The park is offered to you as make-believe. It announces its own falsity at the gate, sells you a ticket to the falsity, and hands the falsity back to you at closing time with a stamp on your wrist.

This is not a deception. It is a load-bearing structure.

Its function is to be the designated fiction, so that the freeway you take home, the office park, the twelve-lane approach, the beige campus with the flags, can be experienced as the real thing by contrast. The fiction is fenced so that everything outside the fence can be zoned as fact.

Stand in the parking lot at four in the afternoon. Section Goofy, row 41. Heat coming up off the asphalt in sheets. Look back at the gate, then out at the interchange.

One of those two things was designed by people who had read about a small town, and one of them was designed by people who had read about a small town.