Observations about the nation’s Sunshine State
My visit to Stuart
I have just returned from a five-day stay in Florida. My state of mind is similar to that when I returned to my home state of Connecticut after having lived in Paris for five years and I went to buy a yogurt. I was so overwhelmed by the staggering amount of options available, I was unable to choose. I had forgotten that side of America. Florida is like an overwhelming dairy section. Only larger, and more frightening.
For one thing, it is difficult to discern whether or not anyone actually lives there. The homes are all hidden away behind pink stucco walls in private communities with gold plated gates embellished with pineapple tips. These communities have names that call to mind a particularly attractive funeral parlor with wrought iron railings and lots of pink silk: “Sunset Dreams”, “Melody Lanes”, “Eternal Sands”. The houses are indiscernible from one another and the grass is uniform in color and in length: obedient half-inch tufts of Lilly Pulitzer green, here, there and everywhere. You’re not likely to see any rabbits nibbling on the grass, unless they have a weakness for chemical turf builder.
Many of the homes in these gated communities sport horrendous, sci-fi offshoots from their back sides. These enclosures are made out of steel and wire netting and are intended to protect one’s pool from any leaf that tries to commit suicide in its chlorinated waters. The real purpose of these contraptions (Transform your outdoor pool into an indoor paradise!) is to protect Floridians from icky things like oxygen, the irksome sounds of nature, and the lifeless regards of the nameless brown men milling about their property, clipping away at their nuclear grass.
For all the bragging they do about their climate, Floridians are curiously intent on avoiding all contact with it. They encase their outdoor pools and patios in sixty thousand-dollar cages, they block out foreign noises with SleepMate 980A machines and they eradicate all traces of the sub-tropical temperature they claim to adore with arctic A.C units.
When it comes time to leave the climate-controlled interiors of their pre-fabricated homes, Floridians do so in climate-controlled vehicles. During my stay, I learned that many Floridians opt for a convertible, which certainly seems like a lovely way to get around, but they rarely put the tops down because “it gets too hot”. In their endless quest to avoid any contact with pavement and concrete, Floridians use drive-thru banks and drive-thru dry cleaners and drive-thru coffee shops. When it comes time to eat, they choose restaurants based on the cost of the lunch special, the proficiency of the air conditioning system and the caliber of the all-you-can-eat salad buffet. They never have to wonder whether to eat inside or outside because the outside doesn’t exist.
There aren’t any people on the streets in Florida. There aren’t any people in the buildings. Once in a while, if you get up early enough, you can spot the rare homo sapiens coming out to fetch a paper but he retreats quickly, and is awfully hard to spot. The only place where one can see this breed in the wild is along the interstate I95. Here, you can witness the Floridian in their natural element, breathing safely and securely in the cushioned environment of an automatic vehicle. More often than not, they will be sucking on an oversize straw poking perversely out of a Styrofoam cup. Many Floridians refer to this as “lunch”, but do not be fooled- they have already eaten. It is a snack.
It is important, nay, essential, for Floridians to avoid car pooling at all costs. Imagine the risks of encasing three entire people inside of a vehicle designed to accommodate five! The carpoolers might be spotted, recognized even by their fellow Interstate-users, and God only knows what that could lead to. Entire hordes of people might start jumping into the vehicles of complete and utter strangers. People would fight over XM Satellite Radio stations. It would be carpool anarchy.
Now, I don’t mean to insinuate that Floridians aren’t social by nature, because they are- it’s just that they don’t like to be too close to one another. (This is why Floridians all own King size beds.) In order to propitiate the age-old tradition of shopping with the new-age obsession of keeping-one’s-distance, female Floridians have come up with an ingenuous new use for the Walkie-talkie option on their cell phones. These flip-phone devices serve a vital purpose in the dangerous zone of strip malls and stop lights along the aforementioned Interstate. En route to the strip mall, they send an elected scout ahead of the pack to Assess the Situation. Using the Walkie-talkie option, they are than able to simultaneously operate their motor vehicles and relay vital information back and forth between their fellow drivers without having to take their foot off the accelerator. (Three spaces in front of T.J Max, only two cars in the Starbucks drive-thru line, Fire Sale at Lowmans!!!)
When the Floridian female shops without her entourage, she calls it “running errands”. Many of these “errands” necessitate the purchase and consequential return of an item in the same week, because the item in question was never needed in the first place. This cycle of conspicuous consumption allows the Floridian female to contribute to the economy on a number of different levels. Sadly, my observations in Martin County led me to surmise that the average Floridian has a small foot, but a massive carbon footprint. In addition to possessing frequent-buyer cards to a number of gas stations, Floridians go through a really impressive amount of Styrofoam- a necessary material for eating “on the go”.
One would think that a state with a sub-tropical climate would bestow an endless bounty of fresh fruit and vegetables upon its happy citizens. I did not find this to be the case. In fact, with the exception of certain airlines and Christmas ‘89 at Aunt Cindy’s, I have never eaten so poorly in my life.
Florida has a spattering of casual restaurants near the Intercoastal, and many of them are charming, with Pirate-like setups and weathered wood patios- in fact, these are some of the only places in Florida where one can eat outside. I went to one such place, I think it was called “Swarmy’s”, or some such nonsense, and I made the mistake of ordering that day’s “Ship Log Special”, the mussels marinara. My mussels came with a side salad, and as a testament to the superior intelligence of Floridian waterfowl, the seagull that granted me several perfunctory visits seemed far more interested in my cherry tomatoes than he did in my shellfish.
My mussels had clearly been frozen in a previous life, and then reincarnated in a microwave before reaching our table. The dish tasted like something a sadistic three year old might make for a babysitter. I gave them back to our Lady Pirate waitress with a genuine request that she not bring me anything else, but she made quite a show of sending out a series of assistants to the assistant manager, “How about the steamers? Now those are really fresh”.
Everyone at Swarmy’s looked like they were having a good time besides my mother and I- my mother being someone who still has something of a palette, despite the fact that willingly continues to reside in Florida. I paid extra special attention to the seafood dishes and stacked hamburgers ambling by me on the upturned palms of the orange waitresses, and ticked off their faults, one by one, in my head. Store-bought, frozen, defrosted, still frozen, alive? We paid our check (no charge for the mussels- Like most Americans, Floridians have the quality of unfailing politeness in the face of adversity) and made our way up and down the various wooden exit ramps to the sprawling parking lot. The faces of the people in the restaurant stuck with me as we prepared to reverse out of our extra-wide spot. They looked happy, doggonit. They looked positively pickled to be out and about at Swarmy’s, where every entrée came with a side salad and a “home-baked” loaf of bread with a dagger sticking out of it.
And that is when I realized that Florida is to me what Europe is to the type of American that correlates fanny-packs with stylish traveling. If traveling “abroad” requires a bit of thought and preparation, Florida is the opposite. Here is an entire state where everything is simple and sterile and easy and clean. This is a place where confrontations never happen because you only have to come into contact with other people’s bodies if you really, really want to. (That’s why there’s the drive-thru!) This is a state for people who want to coast through the rest of their Posturepedic® lives without a care in a 70 degree world. Florida is Ab Psych 101 for the middle aged. It’s the gut you’ll get an A in.
I came to Florida pitying the plump, protected people who had never actually tasted an authentic Florida grapefruit because 50% of their state’s produce is exported, people who equate The Great Outdoors with a dotted yellow line and consider orange and purple appropriate color combinations for any occasion. I spent most of my stay wondering if I could change things, influence people, make a difference somehow- remind folks that human beings are bipeds because we are meant to walk. But I had an epiphany in the parking lot of Swarmy’s. I was surrounded by people who preferred the smell of Febreze to the briny smell of the ocean, constitutions so mind-blowingly lethargic, they would rather turn on their televisions to find out the temperature than to step foot outside- this type of person did not want to change! As hard as it was for me to understand, this type of person- this Floridian- was happy.
As we pulled out of Swarmy’s, I felt happy, too. I was lucky enough to live in a town that received an average snowfall of 90 inches per season where no one had T.V. Air conditioning wasn’t much in demand, either. No one from Florida would be visiting me soon.
