In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  Florida is spiritually unclaimed, was my point. It’s never had a hero of history like the cowboy or frontiersman for its people to rally around.

  That night, Noah and I resolved to become those heroes. We’d be the native sons who created the grandest, funniest, most far-ranging, depth-plumbing, tear-jerking, je-ne-sais-quoi-capturing work of art ever to emerge from the rank morasses and mirage metropolises of our beloved home!

  “Vanishing home,” Noah pointed out. “Climate change. Rising tides. Place is sinking back into the water, don’t forget. There’s our timeliness peg.”

  It was decided. We’d give Florida the elegy she deserved. We toasted ourselves.

  Of course, we toasted ourselves many times more that night. When we came to the next afternoon, our plan had curdled somewhat. Spoiling our excitement was the sour taste of real-life exigency. (For one thing: the lactic acid we would have to expend.) Over the course of days, then weeks, then months, our plan fell out of focus. We hadn’t consciously rejected it so much as recognized it as fantasy. We’d love to see it through, yet it was practically impossible for us to imagine taking the time necessary not only to plan such a trip but to carry it out.

  Noah found a job—at JPMorgan Chase, of all places. Something about billions of dollars in fines levied by the U.S. government, and Chase needing to hire more veterans as part of their penance. Noah settled in as a client investigator. He found and promptly married a young bride, whose extended, very Polish family understood four or five syllables of my best-man speech. He moved to Queens and climbed slowly out of debt.

  I, meanwhile, puttered apace. I adjunct-instructed a handful of undergraduate courses at Columbia University, where the six grand they paid me in no way remunerated my efforts. I authored several hacky magazine features, for which the dwindling cents-per-word rates were no better. In lieu of updating my résumé, I revised my bio whenever a publication I had written for folded. Day jobs—I had a few. But traditional employ does not agree with me. Mostly what I did during this period was worry that my shallow wellspring of story ideas had been exhausted by my first book, which was a commercial catastrophe.

  Nevertheless, while Noah thrived, I kept on keeping on, at least in terms of being a moody, difficult, irresolute fellow plagued by tensions and contradictions. My hypos got the upper hand of me, as they say. I drank deeper and deeper of the bottles of Old Overholt I bought every week. Then every five days. Then every two. I put on records by that good Catholic boy Ronnie James Dio and staggered about my apartment, medicine in hand held steady as a gyroscope. Without Noah there, I was free to kick about my piles of remaindered hardcovers like a stinko dragon circling the worthless ingots in its den. I ordered delivery nonstop. I lost weekends to actions that felt newly taken but were in truth the original action acted out over and over again. I went to Sunday Masses trashed, so that I might meet my maker while buoyed with Dutch courage.

  Here I will cop to the fact that I had no mortgage payments and no outstanding student loans. No health crises, car accidents, run-ins with the law. Nor parents, siblings, or children in dire financial straits. Yes. Seemingly blessed in most respects.

  And forasmuch as I would like to wax pedantic about how it takes greater virtue to bear good fortune than bad—don’t worry. In due time, fate’s fickle hand shot me the bird, which arrived in the form of a letter from the government. According to this certified letter, I was beholden to something. Ho ho. I owed $37,000 in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. For you see, when you are granted an advance on a book prior to its publication, the check you receive has none of your federal, state, or city taxes deducted from it. It’s one big lump sum, like the number stamped on an oversized game-show check. And cashing such a ludicrous check, I can assure you—it induces a kind of stupor. Witnessing your ATM balance wink from three integers to six, you can’t help but shush the small inner voice that warns: You know that check was worth about half of what it said it’s worth, right?

  So if one were to, say, blow through all of one’s advance? After improperly reporting said advance on one’s tax return? One might discover that one owes Uncle Sam the dregs of one’s savings account. And then some. And then then some, garnished wages and all (if one had wages to garnish), since Uncle Sam had been attempting to bill one at one’s old address back in Manhattan, compounding interest as he went.

  I had to go on Noah’s walk now. Hastily I educated myself, reading every walking narrative I could find. But in absorbing walking narrative after walking narrative, I came to realize that I loathed walking narratives. I loathed their epiphanies. Their treacly sentimentality. Most especially, I loathed their tropes. Like, the walk-as-exorcism. The walk-as-self-sanctification. The walk as fast shuffle of stale experiences. As through line between me-as-I-was and me-as-I-am.

  Walking and confessional writing have been convoluted for centuries, basically since the time of Rousseau, who noted: “Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself…as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot.” What Rousseau started, the Romantics popularized. Their peripatetic heroes walked and pondered, walked and pondered. They jotted down the discursive links between their thinking and their strolling in “nature” (some footpaths around a country estate, usually). By turns maudlin and peevish, these fancy boys sounded out their selves with each step. Like the Sierra Club after them, they sought to repair their sense of lost unity by hiking through pretty scenery.

  And, Christ—bourgeois origins notwithstanding, America loves this hero.

  Why should this be? Maybe it’s because “the soul of the [pedestrian] journey is liberty, perfect liberty…to think, feel, do just as one pleases,” as Hazlitt wrote. Maybe it’s because “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me…Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune,” as Whitman wrote.

  Maybe it’s because the road is supposed to be the American’s home, and movement his means of expression. The only way I can truly pursue happiness is if I take off after it down that American Way. And so on.

  Yeah, I wanted to write about none of that. Neither self nor scenery nor old, dusty trail. The only state I wished to chronicle was Florida. Understanding and then making credible my birthplace—the peninsula that stupefies, sickens, infuriates, and finally embarrasses the rest of the nation—was task enough for me. But how best to capture it?

  I marinated on that. Wily as I judged myself to be writing-wise, I felt I lacked the chops to match up against my home. Almost daily it tossed up villains and tragedies that were the envy of any novelist, to say nothing of a reality artist in desperate need of quick bucks.

  Then I asked myself: Wait a minute, does one describe an advertisement? A franchise? A souvenir store, gated subdivision, drive-in church? Of course not! These are all signs, and one does not describe signs. Words slip from these as though they are Teflon-coated. No, signs you take pictures of. Dreamscapes, you film.

  So we’d make a gonzo documentary! Duh! We’d go it alone, sleep anywhere, interview anybody, live on almost nothing, eat and drink whatever, befriend strangers rich or poor, sane or not. We’d brave the worst that heat and sun, mishap and blister, officialdom, prejudice, and politics could do to us. Most crucially, we’d film nonstop. Altogether sui generis, behaving just as we pleased, we would do what the Chamber of Commerce has always encouraged: Come on down to Florida, and exploit her! Use her resources to satisfy your wants.

  I pitched Noah. He thought the idea excellent. What especially excited him, he told me, was the prospect of quitting his corporate-greed-enabling gig at Chase. “I felt less bad shooting at people during the siege of Fallujah,” he said. Problem was, neither of us knew anything about documentary filmmaking. So the plan stalled again.

  A couple of weeks later, out of the blue, I received a Google Chat message from a guy I’d studied
writing with—Glenn. From our limited time together in New York City, I’d known Glenn to be an affable Ottawan, a genuinely sympathetic guy who had been socialized within a functioning family in a functioning democracy. An excellent youth tennis player and camp counselor, like. The kind of progressive international who betrays no anguish over, say, a God-shaped hole. Who believes the best lack all conviction. That’s the Glenn I palled around with: the near-ideal product of a tolerant society.

  We were as much fascinated by each other as we were repulsed. While we studied “cultural reporting and criticism,” whatever that could possibly mean, Glenn and I engaged in epic weekly drinking bouts. Friday nights at dive bars across the city, we two contraries roared like men who had carried a confrontation with each other to its distressing limits before suddenly safely passing those limits. Bit by bit, I learned that Glenn had been born in Malawi to a diplomat father and an accountant mother. At age four he returned with his parents to Canada, where he was treated to the aforementioned idyll in suburban Ottawa. Nothing much to report, Glenn contended. He wasn’t even that rebellious of a teen, since the idea of rebelling in order to gain identity requires that you have something to rebel against. Canada is…post-liberally humane. To a fault.

  Mostly there was the basilisking glare of television, of mall movie theaters. That’s where Glenn’s filmmaking enthusiasm was stoked. The screen gave him something to crane his neck toward, like a plant in a hothouse with a single bulb above.

  After receiving his English degree from McGill University in Montreal, Glenn spent a few gap years tramping around Africa with the woman who would become his wife. He freelanced news stories to Canadian outlets. When those didn’t kick-start a whirlwind career, he became the tiniest bit depressed. Depressed enough to consider entering the field of nonprofit development, I should clarify. Traveling around the continent, Glenn became fascinated by the ways in which systems break down, noble intentions go awry. He decided to involve himself in some real white-savior stuff: water purification projects, mobile financial networks for informal economies—you know the type. Then he realized he had no future in any of that. Aimless and listless, Glenn made the mistake of applying to a writing program in New York City. Which was where “our destinies became commingled,” as he put it.

  On Google Chat, Glenn caught me up with his life. Turned out, he had abandoned the writing thing four years ago, when he moved to Toronto. Turned out, he was working in documentary film—first as an assistant, now as a producer. Mere days ago, in fact, he’d finished shooting a couple episodes of a Vice Media television show.

  But he was having something of a thirty-three-and-a-third life crisis, he told me. “I’m tired of being a do-boy for tattooed chefs getting drunk in Copenhagen” was how he phrased it. What he wanted to do, he confessed, was direct.

  “So,” Glenn typed. “I need a project. And I thought maybe it’d be fun to come up with something together.”

  “Boy,” I replied. “Wouldn’t it.”

  * * *

  —

  First I had to enlighten Glenn. Which was easy enough, since every native Floridian regardless of occupation happens also to be a psychoanalyst of our state. This is because people, when they find out one of us is actually from the place (and they see that our eyes are clear, and we do not twitch involuntarily like a sleeping pack animal), tend to take us by the arm and wonder earnestly: Just what is the deal with Florida?

  The deal with Florida, I told Glenn, is the charlatans and lunatics and Snapchat-famous plastic surgeons. It is the Ponzi schemes, the Byzantine corruption, the evangelical fervor, and the consenting-adult depravity. It is the seasonless climate. The lack of historical consciousness. The way in which this nation’s unctuous elements tend to trickle down as though Florida were the grease trap under America’s George Foreman Grill. It is the bath salts. It is all of the above, and more on top of that.

  Its name means “feast of flowers,” I explained, but what “Florida” has come to connote is: hucksters, boosters, and fly-by-night mountebanks. Carpetbaggers, chicanerers, and salesfellows who grafted the American Dream onto strange roots in sandy soil. These rule breakers and rainmakers constructed modern Florida within the last seventy-odd years. They were able to do this because, unlike those of Hawaii and California, Florida’s plots were bog-cheap, its taxes nonexistent, and the flat, empty canvas of its peninsula allowed for the projection of any and all fantasies. Every single day since 1950, about a thousand people have been lured to Florida by its chimerical promise. (Several hundred recent arrivals also flee every day, repelled or disillusioned by what they’ve found, but we needn’t trouble ourselves with them.)

  In an astonishingly brief span of time, Florida has grown from a backwater of 955,000 mostly white, mostly rural, mostly Southern-born inhabitants to our third most crowded state. Its population of newcomers is more ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse than the United States itself. As a result, Florida is now the petri dish whence things like Stand Your Ground laws, core curricula, and majority-minority city governments spring. It is where fabulous wealth, natural splendor, and unfettered desire intermingle with systemic poverty, inequality, violence, and addiction. Growth here is pegged to housing and defense industries, the largesse of corporate giants, the fairy tale of expansion-in-perpetuity—and yet, for all of the rhetoric about entrepreneurship, global convergence, and affordable mortgages for all, everyday life in Florida is still tied to the service sector, is still a perilous, debt-ridden existence stitched together from the shreds of part-time shifts. Oh, also: The rising seas caused by global climate change will wash over this state within a hundred years—and we’re still selling the dream, still hawking waterfront condos as fast as we can build them.

  “This is vulgar and despair-inducing,” Glenn offered in reply.

  “Yes, fine, whatever!” I said. “But know that the vulgarity and despair exist only because of the rest of the country.” Florida is a pure creation of others’ demand. It is a reflection of the hopes and wants of America at large. Florida’s retirees, its vacationing families, its arriviste millionaires looking for second homes and tax havens—to say nothing of the losers and dreamers and petty criminals who drive down the map in search of orange groves, smoking rivers, and third chances—these people are us.

  There was a simpler way to put it, I said. “Florida: America Concentrate™.”

  Glenn was aboard. Noah—aboard. They made peace with their wives; I found a subletter. Together we emptied our savings accounts, rainy-day funds, and IRAs. We applied for new credit cards. We Skyped to plan, ostensibly, but mostly we giggled. Finally, in late August 2016, grinning as though expecting our bluff to be called any moment now!, the three of us convened in Atlanta, where my uncle lives. He’d agreed to drive us to the Florida-Alabama border. My uncle was in fact a little disappointed that we hadn’t invited him along, for my uncle is something of an adventurer himself, albeit a real one. Guy used to compete in Ironman Triathlons and has through-hiked the likes of the Pacific Crest and Appalachian trails. When he got his first look at the three of us, though—at the Dunwoody MARTA station snapping our fingers at one another’s crotches while wearing basketball shorts and shower slides—the guy wires supporting his smile snapped.

  He insisted on taking us to REI posthaste. There, he perched upon a hunting stool and tried to slacken his cramp of disgust. We’d need these kinds of underwear, he said, and actual packs (not camera bags, which Glenn had brought along). “We gotta get this,” I said, extending and collapsing a retractable baton in the self-defense aisle. “You try to use that against a criminal,” Noah responded, “and it for sure is going to end up in your butt.”

  My uncle ordered us to march a few laps around the store while wearing our loaded packs. Doing so, I caught a glimpse of myself in a full-length mirror. Friend, let me tell you—I am built for the sartorial generosities of sweater weather. My training regimen
leading up to this trip had been: mash out thirty minutes on the elliptical machine; hit the bar; use customer rewards points for Papa John’s on the way home. Like a functionally alcoholic baseball player rolling into spring training twenty pounds overweight, I figured I’d play myself into shape. Honestly, I’d put more effort into my lustrous, shoulder-length mullet.

  The next day, we piled into my uncle’s SUV and drove to Florida’s westernmost border. Along the way, Noah and Glenn took the opportunity to size each other up IRL. I’m sure they also took note of the different versions of my self I presented when addressing one guy and then the other. But since I cannot abide being an interpersonal go-between (sink or swim, my dogs), I turned our attention to a paper map of Florida whenever possible.

  “What’s your budget per day, gents?” my uncle asked from the driver’s seat.

  We stared at him blankly. “What about per week?” he tried again. “Per month?”

  We didn’t have an answer for him.

  “How many miles do you have to walk per day to meet your deadline?”

  The three of us turned to one another, shook our heads, shrugged.

  Midafternoon, we pulled up to the Flora-Bama Lounge, a debaucherous indoor/outdoor Hooverville that straddles both states. We sat down, had a beer. “I’ll be staying the night in Gulf Shores,” my uncle said. “So if you change your mind…you know…there’s no shame in that.”

  We cinched our packs and said our goodbyes. We clomped through a deckside bingo game on our way to the beach. Dropping onto the fine grain, we took our first small steps as effortlessly as astronauts on the moon. For one hundred paces, we were away and floating. Then Glenn said, “I suppose I should be filming this.” We turned back. By the time we’d made it a hundred feet past that, we had concluded that walking on shifting sands with forty-five-pound packs on our shoulders was the worst possible introduction to our odyssey.