Sunburned, dehydrated, and a little out of sorts, I’m beginning to wonder why I have agreed to this early-morning fishing excursion with my brother at, of all places, Walt Disney World. My relationship with Nicholas has frayed; I would say “in recent years,” but our friction goes back decades. We now only exchange the occasional frosty text about our mother’s health. Yet here we are, at the end of a few days’ journey at the Happiest Place on Earth, attempting to reconnect over our shared loves of Disney and nature—in this case, angling for bass.
I adjust my aviators, and we board the twenty-one-foot pontoon, both of us relieved for some quiet time out on Bay Lake, in the shadow of the Magic Kingdom, after elbowing through the hordes at Animal Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios. Our childhood, though, was much more chaotic. Our parents existed on the edge of destitution, and to stop us from fighting—so that they wouldn’t be distracted from their own quarreling—my father would slip a bootleg Disney movie into the VHS player. And they fought a lot. The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, all were in heavy rotation. Nicholas and I would share a single bag of microwavable caramel popcorn, getting along long enough to watch DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp. Fantasy was safe. We knew how the story ended.
In recent years, Disney could break our mutual silence—one of us sharing a TikTok of someone dressed up as Powerline from A Goofy Movie and dancing, the other, news of a new ride or the latest runDisney race theme. This made me think of you. Right after our father died, we even ran the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror 10-Miler together. Our grief was still fresh, but in photos from the event, we are all smiles. Even so, this Disney-adjacent fishing trip is a risk. We used to hate this type of thing.
* * *
Before our parents returned to their home state of South Carolina, we all lived in northeast Nashville, growing watermelons in a little patch in front of our rented duplex but otherwise surrounded by a sea of concrete. When Dad had an open afternoon, either because he was working the night shift or in between jobs, he would pick us up from Stratton Elementary, his serious fishing rods poking out of the passenger window next to my Little Mermaid pole and Nick’s Snoopy one, a bucket and bait in the front seat. After a stop at a gas station for pork skins and nickel candy, we would wind our way to Old Hickory Lake, a reservoir along the Cumberland River, to put our lines in the water.
Too young to appreciate that we were supposed to be catching our dinner, I often kept my nose in a book while the panfish nibbled all the bait off my hook. Nick, ever the boundary-breaking explorer, fell in the water more times than he fished something out of it. Every once in a while, though, we would get a bite, and if the fish could have heard our squeals of delight, they would have been driven away. Dad would talk us through reeling in our catch—at times a big ole catfish (Nick) or a good-sized crappie (me). If a fish was too small to keep, Dad made us hold it up and smile, taking a picture with his imaginary camera before we tossed it back.
Nick and I further fractured when we moved to South Carolina. There, my parents quickly divorced. As the oldest daughter, I felt responsible for ensuring that things at home stayed stable while my mother sifted through what she thought was left of her life. It became my job to anticipate and manage, to play the peacemaker, to deescalate. You should know better, she often scolds me, even now. I pushed down my own feelings of stress, sadness, anxiety, and anger.
By comparison, it seemed to me that my little brother got off easy. When my parents, who eventually remarried each other, fell ill, I was always the first call. When Dad died, I was in charge of executing his affairs. Between what I was told to do and what I felt called to do, my world got small, trapped in the revolving doors of work and caregiving. Few partners, no concerts, no vacations. When my brother managed to leave our family behind and head to San Francisco, I couldn’t help but hate him for it. Now we talk past each other, when we talk at all.
* * *
Almost sixty years before our day on the pontoon, another set of siblings, Walt and Roy O. Disney, stood on this spot wondering if the lush landscape—12,500 acres of cypress, oak, maple, and bay trees and the 36-acre natural Bay Lake—was big enough for their dreams. While they were building Walt Disney World in the sixties, their company stocked Bay Lake and the connected, man-made Seven Seas Lagoon with seventy thousand Florida largemouth bass fingerlings. After a decade of allowing the bass to grow, Disney began offering fishing excursions in 1977, six years after the Magic Kingdom opened.
Nick and I are younger than that, but not by much. As I close in on forty, I recognize that most likely more time lies behind me than in front. My brother’s hands shake more than they used to. My father died at sixty-two. If this fence is going to get mended, we should start now. And so here we are, our boat pulling away from the marina at the Contemporary Resort, one of the two original Disney hotels, and its iconic A-frame tower. As we pick up speed, our guide, Matt, tells us about the habitat and habits of largemouth bass before giving us a tutorial in how to cast for them. Bass like their bait fresh—shiners, little silvery wiggly fish that practically glow. This was the part Nick and I hated as kids, squeamish and squirmy about hooking night crawlers and crickets. I feel lightheaded.
Matt puts a shiner in his mouth and strikes a pop-star pose, making us giggle. “See, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” he assures us. My brother and I look at each other and smile, knowing we’ll at least come away with a funny story to share.
As the four-hour tour continues, we remain amateurs, but it doesn’t matter; we’re just happy to be out here, and Matt keeps us entertained. He and his wife are awaiting the arrival of their second child, and he is overflowing with dad jokes.
“Have you met my girlfriend, Jeanette?”
Without looking, I know my brother also has one of his eyebrows cocked—at this point, we know Matt is married. Even when we try to deny our kinship, this shared physicality gives us away. Same laugh, verbal tics, facial expressions.
“People say she smells fishy, and she’s real holey,” he says, as he laughs and shakes the net we’re using to scoop our catches.
As we fish, we feel like kids again, transformed by the excitement of something down there, unseen, tugging; we’re anticipating what would await at the end of our line. As it turns out, mostly bass, but also the occasional bit of aquatic plant. As the temperatures climb, Matt steers us to deeper waters. I reel in more fish, but Nick lands bigger ones. Matt says they can go up to fourteen pounds.
The only monsters in our lives, for today, are the fish. During our time at Disney, Nick and I have relearned how to navigate each other’s quirks. How to compromise. Florida’s weather does its best to come between us. By the time we check into Animal Kingdom Lodge during a record-setting heat wave in May, our shirts are soaked and our patience short. But when we were little, this was our dream resort, and even though we’ve watched YouTube walk-throughs, they are nothing like being here, stepping out on our hotel-room veranda and watching zebras saunter by.
The childhood versions of ourselves would think we were living the dream. And while here, we try to honor those kids who deserved a better upbringing than they got. Even as the theme-park lines test our good humor, nostalgia buoys us. By the time we embark on the Kilimanjaro Safaris—a tour in an open-air vehicle that traverses Harambe Wildlife Reserve in Animal Kingdom—we’ve begun to get along.
Our guide points out all of the sibling pairings she can see: sister cheetahs, brother-and-sister hippos Hans and Greta, a gang of brother crocodiles, sister elephants Stella and Luna. Eventually the giraffes stroll by. Nick’s favorites. After decades of studying his face, I can tell—even though he’s turned away from me, watching them—that he’s pleased, because when he smiles, his ears stick out, just a little.
Somehow we become our best selves, though, out with Matt and the bass on Bay Lake. Among the meditative fishing, a brokered peace, however tenuous. For the first time this trip, we are both smiling.
Before we head back to Contemporary’s marina, Matt decides to help us make a memory. Without telling us where we’re going, he motors past Discovery Island, and through a glade of water lilies, verdant and blooming. He keeps going, as cypresses draped in moss blur past us.
We know we have arrived when we see Cinderella’s castle. Matt cuts the motor.
We are here to make a new picture.
