Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [22]
The point is, you can spend a solid month at Disney World and never see evidence of the real Florida, save for the occasional renegade buzzard on a roadkill. The Magic Kingdom might as well be in Tucson or Nashville or Tacoma; it wouldn’t matter. Once inside the gates, the experience would be virtually identical—not at all unpleasant, just fake. A sublime and unbreakable artificiality. People might like it, but it’s not natural.
Which brings us back to the story of Nala, the lioness that escaped from the JungleLand zoo. For three glorious days she eluded searchers who tracked her by foot, 4-by-4, and helicopter. Satellite trucks lined State Road 192 and concerned-looking news correspondents beamed updates to points around the globe. Was the lion heading toward Disney World? How long before she got there? Was it safe for tourists to stay? What should they do if they encountered the animal? The drama escalated hour by hour, experts warning that the cat soon would be growing hungry.…
Now, in my lifetime I’ve seen many tourists so poorly behaved they deserved to be eaten alive by something. Tourons, they’re called down here. They come to Florida, they trash the place, then they go. So out of reflex I began fantasizing what might happen if, by providence, a Disney touron crossed paths with the half-starved lion—a rustle in the vinyl topiary, a tawny flash, a muffled outcry … and somewhere the ghost of Charles Darwin exclaiming, “Right you are! This is what it’s come to!” Or if not a loutish snowbird, then perhaps Ms. Kathie Lee Gifford, although for her the cat probably would need its claws. Another tasty possibility: Insane Clown Eisner himself, dragged down from behind as he hotfooted it across the phony savannah. Yo, Mikey, here’s your frigging “animal kingdom.”
But nothing so brutally ironic unfolded. Nala the lost lioness never made it to Walt Disney World; as a matter of fact, she headed in the other direction. Game wardens found her sulking beneath a palmetto bush, barely 150 yards from JungleLand. They zapped her with a tranquilizer dart and hauled her back to the cage, where she awoke and promptly began to chow down. The international press corps packed up and departed, as did the police, wildlife officers, and highway patrol.
And life goes on as before at the plastic fantastic Reedy Creek Improvement District. All is safe. All is secure.
A new project, Disney’s Wide World of Sports, has opened on what once was a two-hundred-acre wetland. Now there’s a double-decker baseball stadium, an athletic field house, championship clay tennis courts, beach volleyball (sixty miles from the nearest natural beach), and a parking lot for thirty-five hundred automobiles. Next to the ballfield an All-Star Cafe franchise is being completed, its investor-celebrities including Andre Agassi, Shaquille O’Neal, and Tiger Woods.
Touring the new sports complex with an Orlando reporter, Disney vice president Reggie Williams marveled, “I remember walking out here three years ago, months before we even began planning. There were snakes, spiders and all kinds of animals out here.”
Reading that remark, I couldn’t help but wonder about the water moccasins living in the marsh that Team Rodent had drained and bulldozed. And—God forgive me, it’s nothing personal—I had a fleeting vision of young Agassi himself thrashing about on the red clay, a plump five-foot cottonmouth attached to his serving arm. Reptiles are fond of cool, dark places, you see, and a Nike gym bag would do fine in a pinch.
“There were snakes, spiders and all kinds of animals out here.”
But did Disney