Where Progress Has Yet To Be Inflicted

Back when I was doing my growing up on Florida’s sunny shores, native Floridians were hard to come by. “You were really born here?” was the stock response when folks found out I wasn’t a transplant from a less friendly climate.

But that was a few generations ago, after the boom and bust of the ‘20s … and long before Disneyworld. Before bumper-to-bumper Interstates and cookie-cutter shopping malls. Before professional sports teams and crowded airports. Before drugs and crime hit the headlines on a daily basis.

Sure, we had Al Capone living on an island in Biscayne Bay, but nobody paid any attention to him because he had syphilis. None of us kids knew for sure what that was, but we knew it was pretty bad because when our parents mentioned it, they lowered their voices as parents are prone to do when they get to the juicier bits of gossip. I remember a dockside chat with a couple of other 12-year-olds, just before we dove into the bay, wondering if we could catch anything if we swam too close to Capone’s off-limits dock.

We all knew a couple of kids whose fathers were bookies, and by the time I was 15, I’d met Ginny’s grandfather, a real-life Prohibition era rumrunner. He was a fascinating old gentleman who loved to relive in microscopic detail his full-throttle forays through tepid Atlantic waters to pick up a load of booze from the islands, and his moonlight deliveries to heavily guarded docks on seldom-traveled mainland waterways.

Pretty exciting stuff, but not enough to keep me at home. I wanted change. I was tired of living with heat and monsoonal rains, and without seasons (other than what was known as “The Season,” which meant the tourists were in town). I was tired of mildew and mold, and cockroaches so big they could open refrigerator doors. I was ready to leave behind balmy nights where the moon was so bright the royal palms cast gigantic shadows, and where the pungent night-blooming jasmine filtered through my bedroom windows.

I left when I was 20, and now I know I shouldn’t have done that. While my back was turned, while I was thoughtlessly living out my life elsewhere, my enchanted peninsula has been mauled by progress, debilitated by mercenaries.

There’s not a whole lot left of the wilderness I grew up next to. Little has been allowed to endure in its natural state. Fast foods and chains of businesses that nobody needs have taken the place of land - just plain old weatherbeaten, sun-parched, open land. Empty land. Space without plastic. Nighttimes without neon.

Even the Everglades has been poked and prodded into threatened oblivion. Manatees, those prehistoric, gentle, lumbering seacows that inhabit Florida’s inland waterways, are fighting a losing survival battle with pollution and boat propellers. In some odd way, I can identify with their predicament. Progress, it is called.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time to go home, before home has all been dredged up and paved over. Before every linear foot of land has been developed into a strip of mortuaries, banks, and lawyers’ offices. Time to go back and get a whiff of those brackish backwaters, to revive memories of hours spent out where wild things roamed (not on a Miami street corner), where nature was still natural, rather than a Disney recreation.

That’s how I came to spend last week in a fish camp on the banks of the Crystal River in Homosassa Springs on Florida’s Gulf coast.

At night, I slept with the windows open to harvest the night sounds and smells. Come morning, I percolated coffee in a beat-up dime store pot and piled my dirty towels on the picnic table out front, to be replaced by cleans. That’s as close as the place comes to maid service.

I broiled fish in an oven that slammed shut on my hand each time I opened it, and cooked grits in a pot that had probably gone to war with some of J.E.B. Stuart’s boys. I even managed a skillet of okra and tomatoes with a side of rice.

In short, I went home again.

And they said it couldn’t be done.

xxxx