FantasticLand Read online

  But every now and then there was something Trolly couldn’t talk Johnny Fresno out of, and this, this one thing, is what you need to understand when you look at what those kids did to each other. Johnny Fresno said he had a dream where he was in a restaurant in the clouds where he could look one way and see nothing but trees and another way and see nothing but the ocean. By now, it was 1971 and Disney World had just opened and they needed to make a decision about where to build the park. The media at that point was starting to speculate that two giant theme parks couldn’t exist in the same state. Johnny was desperate to make sure FantasticLand stood out, that it had some sort of identity. Then he had this dream. A month later they broke ground on a site between Daytona Beach and the Lake George Conservation Area near Seville, not far from the beach and not far from the trees. A year to the day after they broke ground, Fresno was sitting on the top of the Point Café, eighty stories up. There’s this great video where he looks at the trees, then turns and can see the ocean way off in the distance and he says, “It’s not as good as I imagined, but it will do.”

  Tracks was livid about it. Just livid. There were meetings where the two men threw things at each other. Tracks even had to go to the hospital when Johnny got in a particularly good shot with a glass tumbler to his temple and Tracks needed a few stitches. One secretary got so fed up with listening to them fight about where to put FantasticLand that she transcribed one of the arguments where they were screaming at each other and circulated it around the offices. It soon became a pre-Internet version of a meme.

  Author’s note: Here is the transcript she is referring to, emphasis in the original document:

  FRESNO. IF YOU COULD ONLY SEE WHAT I SEE!!

  TRACKS. Please, listen to me …

  FRESNO. THE OCEAN! They HAVE to SEE THE OCEAN!

  TRACKS. YOU have to see this is FINANCIALLY IMPOSSIBLE!

  FRESNO. That’s why IT’S A DREAM, TROLLY! If we can build the dream, everything else will work out!

  TRACKS. If we build this, you won’t have a company, Johnny. You’ll have nothing but rusted roller coasters and soggy corn dogs.

  FRESNO. FUCK YOU FOR PISSING ON MY DREAM!

  [Loud crash, muffled grunts]

  TRACKS. Goddammit, you bit me!

  FRESNO. AAAAAAAHHH!

  Some of the staff made T-shirts that year that said FUCK YOU FOR PISSING ON MY DREAM. My kids can’t stand it when I tell that story [laughing]. It kind of became the unofficial slogan of the FantasticLand senior staff to this day, so I hear. But, in the end, Johnny got his way and they built the thing not far from the ocean over the objections of Tracks and the shareholders.

  Remember, this was before climate change was understood and before we knew that the oceans were going to rise. Tracks knew that there would be storms because there are always storms, and that one of them would be huge and would barrel through and likely do some significant damage to the park. The market bore him out on this, too, because insuring a nearly billion-dollar project a few dozen miles away from the coast was almost as bad, in his mind, as building a golden road at the entrance to the park. But on some things, Johnny Fresno could not be moved, and in the end, well, before all this happened, it looked like his gamble had paid off. Before all this happened, the privately held FantasticLand Inc. was worth well over two billion dollars, most of which went right to Johnny Fresno.

  I mean, you know this as well as I do. FantasticLand is a blow-for-blow competitor with Disney and Universal. Each one of them does something unique. Universal has Harry Potter, Disney is … well, Disney, and FantasticLand has the immersion factor. The different FantasticLand worlds are truly different, and everyone from the planners to the snow cone salesman thinks of absolutely everything. The food is different, the music is different, and they even pipe in different smells for each location, like seawater for the Pirate Cove and cotton candy for the Fairy Prairie. Turns out there was not only room for three theme parks, but each one would challenge the others and force them to innovate. And they would share some of the audience. I don’t need to tell you about the tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars the theme park industry brings in. The difference is, Universal and Disney had the good sense to build away from the ocean. FantasticLand did not.

  Part of the reason why each section of the park was so different was due to the plan that Tracks put into place after that famous yelling incident. He totally shifted gears away from convincing Fresno to change his fool mind to focusing on safety and infrastructure. He ended up spending more on levies and emergency preparedness than he ever would have on insurance for a mammoth semi-coastal theme park. People thought he was too obsessive. The park was near Daytona Beach, which hadn’t taken a direct hit from a hurricane in fifty years. The thing is, they were absolutely right. He was obsessed. Tracks brought in experts and then went to other countries and brought in their experts, and then he went and found the intellectual enemies of those experts and brought them in. It reached such obsessive levels that the elaborate network of tunnels under the park doubled as bomb shelters that could withstand a ten-megaton explosion. The emergency plans were just as elaborate, some running seven hundred pages. I vividly remember a photo of one of those huge binders labeled DISASTER PLAN FOR THE FAIRY PRAIRIE floating in the water after the front gate flooded.

  Fresno let Tracks plan and overplan and redo the plans, basically without limit or, really, supervision. Fresno told me once that “it made a valued member of my team feel like he was prepared. Who was I to deny him that?” See what I mean, that he could make you feel important? So these plans existed, and the park was a big success when it first opened, and little by little the emphasis on disaster preparedness started to fade away as management changed. Then, of course, Tracks died in September of 1999, and Fresno died in 2001, and his son, Ritchie, took over. These safety plans were in place, and they were as much a part of the park as the beams that held the giant Exclamation Point logo in the center of town, and upper management let them be. My impression, and that’s all it is, is that they thought they had safety covered and didn’t feel the need to update or train people on what was, in essence, the most sophisticated disaster manual ever created by a private company. If you have something like that in your pocket, it’s easy to see it as an asset as opposed to a living document that had to be refreshed from time to time.

  OK, the different worlds. As you know, FantasticLand is set up in six distinct areas, the first being the Golden Road when you first enter the park. It’s full up with shops and info stations and topiaries and whatnot. Then there’s the Fairy Prairie, which is for children six and under, Fantastic Future World, the World’s Circus, the Hero Haven, and the Pirate Cove. Then there are the many parts of the park that aren’t open to the public, like the tunnels that run under the park for maintenance and janitorial and the multiple offices and work spaces that were hidden away behind the facades in many of these places. The offices where executives worked were divided by the themed lands as well. Operations were along Golden Street, Park Development was in the World’s Circus, HR was in the Fairy Prairie, which was a constant source of ridicule and bad feelings, and Marketing was in the Pirate Cove. The point of Trolly’s disaster plan as it stood when he died was that everyone, from the janitor in the tunnel, to the executive behind the facades, to the actors working in the rides, would follow the same plan, and that plan happened to be one of the most comprehensive and thick and, in many ways, impenetrable documents I’ve ever come across. There was no easy way to look up what you were supposed to do if your office was filling up with water. And it never got updated. Add Ritchie’s lack of focus on disaster planning, and that’s a recipe for something bad happening.

  When my daughter caught me screaming at the TV, what I was screaming about was the overall tone of the news coverage. People seemed to think this was some sort of metaphor, that “the veneer of American happiness has been stripped away,” and that young adults murdering each other in terrible ways
was what was truly underneath. I have sworn more in this interview than I have in the past three months, I promise you, but that analysis is pure bullshit. It just doesn’t wash. Given the history I’ve laid out, let me give you some analysis, OK? There are three major reasons why the “tribe” thing happened and got so out of hand and so violent so quickly.

  First and foremost, these six parts of the park, the Circus and the Fairies and the Pirates and all of that, they all existed in very distinct geographical, tactical, and operational sections of the park. The Pirate Cove is not like the World’s Circus is not like the Golden Road, is what I’m getting at. The cultures are different, the landscape is different, the tools they use are different, and the clientele is different. Hell, the smells are different. The employees, they all carried around devices, they were smartphones, basically, that told them everything they needed to know for the day and that they used to communicate with each other, and even those devices—RADs, they called them—were only coded to certain sections. It was like that on purpose. Johnny Fresno wanted a unique feeling for each location, and he wanted visitors to feel like they’d been to four or five different parks in a day, when really it was one big park. He accomplished that and people worked like that. Please try and hold that in your head when considering points two and three.

  Point two—I just got done telling you that each section was different, but the disaster guide was kind of a mess in terms of what was section-specific and what was mandatory for the entire park. Parts of the disaster response were a mess inside the park, but there was fresh water and food and medical supplies for everyone who was not evacuated. There was plenty to go around. This might sound counterintuitive. If there was plenty for everyone, why did they start fighting? They weren’t starving; they had enough water, right? The way I see it, if you come up to someone and say, “I’m thirsty and you have plenty of water. Can I please have a drink?” most people are going to be a human being and share. If it was a personal thing, if Susie from the gift shop came to you and said “please,” then Susie is likely not going to be shot with an arrow or strung up in the center of the park. But everyone had enough and they were staring across the park at five different groups who could potentially come and take what they had. Instead of needing to coexist to survive, the disaster plan Ollie Tracks had put in place twenty years before bred contempt and paranoia. Basically, you had six little groups who felt like they were Israel, beset on all sides by those who wanted their extermination.

  Which brings me to the most obvious but least talked about reason why so many people died in FantasticLand. They were kids. They were scared kids. Some of them had never been away from home for more than a few weeks. These were the kids that would complain when they don’t have Wi-Fi and couldn’t get on Facebook. What do you think happens when it’s suddenly life or death? People want to make this out to be a great American failing, but try this experiment: Take one hundred kids from that age group from any country, separate them on islands, give them the cocktail of constant affirmation and stimulation these kids were getting pumped through their brains, and one hundred times out of one hundred you have bloodshed. I guarantee it. Put yourself in the shoes of any of these kids, with their peers yelling “kill or be killed” in their ear, coaxing them, begging them to swing that sword or shoot that arrow or … or stab that other kid tied up and … sorry. I’m sorry. Those images that came out of that park, I don’t want to admit it, but they got to me. FantasticLand was a place of dreams, and to see it in disrepair was bad enough, but to see the big Exclamation Point destroyed and the faces of dead … of dead employees …

  Did you ever go to FantasticLand? You should have been there with a kid. They see the line of gold in the street, and their eyes go to that giant Exclamation Point, bigger than you imagined for all those weeks, and then you decide where to go first and you get there, and that is better than you imagined. It was special. It inspired awe. Johnny Fresno was a talker, and on some level a huckster, but he built something magnificent. And that magnificent view, from the rotating tower? You could see the ocean. Clear as day.

  [Laughing] And then you go home and your daughter hears you swearing at the TV.

  INTERVIEW 2: MIRANDA TOTS

  Former director of the Palm Beach–Treasure Cove Region of the American Red Cross.

  Hurricane Sadie was the first hurricane to hit the Daytona Beach area since 1960. Let me get that out of the way up front. Most hurricanes are going to make landfall around the Miami or Key West area, and when you have limited resources, that’s where you concentrate your preventative efforts. That’s where you set up shop. Up until last fall, there seemed little to no point in putting manpower and resources in the Daytona Beach area. This was the major issue with the response. When you’re guarding your head, you don’t expect a blow to the breadbasket.

  The other issue was that no one, not in their wildest dreams, expected a storm anything like Hurricane Sadie. The laws of how hurricanes are supposed to behave seemed to no longer apply. The basic protocol for even the most severe hurricane is to evacuate everyone within ten miles of the coast where the storm is going to make landfall. That’s the worst-case scenario any human being has ever seen. Get everyone ten miles away from the coast, and then you just have 150-mile-per-hour winds to deal with. But when they were tracking the storm, immediately things started to look … “wonky” was the term we used around the office. Everything was happening faster than normal. Development off the coast that should have taken a day took nine hours, and before we knew what had happened, the storm had strengthened, and then it just kept getting stronger as we watched. We’d never seen anything like it, and by the time we realized what was going to happen, it was too late to reposition resources. All we could do was warn people and try to get as much information to the public as possible.

  What did it feel like? I asked one of the forecasters from NOAA about it. I’m not going to give you his name, but I asked him something like “how did we not see this coming?” and he told me that what he was feeling must have been similar to what the CIA agents responsible for keeping tabs on bin Laden felt on 9/11. He said it was a combination of intense regret that he hadn’t done more to figure it out and dread because, at that point, we knew it was coming and we knew it was too late to properly prepare. We were sitting there before the storm was even visible from the coast, and we knew this was going to be one of the worst disasters we’d ever seen. We knew the storm would kill people, and because of my job, I knew that the aftermath was probably going to kill more people than the storm. I was right.

  But, like I was saying, ten miles. That was the protocol. Turns out with the waves and the infrastructure not up to the task and the way the storm was pounding Florida so far north, ten miles wasn’t even close to adequate. Buildings fifteen miles away were blowing apart and we could only watch as the amount of rain went up and up and up, ten inches, twelve inches, fifteen inches. I can tell you now, at the height of the thing, I was on the phone to the Navy, and I told them, only half joking, that they might be able to find boating lanes all the way to Orlando. I could go on, but I don’t like reliving it, to be honest. Besides, you’re interested in Daytona Beach and FantasticLand, right? OK. Let me start with the hurricane, because some people don’t understand what caused these conditions in the first place.

  Hurricanes are rated on a scale from 1 to 5, 5 being the most severe. A level 5 hurricane hits you with 150- to 180-mile-per-hour winds if you are in its path. With Sadie, we saw winds that high seventy-five miles inland, which is rare. What 150-mile-per-hour winds do, effectively, is blow small buildings off their foundations and rip off the roofs of larger buildings. You would expect to see tons of roof damage for a storm like this, and what we were seeing was less roof damage and more roof removal. If someone was out in something like that, they would certainly be lifted off their feet and thrown into the nearest solid object. If you hadn’t taken shelter, you would certainly be injured or killed, and we saw our fair share
of that.

  Anyone who’s had to respond to a hurricane will tell you the absolute worst moment isn’t huddling in a bathtub hoping your siding isn’t in Louisiana. It’s the moment after the storm dies and you walk outside and realize you need help. Most Americans aren’t too happy asking for help, to be honest with you. It’s part of our national character. I used to run a Red Cross chapter in Iowa, and we had to deal with tornadoes. You’d think it would be a straightforward idea—the tornado hits; some houses are damaged; you feed, house, and provide resources for those affected. As it turns out, there is no point opening shelters after a tornado. The folks who lost their homes, they are too proud to sleep in a gym or a church. They’ll come in for a drink and a meal and to cool off or warm up, but they will not stay in a shelter. It’s not part of the character there.

  I’m on a tangent. What was I talking about? That moment, right. That moment when you come out of your house, you are alive, but you realize your house isn’t structurally sound and you have no electricity or water and there’s nothing you can immediately do about it. The absence of self-determination is a terrifying prospect for most people, and then coupled with the lack of preparation many of these people had, it was a bad situation. Some of those affected by the storm were more than unprepared. They were dumbstruck. We saw that particularly in more affluent neighborhoods. Some of them had generators, but not one of them had thought about water, you know? I ran across more than one family who had a generator but had never turned it on or they didn’t have gas for it. “Unprepared” is an understatement, but I’m digressing again.