by Kent Russell
“It’s got shocks and everything!” the underdeveloped man called out.
“You’re goddamned right it does!” I cried.
Pain could not reach me as I ran the stroller through several donuts. The carriage swung rhythmically on its springs, rocking my pack to sleep. “Glenn! Noah!” I said. “There’s room enough to stack one of your bags here! Rock-a-bye Thunder!”
“No,” Glenn said. “Absolutely not. This is what’s going to get us messed with. We’re talking about people who…literacy is provocative to these people. Their line of thinking will go: Why do you have that? Where did you get it? Who are you? Are you people who are better off dead?”
“It’s on the nose,” Noah said of the buggy. “But, hell, I’m down.”
He slung his bag into the pram. I held my breath as the springs squealed. They strained, they settled, they supported the box at an uncanny depth, like that of a full diaper.
“So what’s y’all’s cause?” the cashier asked. “Where can I put some money towards your cause?”
“We’re actually collecting for our cause,” Noah said, turning to her.
“But what’s the cause?” she pressed.
“Uh.” I stepped in for Noah. “We’re making Florida great again. For the first time.”
“Wonderful!” the cashier said. She handed Noah a fiver. “God bless you boys.”
Glenn started down the road at a rapid clip. Noah and I hurried to catch up. “I am a malingerer and a pussy,” I said. “Fine. But this trip is not about putting on the hair shirt. You know? We gotta be able to think if we’re ever going to see that money?”
Glenn said nothing. He leveled his chin at the road, raked a hand through his wet hair.
“Hey,” Noah said, looking at his phone. “According to eBay, this brand of buggy goes for a hundred and fifty dollars, plus a hundred dollars for shipping.”
Glenn kept to his brisk estrangement. But I was euphoric. I babbled on and on during this honeymoon period, my sweat streaking the insides of my glasses lenses like obverse tears. I paid no mind to the burning drill bit of postmeridian sun. I sweltered under it happily, remaining outside with my new filly while Glenn and Noah entered a gas station to get Gatorades.
To be honest, I no longer want to step inside a gas station, CVS, Publix when we’re out on the road. I can’t abide the air-conditioning. My body balks at it, seemingly cannot process it, as if it were lactose or something. I cross the threshold into a frigid Tom Thumb, and boom—I evince all the symptoms of shock.
It feels good to be perspiring, especially come evening. No longer do I get the sense that I am covered in the day’s expectorate. It’s almost as if the sweat is evidence of a skill.
I’ve grown acclimatized, is my point. And I’ve realized something. Being sweaty is a self-fulfilling circuit.
Now, I am a torrential sweater. This I chalk up to my childhood bedroom not having air-conditioning. In retrospect, this seems patently insane, considering that every other room, building, automobile, and enclosed space in South Florida is chilled to a bracing sixty degrees. My bedroom, however, was exposed to the elements. And according to the research, the intensity of one’s sweating gets “set” during one’s earliest years. Though everybody is born with virtually the same number of sweat glands, they’ll be “activated” only if they are exercised in youth. Hence, those who grow up in hot or even moderately warm places will have more active sweat glands. If those places aren’t intensely climate-controlled, that is.
And therein lies the self-fulfilling circuit. If you don’t sweat when you’re young, you won’t sweat when you’re older. If your formative years took place in a conurbation that is laid out like an ore-extracting colony on an inhospitable planet—if you hold your breath and run from one air lock to the next—then of course you’re going to feel like you might die when you have to spend time outside. If you never get sweaty, you’re going to loathe that little amount you do sweat. You’re going to go to greater and greater lengths to avoid it.
It was not always this way. As recently as one generation ago, Floridians were attuned to the rhythms of their environment. They lived in tin-roofed bungalows built to capture crosscurrents. They planted shady, fast-growing chinaberry trees alongside their homes. They closed the windows and shut the blinds at midmorning, to keep the cool inside. They made rituals out of sitting on the front porch in the evening, or going for twilit strolls. They met the place halfway. The contemporary mind recoils at the thought. Dormers, screened windows, wide verandas, high ceilings, sleeping porches, paddle fans, louvered jalousies, terra-cotta tile, classical porticoes, dogtrot breezeways, canvas awnings, iced tea brewed in pickle jars. Even sleep—sleep was induced by the sounds of hooting owls, croaking frogs, fish flashing out of water. Air-conditioning changed all that.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the birth of air-conditioning does not contravene this fact. John Gorrie, a physician in (where else?) Apalachicola, wanted to lower the body temperatures of his malaria and yellow fever patients, so he began experimenting with crude forms of mechanical cooling. He developed an apparatus that blew air over buckets of ice suspended from the ceiling of his hospital. The results were mixed, but Gorrie became obsessed with the idea of chilled-air-as-cure-all. He tried using a steam-driven compressor to cool air; this led to his patenting the world’s first “Machine for the Artificial Production of Ice” in 1851. His pioneering work would become the foundation for modern air-conditioning.
Willis Haviland Carrier perfected the mechanical air-conditioning system in 1902. Problem was, mechanical air-conditioning was incredibly costly. Only a few movie theaters, department stores, and wealthy residences could afford it. Motels and hotels charged an extra dollar for rooms with it. “The return on this investment has proven to be quite phenomenal,” admitted the owner of the Raleigh Hotel in Miami back then. “Our summer trade has increased considerably.”
In 1922, Willis Carrier had a breakthrough: He ditched the large and inefficient piston-driven compressor and coupled a centrifugal compressor to the air conditioner in its place. (He also came up with his own refrigerant, Carrene, which was a good deal safer than the deadly ammonia gas his old ACs ran on.) Not too long after, air-conditioning could be found in banks, government buildings, hospitals.
The biseasonal culture of Florida—half the year: inferno, other half: paradiso—was never to be the same. No longer a six-month industry, tourism became a year-round engine of growth. Air-conditioned factories and offices meant that businesses could relocate from the Northeast and Midwest. New Floridians bought new houses built with concrete block instead of wood. Efficient, inexpensive window units fit these tract houses perfectly. Or, rather, the houses were built around the units. Then came the shopping malls and chain restaurants which were built around the sprawl built around the AC in microwavable insta-metropolises like Port St. Lucie, Cape Coral, Port Charlotte, Pompano Beach…
The unintended consequence of this-all was the slow death of Old Florida. Agrarianism, cultural isolation, historical consciousness, an orientation toward folk culture, a preoccupation with kinship, neighborliness, a strong sense of place, a relatively slow pace of life—the lot of it went the way of vernacular architecture. Regional distinctiveness was reduced to culinary habits and tics of speech. Previously enculturated lives were reoriented toward…what? The TV room?
So goes technological determinism. The air conditioner, the TV, the automobile—these supposed tools are remarkably good at creating demand for themselves. People decide they cannot live without them; they restructure their lives around them; they work to serve them rather than the other way around. It comes as absolutely zero surprise that the single greatest source of energy expended by Floridians today is: air-conditioning. Virtually every problem associated with the present-day state, from urban sprawl to highway congestion to contaminated drinking water to an
tisocial atomization, has been exacerbated by its spread.
But, hey—climate control. Modern Florida couldn’t exist without it. If you look past the social and cultural costs, why, we purchased our existence for the low, low price of shifting the surplus heat somewhere else. Onto surrounding streets, and ultimately into the planet’s atmosphere. Just wait till rural India and China get a taste of this!
* * *
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In the late afternoon, Glenn finally said, “I haven’t seen you this happy since the last time we got a cart.”
“Yeah,” I said. “My mind is free! My gaze is outward and upward.”
“Roadkill,” Noah interjected. “Watch out for the roadkill there.”
“Think of how good it’ll be for you, though, in a couple weeks,” I said. “Joy is the feeling of your power increasing, right? By then, you should be a bag-carrying machine!”
“It is amazing for someone to have so much privilege and yet choose to waste it in this way,” Glenn deadpanned.
“Whatever, man,” I said. “What would you rather us be doing?”
“No, no. I look forward to this profoundly self-destructive, self-critical Sherman’s March we’re doing here. In which no behavior is ever justified. And the endeavor itself is a mark of shame.”
We three laughed.
“That was really good!” I said.
“Even your praise is patronizing.”
“Especially the praise,” Noah clarified.
“Please,” I said. “That was purposefully ironic patronizing.”
“So many layers,” Glenn said. “All of them toxic.”
“I think we have the blurb for the Blu-ray case,” Noah said.
We three laughed.
“If you’re not carrying your bag,” Glenn concluded, “you’ll still have to do some kind of labor. You’re going to have to do the emotional labor of supporting me. Providing me with diversion and moral support.”
We stopped for supper. We made some phone calls. Glenn arranged an interview with a veteran newspaperman who’d written his PhD dissertation on Walkin’ Lawton Chiles. I thought this idea a boring one—but, you know, emotional support. I labored to keep my mouth shut.
At Tallahassee’s outskirts, we checked into a motor lodge. We filmed B-roll the next morning while killing time before our meeting with newspaperman Jim. Tallahassee, friend reader, blows, so I won’t waste time telling you just how much. It’s the capital, of course. It’s the capital because it is equidistant from Pensacola and St. Augustine, the two biggest Florida cities back in 1821. That’s it. That’s the reason. The overland journey between those cities was fraught with peril, plus it took too long to sail around the peninsula. Tallahassee was the compromise.
Tallahassee also happened to be located upon the only significant portion of the state not undergirded by a thick honeycomb of highly porous limestone. It’s that rarest of things in Florida: terra firma. This made Tallahassee’s rolling hills and vales the one spot suitable to cultivating cotton—and importing plantation culture (and slaves) en masse. Yet Tallahassee’s aristocratic pretensions were not enough to impress Ralph Waldo Emerson when he visited in 1827. Our eternal poet laureate took one look around and adjudged Tally “a grotesque place” populated entirely by “public officers, land speculators, and desperadoes.”
Aside from bureaucracy, Tallahassee also accommodates Florida State University, our densest concentration of staggeringly beautiful, rock-dumb youths. FSU is a research university, yes, but its greatest endowment to this state, bar none, has been its ongoing contribution to comedy. To wit: Q. Why do Florida State graduates put their diplomas on their dashboards? A. So they can park in the handicapped spots. Or how about: Guy walks into a store and says, “I want a garnet hat, gold pants, a garnet shirt, and gold shoes.” Clerk goes, “You must be a Florida State man!” Guy asks, “How did you guess? By the colors?” “No,” the clerk goes. “This is a hardware store.”
We saw few students and zilch in the way of tourists as we ambled around the empty, brutalist spaces downtown. “I like that they’re not giving up on the paradise vibe here,” Glenn said, his eye in his viewfinder. “Even the striped awnings on the capitol building look like they’re made out of parasol fabric. Nothing in this state appears to have been built for any serious attempt to govern itself according to reason.”
Not yet sufficiently bored, we walked to the Museum of Florida History. The docents were startled; then they were overjoyed. Absolutely we could film in here, they said. After all, we had the museum to ourselves.
Glenn particularly liked the thousand-yard stares painted onto every mannequin in the place, native and colonist alike. They looked defeated, dismayed. The Indians, well—the cause of their dismay was obvious. There were about 40,000 Timucu, 7,000 Tocobaga, 20,000 Calusa, 25,000 Apalachee, 5,000 Tequesta, and 2,000 Jeaga when the Spanish first waded ashore in the sixteenth century. Two hundred and fifty years later, these natives were gone, wiped out by imported pathogens, cycles of warfare, slavery. The most famous of them, the patchwork tribe who came to be known as Seminoles, weren’t even from here. They showed up in the early eighteenth century, migrating into sparsely populated Florida in order to escape pressure from white settlers in Alabama and Georgia. When settlers began to pour into Florida as well, the Seminoles were forced down “the long frontier” of the peninsula during three wars of removal. Along the way, they intermarried with the Miccosukee. They welcomed runaway slaves into their ranks. They fought bravely. In the end, all but 200 were killed or forced to relocate to Oklahoma. Those 200, though—they beat a strategic retreat into the furthest reaches of the Everglades. There, amid a saw grass prairie stinging with life, they held out. Never did they surrender to the United States government. They call themselves, rightly, “the unconquered.”
The Spaniards’ thousand-yard stare, however—the reasons behind that one are a little less immediate. I’ll let T. D. Allman explain: “People are constantly ruining Florida; Florida is constantly ruining them back,” he wrote in his fine book Finding Florida. “Florida’s history has been dominated precisely by those kinds of people who do not rationally consider the consequences of what they do. For five hundred years successive waves of conquerors, ignoring the reality of Florida, have tried to re-create, in Florida’s alien clime, a more perfect—sometimes outright hallucinatory—version of the society they left behind. A new Castile, where every Spaniard is a gentleman on horseback, his saddlebags bulging with gold doubloons! A new Ohio, where every house is located in a crime-free suburb, only with a swimming pool, and it never snows!”
The thousand-yard stare of the Spaniard is the thousand-yard stare of the subprime mortgage holder. It is the thousand-yard stare of the man who stepped out of his car into ankle-deep water at the property he’d bought sight unseen. It is the expression Ponce de León wore when he played out a protracted and excruciating deathbed scene after a poisoned arrowhead was fired into him by a Calusa warrior.
Ponce did not, I am sorry to report, give a shit about any fountain of youth. What he was looking for was the island chain of Bimini. He’d been sailing around the Bahamas for twenty-five days, trying to locate one particular island, when he sighted a much larger landmass. He came ashore near the St. Johns River in 1513. Natives attacked, injuring three of his crewmen. When Ponce reached his second landing site, at Jupiter Inlet, he was attacked again. Then, while sailing around the Keys and up the west coast, he was attacked twice more. Still, he took possession of La Florida in the name of Spain’s king. The king then granted Ponce the patent to conquer, govern, and colonize the land.
Seven years later, Ponce returned to Florida with two ships, two hundred colonists, fifty horses, livestock, farm implements, all of it. They landed on the west coast near Charlotte Harbor. They were constructing houses and public shelters when the natives attacked, wounding Ponce with a manchineel-poiso
ned arrow. He and the other survivors fled to Cuba, where Ponce died. None of his heirs showed any interest whatsoever in settling Florida.
A few other noblemen would try and fail to set up colonies on the peninsula. Fortunes and reputations were squandered. Somewhere around two thousand lives were lost, too, in the futility. But just as King Philip II and his advisers were deciding to wash their hands of the whole enterprise…they caught wind of a French settlement—a Protestant settlement, no less—near present-day Jacksonville. If they couldn’t have these “accursed lands,” as the Spanish called Florida, then no one could. In 1565, King Philip dispatched Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to destroy the French settlement. Menéndez sailed with three hundred soldiers to the mouth of the St. Johns River, where he found five French ships blocking the entrance. Menéndez backed off. He set up a field base that would become St. Augustine, the first permanent European settlement in North America. Seeing this, the French moved to attack the encampment before the Spanish could muster their strength and attack them. But lo! A hurricane intervened, pushing the French ships past the Spanish and wrecking them upon an inlet. Menéndez rounded up the survivors, bound their hands, slit their throats. After that, the Spanish were free to control La Florida for the next two hundred years. All praise to God’s huracán.
Even so, Florida was considered the bottom rung of Spain’s empire. Anyone interested in wealth or renown did well to avoid it. Not once did the colony turn a profit. It was floated by the lucre and natural resources of Spain’s other New World holdings, Cuba most of all.
Spain was finally relieved of Florida in 1763, following the French and Indian War. In winning that conflict, Britain had captured the crown jewel of Spain’s empire—Havana. To ransom Havana, Spain gave Florida to the Brits. And although La Florida extended way up the Eastern Seaboard at that time, only a few thousand Spanish colonists inhabited it. They walked away without much of a fuss. The British then split Florida into two colonies—West Florida and East Florida, with capitals in Pensacola and St. Augustine. Almost instantly, they learned that Florida was a money pit. They ran the two territories as cheaply as possible.
