The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [36]
“You wait. You’ll like it. You’ll see,” was all he would say, to whoever asked. The whole idea of it was unspeakably exciting—we weren’t the type of people to do something so rash, so sudden, so un-seasonal—but unnerving, too, for exactly the same reasons. So on the afternoon of December 16, when Greenwood, my elementary school, dispatched its happy hordes into the snowy streets to begin three glorious weeks of yuletide relaxation (and school holidays in those days, let me say, were of a proper and generous duration), the family Rambler was waiting out front, steaming extravagantly, keenly even, and ready to cut a trail across the snowy prairies. We headed west, as usual, crossed the mighty Missouri River at Council Bluffs and made our way past Omaha. Then we just kept on going. We drove for what seemed like (in fact was) days across the endless, stubbly, snow-blown plains.
We passed one enticing diversion after another—Pony Express stations, buffalo licks, a pretty big rock—without so much as a sideways glance from my father. My mother began to look faintly worried.
On the third morning, we caught our first sight of the Rockies—the first time in my life I had seen something on the horizon other than a horizon. And still we kept going, up and through the ragged mountains and out the other side. We emerged in California, into warmth and sunshine, and spent a week experiencing its wonders—its mighty groves of redwoods, the lush Imperial Valley, Big Sur, Los Angeles—and the delicious, odd feel of warm sunlight on your face and bare arms in December: a winter without winter.
I had seldom—what am I saying? I had never—seen my father so generous and carefree. At a lunch counter in San Luis Obispo he invited me, urged me, to have a large hot fudge sundae, and when I said, “Dad, are you sure?” he said, “Go on, you only live once”—a sentiment that had never passed his teeth before, certainly not in a commercial setting.
We spent Christmas day walking on a beach in Santa Monica, and on the day after Christmas we got in the car and drove south on a snaking freeway through the hazy, warm, endless nowhereness of Los Angeles. At length we parked in an enormous parking lot that was almost comically empty—we were one of only half a dozen cars, all from out of state—and strode a few paces to a grand entrance, where we stood with hands in pockets looking up at a fabulous display of wrought iron.
“Well, Billy, do you know where this is?” my father asked, unnecessarily. There wasn’t a child in the world that didn’t know these fabled gates.
“It’s Disneyland,” I said.
“It certainly is,” he agreed and stared appreciatively at the gates as if they were something he had privately commissioned.
For a minute I wondered if this is all we had come for—to admire the gates—and that in a moment we would get back in the car and drive on to somewhere else. But instead he told us to wait there, and strode purposefully to a ticket booth where he conducted a brief but remarkably cheerful transaction. It was the only time in my life that I saw two twenty-dollar bills leave my father’s wallet simultaneously. As he waited at the window, he gave us a bored smile and a little wave.
“Have I got leukemia or something?” I asked my mother.
“No, honey,” she replied.
“Has Dad got leukemia?”
“No, honey, everybody’s fine. Your father’s just got the Christmas spirit.”
At no point in all my life before or since have I been more astounded, more gratified, more happy than I was for the whole of that day. We had the park practically to ourselves. We did it all—spun gaily in people-size teacups, climbed aboard flying Dumbos, marveled at the exciting conveniences in the Monsanto All-Plastic House of the Future in Tomorrowland, enjoyed a submarine ride and riverboat safari, took a rocket to the moon. (The seats actually trembled. “Whoa!” we all said in delighted alarm.) Disneyland in those days was a considerably less slick and manicured wonder than it would later become, but it was still the finest thing I had ever seen—possibly the finest