“I think it would be difficult to keep them all 6 feet apart,” said Jenifer Parnell, the Flora-Bama’s head of marketing and public relations.

Fighting Covid-19 is a huge challenge for a state where the whole economy is geared toward gathering people together in one spot—the beach, a bubbling spring or a crowded theme park. And the state’s culture, from its bars to its politics, is focused on giving people whatever they want—the fantasy of fun and the freedom from any consequences. The idea of telling all those good-time Charlies to go home and stay there is so foreign to Florida it might as well be scrawled on the sand in Sanskrit.

Much of America might have been horrified that DeSantis, who possesses a Trumpian disdain for what he’s called “draconian” quarantine rules in other states, kept the beaches open until after spring break, turning the sand into viral petri dishes, but Floridians weren’t surprised. Spring break means big business here, so much so that normally pious Panhandle residents look the other way at the bars offering wet T-shirt contests and other ribald amusements.

Nor were Floridians shocked when DeSantis—a Yale graduate with a law degree from Harvard who has experienced problems with putting on both gloves and a mask—said he was fine with people going back to some beaches last week, as long as they did it in a safe way. Subsequent photos of crowds flocking to Jacksonville Beach as if the pandemic were over led to the hashtag #FloridaMorons becoming the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter on Saturday. He took the mockery in stride, telling the beachgoers, “For those who try to say you’re morons, I'll take you over those who criticize you every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez (left) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) attend a press conference at the Miami Beach Convention Center in April. | Getty Images

DeSantis is poised to become one of the nation’s first governors to reopen his state. Florida’s “Safer At Home” order expires April 30, and he’s set up a group primarily of business executives to advise him on how to do it, possibly on a region-by-region basis. But if he does, it will turn Florida into a different kind of petri dish: A test of what happens when an livelihoods-over-lives politics collides with what businesses, families and bar-goers are really willing to do.

Even in a state that’s wired to cater to the whims of its 100 million annual visitors, there’s a tension between the eagerness of pro-business politicians like DeSantis to return to business as usual and the lawsuit-conscious cautiousness of a tourism industry that worries reopening too soon could do permanent damage to the state’s worry-free image.

Right now, instead of following DeSantis, many of the state’s businesses are nervously keeping an eye on the state’s biggest tourism moneymaker, Walt Disney World—although they lack similar resources for a long-term pandemic pause. The park closed March 16, well ahead of the governor’s order, and has yet to announce a reopening date. One analyst predicted that, because of a lack of a vaccine and an expected economic slump, Disney’s gates would remain locked until 2021.

In the meantime, like schools and strip clubs and other shut-down entities around the state, the Flora-Bama is trying to shift the Flora-Bama experience to the web, sort of.

Every day, and sometimes twice a day, the bar puts on a live, online concert by the various bands that would have been playing there had it been open. At the bottom of the screen are links for sending in money. They are doing that to help pay the salaries of the Flora-Bama’s 500 or so employees during the shutdown, Parnell said. Another link offers a way to support the bands, most of them local groups that have nowhere else to play right now, she said.

“We’re trying to keep the staff together,” she explained, “so when we reopen, we can go right back to serving people like before.”

No one knows whether that goal has the same chance that a flung fish has of crossing a state line.

Florida tourism dates back to the 1870s, when Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe moved into a house on a bluff overlooking the St. Johns River and wrote stories and columns for Northern newspapers encouraging everyone to come see the beauty of Florida. Her own house became one of the state’s first tourist attractions. Steamboat captains would charge passengers 75 cents a head to cruise past her home in hopes of catching a glimpse of America’s most famous writer sitting on her veranda.

As one historian has observed, there’s a straight line from the throngs gazing up at Mrs. Stowe’s Cottage to the throngs that normally would be jammed into Cinderella’s Castle. But right now, a skeleton crew at Disney World raises the flag over an empty Main Street USA every day. The Disney hotels are closed and so are its shopping centers. The most popular tourism destination in the world has furloughed 43,000 employees. Fantasyland just got real.