we arrived quite late in the day so time was limited.   And of course, it turned out that the only remaining coupons were A and B tickets, so we could only go on the most tame of rides.  My primary memory is begging to go on the ride with the slogan "Steer your own motorboat through rapids!" to find out that the boat moved slower than you could walk, was locked into a narrow channel so there was no steering of any sort possible, and the rapids were just 3/4 inch pipes here and there gurgling water at roughly the equivalent velocity of water from a garden hose AFTER you've turned off the spigot.  We did get one "premium" ride, but because I was youngest and we had to split evenly, I had to go to It's a Small World with my Mom and sister while my Dad took my two brothers on the Matterhorn.  (Until I started writing this, I had sort of blocked that memory...)  So Disneyland was not all I had dreamed it would be.

A couple days later I learned that the redwood you could drive through had died and fallen down.  So much for a dream vacation.

I did go to Disneyland on my own around 1992 when I was doing some consulting in the region and my client gave me a pass to get in.  This time, without the limitation of coupons, I thought I would recover the magic I'd missed before.  What I learned was that Mr. Toad's Wild Ride as a solitary adult is not very thrilling.

So anyway, my background with Disney is somewhat checkered, but I don't think that is the issue for my current utter disinterest.  Since those days I have grown and experienced adventures, good and bad, all over the US and in a few foreign spots.  In that time, my most pleasurable memories are those in which there was some actual adventure, a discovery of something entirely unexpected, a confrontation with something of unimaginable beauty, or even where the was a little loss of control.  

The thing about the mode of operation of Disney is to create a world separate from reality, where everything is perfect--where things are invented to entice you in but to never fully satisfy--to keep you always wanting more, expecting more, buying more.  The control and the artifice that is the main value is precisely what I find no value in.  But it seems to be exactly what almost everyone else wants.

This makes me a little sad, in that it reinforces my feeling of being out of step with the vast majority of the population.  But not so sad not to have been so happy to return home to southern Illinois in the middle of an ice storm, to my falling down garage, to the unfinished wiring and plumbing.  This is the kind of Adventureland that makes me happy.