The Happiest Place

My good friend, the oldfangled film photographer Elizabeth Nahum-Albright, was recently tasked with a common problem: the disposition of her newly dead father. His most urgent demands were clear: he was to be cremated and placed, like all of his cats, into a cookie jar.

His daughter didn’t have the bandwidth to get a chocolate chip container large enough to hold the whole of her father’s legacy, but as a photographer she was ready for another task: the ad hoc photo exhibition that has become the norm of every American funeral.

She is a good friend, and I — well, I like photographs. The funeral photo exhibition has become treasured tradition: a whole life briefly pinned to a bulletin board and then back to bins, drawers, maybe a wastepaper basket — a disassembled celebration of life. And so she sent and sent and I bore it with a patient shrug as she forwarded one photograph after another while combing through boxes, digging containers out of basements and attics, and sent to me out of curiosity a life she was assembling out of a dustbin.

Like all family photographs, it was a familiar foundry: the looming, planning father, the smiling ebullient mother, the little girl they’ve brought along to the big national amusement park. Everybody’s shorts are too short. Everybody’s time, though they don’t know it here, is too short, too. And behind them, slightly out of focus, is the towering castle of American funfair, and a large, smiling, foam rodent.

I am not a betting man. But if I were, I’d offer all the money in my pockets against all the money in yours that almost every funeral in this great nation has at least one such picture of a smiling family standing together triumphantly, unified, on their amusement park vacation. They have vacated their lives, but in the permanent memory of photography’s infinite present they remain, eternally, amused.

Now, I have been a travel photojournalist for a quarter century, and I must tell you that one of my very favorite destinations — in all this world, in which I have traveled to 102 nations — is that very same particular overly litigious theme park which we shall hereafter refer to as The Happiest Place.

My first memory of going there was as a child with two cousins visiting from The Old Country, who flung themselves across an ocean to arrive at our shores and see the place that defined new world splendor; we three (seven and eight and nine year old) heliacal youths draped in sunshine went up and down all over roller coasters, flume rides, chasing down mascots and waiting for autographs, all while my bored doughy father stood on the sidelines, watching Snow White with the same determined emotion as the Amish raising a barn. Should he ever die, I’m sure there’ll be a photograph of the lot of us children with him, grinning ear to ear, at the funeral.

Good. These stolen instants are the shining lies of our lives. Because as the Happiest Place has captured our national imagination, it has also become the destination couples visit to convince themselves the divorce isn’t worth it, where families go to make memories that will last a lifetime under the promise of something that can never be offered, let along guaranteed: absolute, certain, unyielding joy.

But the truth is different: in the real world, absolutely nobody at the Happiest Place is ever, ever happy.

Only a few days after Lizzy’s father’s funeral I began, as I’d for more than a decade hoped to do, an informal artistic residency of ten consecutive days at the Happiest Place: getting there every morning before its opening, staying there until it closed. It remains one of my favorite places as both a person and, yes, a photographer. Every morning a rope drops and thousands of people march in with bellic determination, invading with vigor every corner of the place. But as happens so often in our world, those who march in frequently… shamble out.

At the gate of the park’s overgrown, perfectly manicured zoo, hundreds if not thousands of adventure-seekers and beast-peepers press against the small but important employees who chime the opening of the day: they are big, small, thin, wide, every shade, every kind of a life, hundreds of thousands of identical, unique people, an entire animal kingdom waiting to view another — to ride rides and perhaps learn something. Like, in my case, that a group of hippos — perhaps like a gathering of Florida tourists — is called a bloat.

That first time I remember going to the Happiest Place was, probably, terrible: I remember the hot sun and endless days led to my vomiting most every afternoon. My cousins had no better a time; Fabio and I fought like the dickens. Ornella cried. And yet, it reads better in the memory than it was lived in skin: I’ve flown, intentionally, straight from an assignment in Mongolia to a more exotic vacation at an American amusement park. My cousins make their way from the Mediterranean to Florida — even now well into their middle age — most every year. My father wanted to sell us on America right then, right there, at the Happiest Place. And he succeeded.

It’s the same today: parents trying to escape from a scary world, as mothers and fathers have for centuries, millennia: the job may not pan out, the election might be disastrous, the future uncertain. But there, every parent can occasionally try to make a better, or at least more imaginary, life for their child in a magic kingdom that’s an uncanny valley of home.

Every day here is the same and unique: every day the most special of your life. Every day a tragedy. But it does have something for everybody: the daredevils, sure, the cartoon lovers of course. But also the chicken riders who sit out the coaster but snake through the themed queue with grandma, son, boyfriend, girlfriend, get all of the view and none of the nausea. Half the deaths that occur at the Happiest Place every year — undeclared but clearly occurring — are surely overheated grandmothers, who do not survive but, surrounded by everybody they love, do not mind.

Now, none of this is meant to take the mickey out of the many American families that go yearly: Europe is far, Asia farther, and in spite of the great expense it’s still cheaper than journeying to any educational foreign reality: costly as it might be, for the average household of 4.6 people it is an opportunity to briefly, step outside themselves. For many American families, it may be the only vacation they take all year. At the Happiest Place’s international pavilion, visitors get a chance to go around the world and visit, briefly, the simulacra of Afar, riding through nations and journeying through history in slow motion on the world’s ascending, dropping, turning, swerving path from Mesopotamia to now, at the fall of its latest but not last empire. It is not a trip. It is a journey.

It is also a fun place to people-watch, and people-photograph: the act of observing disturbs the observed, but not in a place where everyone is under constant, stringent, pastel surveillance. Nobody notices one more camera among thousands, as they wait in queues, finger-browse through sprawling gift shops where everything is on offer but it’s nothing you want, made on factory lines by child laborers in Asia to be taken off shelves by child vacationers in the States. It’s a chance to celebrate all the brands put out by Hollywood studios in every shape and size: there’s merchandise to celebrate love in castles, princesses of all dimensions, more plush companionship than you can imagine.

A breath’s-distance from me in the Happiest Place’s concrete reproduction of France, a teenage boy puts his arm around his sweet, soft girlfriend and tells her, under a miniature Eiffel Tower, that one day he’ll take her to the real one.

She believes him. I do, too.

Throughout the park, families take breaks from fighting and crying and nearly dying of exhaustion to pose in front of this attraction and that — the spheres and towers and attractive espaliered backdrops are tailor-made for Kodak moments — and they smile with their telephoned-arms extended, or huddle together in front of a teenager in a bucket hat selling memories on demand. They are, briefly, elated; young or old, they long to leave and wish desperately to stay and do not realise, for even a moment, that this photograph will one day be tacked on a bulletin board next to their coffin.

At the Happiest Place, absolutely no one is happy — and yet, forever, we always are. We become our photographs.

And at the end of the day, even paradise ceases to exist — those same helpful youths at the morning gate, a whole new shift looking completely different but also the same, help usher families to the exit. Satisfied parents prepare to flop face-first into beds satisfied with their purchase, sugar-loaded children crash into plangent wails.

And then they mount buses, shuffle onto trams, head to their cars and their trains and their airplanes — to their homes and their memories and their funerals.

And also, yes, the larger world: the one outside the Happiest Place, where there’s a great big beautiful tomorrow.

About the author: B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist with three monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life with Neil Gaiman and Mayim Bialik, and On the National Language with many others. In photography he has been a finalist for the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography, and is a Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation grant recipient, a two time Prix de la Photographie Paris award-winner, a New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography, and a winner of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences’ Anthem Award for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. For nonfiction he has been a finalist for the Travel Media Awards for feature writing and is a winner of the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction, and for poetry he has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and Kenyon Poetry Prize, and a winner of the Colonel Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards and the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal, twice.