Florida …

June 24, 2019

I awoke in my motel room in Hollywood, Fla., at 6:00 AM and walked the one block to the beach. The humidity was stifling even then. Dozens of people were there, strolling, jogging, watching the sunrise. I took a few pictures then headed back to the air conditioning.

Some Americans love Florida, others dislike it intensely. The Sunshine State is a place of opportunity and prosperity, of refuge and peace, of escape, joy, violence and tragedy. So—how is it different from any other place?  An intriguing question or a pointless one.

I flew to Fort Lauderdale for a couple of days last week for a family memorial service, and started perspiring as soon as I stepped outside the airport terminal. Jungle heat. No one likes it. My cousin, who’s been here for many years, says she rides her bike early in the morning in the summer, but hardly ever steps outside later. She, like so many others here, came from the North, where they hated the winters. They’ll never go back.

A friend in Connecticut points out that in winter in northern states you run from a heated house to a heated car, while in summer in Florida you run from an air-conditioned house to an air-conditioned car. So if it’s just about weather, you may as well dislike cold places and hot ones more or less equally.

Everyone has an opinion about Florida, in a way they don’t have opinions about Arkansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Maine, Indiana, or others. Those opinions are judgments on observations of actual conditions: the weather is fabulous or awful, the landscape is gardenlike or boring, state tax policy is great for business and retirees, or indifferent to education and the underprivileged.

I wonder instead about the idea of Florida that’s in the heads of visitors, immigrants from other places, as well as the natives. That idea may have to do with why so many people who live elsewhere consider packing up and moving here, and so many do it. “A thousand people a day,” a young banker told me.

From my rental car on a local street just south of Fort Lauderdale, I watched the blocklike rows of high-rise apartments and condos pass. The landscape reminded me of photos of Russia’s Siberian cities: mind-numbing sameness, as if designed by zombie architects. But then beyond are the glimmering white beaches, the clear, aquamarine ocean! Beautiful, wide, long, suggestive of Hawaii or Tahiti. Real sand, real ocean, crystal clear and azure. But it’s Florida.

I was at loose ends one evening, my cousins had plans. I walked the Hollywood boardwalk, which actually is made of bricks. I didn’t want to sit in a restaurant, so I bought a pizza and sat on a bench with my dinner, watching families, twentysomethings, and old folks saunter past, all enjoying the warm soothing air, the waving palms, the tropical setting, the laughing children. Different, but pleasant. For me, an adventure.

The next day we all had brunch then—what else? The Casino, in slightly more upscale Hallendale, which sits in a shopping mall next to the Gulfstream racetrack. My cousins played slots in the refrigerated climate of the casino. I watched the ponies, amazed that they sprinted around that mile-and-something track without collapsing. I staggered from the shade of one canopy to the next then escaped to the arctic temperatures inside.

The idea of Florida exists in the real world and in myth, the distinction enshrouded in dreams. It already hints at the myth of California a generation or more ago: dreamlike, distant, beckoning, intimating escape and salvation. Today the Golden State is afflicted by an angry divide between wealth and poverty, rampant homelessness, prohibitive costs of everything. The dream there has become seedy and threadbare.

If ideas may someday become bitter and turn to myth, Florida still is magical for those who come. The gray heads still arrive from New England and the Midwest, the churches and supermarkets are well-populated with them. Young people come from everywhere, seeking affluence, not Palm Beach fakery but the profits of real work in finance, real estate, engineering, technology. The wealth is there to be earned. Years ago, it was all about golf and oranges.

The new Floridians come for the promise of jobs and opportunity.  Yet for many it is the differentness of Florida that matters more, and prosperity is only incidental to a mysterious mix of confidence in finding life’s purpose and a haunting fear of losing it in this place that is both exotic and banal. The mystery beckons also to the immigrants who land on Florida’s shores, desperate to seize freedom, which is real, not a myth.

They come to a place that resembles Brazil more than Brooklyn, where pythons and alligators patrol the swamps and builders keep throwing up those condo towers, the interstates are gridlocked, the suffocating summer heat shimmers even at dawn. It has only been a decade since the real estate crash devastated the state.  But today it still is Florida, offering its promise of a new life. For the Floridians, whenever they arrived, the right word is hope, which, guided by forbearance and faith, shatters any myth.