On April 16, 1965, the El Con Mall fountain was filled with 1,000 trout. The newspaper summoned the city with five words: “1,000 trout waiting to be caught.” They provided the poles and the line. All you had to do was show up.
After sunset, the scene turned surreal. A full moon hung over the open-air mall, casting a pale light on the fountain’s electric-blue water. Beneath the surface, hundreds of olive and pink-speckled trout darted through the artificial glare.
A mall fountain is a pathetic substitute for a mountain stream, but the trout didn’t know the difference. It fought the line with the same frantic desperation it would have mustered had it been pulled from the Madison River in Montana.
Participants stood on brick pavers instead of a stream bank, but they felt the vibration of a living body in their hands, nonetheless. They felt the cold, slimy skin of the trout and the pulse of a creature fighting to get back to the water as they pried a metal hook from its jaw.
The mall wasn’t “nature”—it was a mini-town square large enough to hold a community, a fountain, and scores of trout. A child who left that derby with a trout in a bucket didn’t have a “simulated” experience. They had a slippery, pulse-pounding encounter with a living thing. The fountain was artificial, but the fish was anything but.