by Kent Russell
JULIAN (CONT’D)
As I step into your vibrations, Kent, I sense that you are approaching very fast the end of a seven-year cycle in your life. I’m sensing that…as you move nearer to 2017…you’re going to start effecting some changes. In your life. In the world.
KENT
Interesting!
JULIAN
“Seeking” means discovering how we fit into the puzzle. Why our piece is here, and how we can connect it. I’m sensing for you…the spirits are telling me…Love. They’re telling me that your next cycle will begin with tremendous love.
KENT
Am I finally going to find the love of my life, Julian?
JULIAN
The spirits are telling me it’s deeper than that. Deeper than a person. Now, Kent, the Universe—are you familiar with the anthropic principle?
KENT
Enlighten me, Julian.
JULIAN
The anthropic principle says that the observer is as essential to the creation of the Universe as the Universe is to the creation of the observer. Does that make sense to you? We are here observing the Universe, and it just so happens that the Universe we’re observing is perfectly compatible with us, the people who observe it.
KENT
You’re saying we’re here because we are meant to be here.
JULIAN
That’s right! The science backs us Spiritualists on this. Things are as we find them—just so—because we are both the causes and the effects of the Universe.
Julian re-steeples his hands. He steals a peek at the papers in his lap.
JULIAN
The Universe is not only like us—it exists because of us. We follow the Universe, but we can lead it, too. You’ve heard of the power of positive thinking? Well, it’s one of our natural laws in Spiritualism. Things can be exactly as we want them to be. Because we are both the causes and the effects.
KENT
(nodding)
So you’re saying that…the subject is the object. The question is the answer.
JULIAN
(smiling like Cheshire cat)
That’s right. That’s right. Love is what led you here. Love led you here so you could see that love is what moves you. Do you understand? That’s what the spirits want you to know. It is not you who has chosen them, but they who have chosen you. The line between them and us is only temporary, you know. They want you to remember that. They want you to make your life a gift for your beloved.
KENT
And our documentary, Julian—what do they say about that? Are we going to redeem Florida? Are we going to die trying?
JULIAN
Now, remember, everything I’m telling you is potentials and possibilities. You don’t have to listen to anything I tell you. But I’m sensing about you, and about your energy, which Glenn and Noah share, is, ah, the spirits, they are saying—
Julian fumbles with the papers in his lap. Kent’s glare ratchets toward him like the head of a socket wrench.
JULIAN (CONT’D)
(relievedly)
That what you’re making will be more than a documentary. Anybody could have made a documentary about Florida. Given a by-the-numbers account. But the vibrations all of you are giving off—
KENT
Yes?
JULIAN
What you’re doing will bring about a change in consciousness. A change in the way people perceive this place. A change in how they act toward it. The Universe wants you to understand that this is a holy task. You have been chosen by love for the sake of bearing love.
KENT
So according to the Universe, the only way forward is for someone to love Florida?
JULIAN
This is what the spirits are telling me.
KENT
That when people see someone loves Florida—even if it’s an arbitrary love, like family love, or country love—people will see Florida is worth saving?
JULIAN
Love is never blind, Kent. If you take anything away from this reading, I hope it’s this. The last thing love is, is blind. Love is bound. But the moment you bind your heart in love? That’s when you realize your hands are truly free.
KENT
Wow. I think I speak for the three of us when I say that that was more than expected, Julian. Quite the treat on Halloween, heh. I wish we could stay longer and bask in the, you know, vortex of energy here.
JULIAN
Well, our doors are always open in Cassadaga. All perfect children of God are welcome to join our association. And should any perfect children of God wish to know more—about Spirit or anything else—they can reach me anytime at WE ARE ONE REALTY. That’s WE ARE ONE REALTY, all one word, at Hotmail dot com.
FADE OUT
—
MILE 607 — ORLANDO
IT’S UNCLE WALT’S WORLD;
WE’RE JUST LIVING IN IT
We knew we were nearing Orlando when the diversity of trash along the roadside broadened considerably. Streets and state roads broadened, too. Traffic: greatly accelerated. We also encountered many pedestrians, which was rather surprising since year after year Orlando is rated at or near the top of the list of deadliest American cities for walkers. In 2016, Orlando regained its crown, barely edging out the runners-up: Tampa, Jacksonville, and Miami.
The company of other walkers, we assumed, would be a boon. Strength in numbers; can’t run us all over; that kind of thing. However, since these were Orlando pedestrians, their presence ended up being less than heartening. Vapors poured from their eyes like effluvium rising off of asphalt in a rain. Many had lips so lined and sun-cracked that they appeared to be sewn shut. Or it’s possible that they weren’t returning our howdies because they took us for narcs.
At least we were blessed with stretches of virgin sidewalk fronting subdivision after subdivision. The old cliché is that Central Florida’s subdivisions were named after the things wiped out to make way for their construction: Cypress Pointe, Clear Lake, Panther Run, et cetera. This cliché is, like most clichés, ten thousand percent true.
Local tax revenue was high enough to furnish big public parks with batting cages we could camp behind. Doing so felt as wishful-thinking ridiculous as putting a lampshade on one’s head in order to hide. Still, nobody called the cops on us even after we awoke to the pinging clatter of batting practice. This way, we were able to park-hop across the Greater Orlando metropolitan area, that sprawling conglomeration which lacks for any clearly identifiable boundaries or civic identity—and which so perfectly stands in as a synecdoche for Central Florida.
“Yikes,” I said, breaking the relative quiet as we skirted another Mediterranean-styled shopping plaza. “I’ve actually eaten in that Ruth’s Chris Steak House.”
Not too long ago, these Orlando ’burbs were orange groves. And not too long ago, there was nothing more quintessentially Florida than orange groves, oranges, orange juice. (That the fruit is nonnative is both beside the point and entirely the point.) In the 1950s, Americans purchased more oranges than all other fresh fruit combined. Hamlins, Temples, Parson Browns, Lue Gim Gongs, Sanford Bloods—they were like edible advertising. The vision of Florida as a garden of earthly delights was seeded into millions by way of these healthful, noon-bright treats. (Many of which had been exposed to ethylene gas, shocked with cold, covered in wax, scrubbed with detergent, or simply dyed orange in order to achieve their radiant color.)
The fecundity of grove towns like Clermont, Leesburg, Citra, Dunedin, Winter Haven, Frostproof, and dozens more turned Central Florida into the world’s leading producer of oranges. Even when demand for the fresh stuff flagged, frozen concentrate was invented to reenergize the market. Unlike California’s navel orange, Florida’s most popular type, the Valencia, was
perfect for juicing. Three-quarters of the 1960 crop traveled to consumers in tank cars, not crates; by 1980, that proportion had risen to 90 percent. Then, when things were sunniest, a series of devastating freezes halved the state’s production. Brazil stepped up their citrus game in response. For them, oranges were a cash crop; 99 percent of their production was for export. Florida couldn’t compete at that scale.
Enter: the developers. Hundreds of thousands of acres of prime grove land were transformed into trailer parks and cul-de-sacs within the last few decades. Juice plants, packinghouses, and the unique sand-hill environment have given way to strip malls and single-family homes. Lake and Orange counties (over which Greater Orlando straddles) once accounted for one-quarter of Florida’s citrus. Today, the counties constitute less than 2 percent. The workforce that used to pluck fruit? They now cater to the 66 million tourists who flock to Orlando year in and out, cementing its position as the most popular tourist destination on Planet goddamned Earth.
No other place in America has been so quickly and thoroughly (re)shaped by tourism. Consider: In 1950, about 186,000 people lived in the Greater Orlando area. On the eve of Walt Disney World’s opening in 1971, the metropolitan population had ballooned to 522,575. It surpassed 1.6 million in 2000. It swelled to 2.13 million within the last two decades. As the former mayor Carl T. Langford put it: “I spent thirty years of my life trying to get people to move down there [to Orlando], and then they all did.” He offered this quote from North Carolina, where he lived out his last years after claiming that Orlando had become too congested for him.
Orlando and its economy have expanded at one of the fastest rates in the nation, but the value of that expansion has not kept pace on the individual level. Growth in annual earnings per worker has been very slow and well below national averages. Real wages in Orlando have been stagnating for decades. In some areas, they’ve fallen. Such is the Faustian bargain at the heart of Orlando’s (re)shaping: shitty pay and iffy quality of life alongside exponential growth.
“What is clear is this,” concluded the Orlando Sentinel, “the nation’s 27th-largest metropolitan area excels at little beyond being one of the world’s top tourist destinations, and it lags behind most comparably sized U.S. cities in virtually every category.” Indeed, when compared with those cities, Orlando ranks near the bottom in things like home ownership, per capita income, and school spending. On the other hand, if you were to look at who’s leading whom in service jobs, overcrowded schools, crime rates, commuting times, and pedestrian fatalities, you’d see that Orlando dominates.
Its story reflects the state’s. The number of service workers in Florida increased twentyfold from 1950 to 2000. Contrast that with the state’s number of farmhands (stayed the same); construction workers (increased threefold); manufacturing workers (doubled); and government employees (increased fivefold). The macrocosm (Florida) and the microcosm (Orlando) both run on low-skill, minimum-wage service jobs because that’s what touristic infrastructure is built around. There are lawyers, doctors, cops, teachers, and accountants in Orlando—but practically everyone else is a laundress, fry cook, trash hauler, deliveryperson, baggage handler. Not to mention desk agent, customer-service representative, Uber driver, long- and short-haul trucker. Waiter. Bartender, by God. Not so many sommeliers or concierges, but a goodly number of ice sculptors. Cartoon character suit wearers. Pretty much anybody you don’t have to give health insurance to.
“Welp.” Glenn gestured at the pipe-cleaner palms, at the eight lanes of roaring traffic, at the zombified pedestrian limping our way.
“Let’s play a game,” Noah suggested. He selected a business at random—a nearby tobacconist—and Googled it. “Yup,” he said. “Part of synthetic drug sting, according to the Sentinel.”
All theme-park-adjacent lodging was booked. It took many minutes of app thumbing for us to locate a room in a welfare hotel on a dark side street in the downtown business district. House policy required that guests pay in advance, in cash, which I did. Noah helped me carry Jog-a-bye up the narrow staircase. Glenn killed the AC, hit the lights. We three jumped into the queen-sized bed, happy if only to have a roof over our heads once more.
After a few quiet moments, Glenn said, “Guys?”
The three of us were lined up Kilroyishly under the covers, our eyes fixed on the blotchy stucco above.
“Guys.”
The walls blinked red then blue as a police car passed.
“Tell me if I’m crazy. But does this mattress feel damp to you?”
“There’s a more important question to be asked here,” Noah said to the ceiling. “Is forty dollars too steep a price to pay to sleep in someone else’s urine in downtown Orlando? Or is it exactly the right price?”
* * *
—
Glenn had made some inroads with a guy whose Facebook page said he “played” Jesus Christ at the Holy Land Experience theme park. So Glenn spent the next day trying to Skype with him, to assure him we were legit. Noah volunteered to do all of our laundry. “You could fold our drawers into paper airplanes” was how he put it. “I would also like to be alone.”
Meaning I had the day to myself. Not knowing what else to do, I made for the Orlando Welcome Center, where I purchased a five-dollar all-day pass for the International Drive Trolley.
If you’ve ever been to Orlando, friend, you’ve been to International Drive. It is the 14.5-mile strip of hotels, restaurants, hotels, time-shares, souvenir shops, lesser theme parks, laser tag emporiums, curio museums, outlet stores, and hotels that’s “as well-known in Boston, England, as it is in Boston, Mass.,” as the line goes. And this is an important point to make. For so very many of the millions of tourists who come to Orlando, this—Disney, Universal Studios, I-Drive, all of it—stands in for America itself. “No matter where you travel in the world, you run into a startling number of people for whom Orlando is America,” John Jeremiah Sullivan has written. “If you could draw one of those New Yorker cartoon maps in your head, of the way the world sees North America, the turrets of the Magic Kingdom would be a full order of scale bigger than anything else.”
International Drive is not Orlando’s main thoroughfare—that’d be Interstate 4, which runs parallel to I-Drive—but as International Drive comprises five-hundred-plus businesses selling everything from digital cameras to golf clubs, weeklong stays to Argentinian steaks, it is far and away the most vital artery when it comes to Orlando’s economic health. This despite the fact that until very recently, I-Drive was nothing but sand, pines, and palmettos. What happened was an attorney turned developer named Finley Hamilton, who went looking for ways to profit from Walt Disney’s 1965 announcement that he would build a huge new theme park southwest of downtown. On April Fools’ Day 1968, Hamilton paid $90,000 for ten acres of scrubland. This patch of nothing was accessible only by dirt road—but Hamilton figured that Disney-bound tourists would spot his new Hilton Inn from the interstate, take the nearest exit, and drive north on the paved road he would build.
He bought and flipped more acreage along his road in the months preceding Disney World’s opening. “I came up with International Drive,” he later recalled, “because it sounded big and important.” Within a few years, I-Drive included a dozen hotels, two dozen restaurants, and four gas stations, most of which were clustered at the road’s two major intersections. Then the nation’s first water park, Wet ’n Wild, opened in 1977. Just like that, I-Drive went from a place to sleep and eat to a destination in its own right. Arriving not long after were your Ripley’s Believe It or Not!s, your Skull Kingdoms, and the like.
In short, International Drive has developed into a tacky gauntlet whereby families are stripped of armloads of cash on their way to and from Disney parks. It, like Greater Orlando, is premised upon one thing: Uncle Walt’s sloppy seconds.
I hopped on the International Drive Trolley at its southern terminus, so very excited to be aboa
rd a motor vehicle. This being Florida, where fixed meanings are prohibited by the spirit if not the letter of the law—the Trolley I boarded was not a trolley trolley. It was a bus. A bus done up fancy-like in trolley drag, but a bus nonetheless, with slatted wood benches, interior lights sculpted to resemble gas lamps, and a whole honking gaggle of Europeans. Europeans slung with water-bladderesque purses on the thinnest of straps; Europeans smoking unfiltered cigarettes; Europeans wearing capris hemmed at inspired lengths. Together we rode from South I-Drive to SeaWorld, where the Continental children ooooed at the expanse of parked cars glinting in the sun. We passed an empty municipal bus, which led me to speculate: I bet this is the most used public transit route in the state.
We gathered more passengers outside an outlet mall. Their wrists were braceleted with the woven cardboard handles of upscale shopping bags; their smiles communicated the bliss of completion. We accelerated past the noodly, Lovecraftian slidescape of Wet ’n Wild. Someone dinged the ding for WonderWorks.
In terms of gross economic power, the tourism industry is in the uppermost tier along with energy, finance, and agriculture. Worldwide, it generates $3 billion in business every single day. If frequent-flyer miles were a currency, it’d be one of the most valuable on the planet. Why shouldn’t tourism have its own city the way oil has Abu Dhabi and film has Los Angeles?
Orlando is tourism’s pantomime capital. But that’s not all due to Disney. Contrary to Uncle Walt’s founding myth, roadside attractions and theme parks had been dotting city and state long before his arrival. It’s just that their theme was, well, “Florida.” Sunken Gardens and Jungle Gardens dazzled Depression-weary Americans with imported grugru palms, Madagascar screw pines, and the greatest concentration of orchids in North America. Silver Springs, Cypress Gardens, and Weeki Wachee Springs took a similar tack—“Come marvel at Florida’s splendor!”—while adding canny advertising and gimmicks like alligator wrestling to the mix. These “natural” attractions were equal parts organic phenomena and human cultivation. Their grounds had been processed and “improved,” just like the canned and sprayable foodstuffs then appearing on supermarket shelves.