La Florida

So, I’m finding it hard to write this post about how much I love my adopted home state, similar to how I struggle sometimes to explain my ongoing love affair with my sobriety - there’s still a bit of wonder and mystery to both of them. And part of me doesn’t even need or want that to go away.  

But what’s clear is this and I guess the best way to tell it is through all the Florida books I have read: it’s easy to fall in love with the beaches here (esp Gulf Coast beaches which I highly prefer to the East), endless summer and palm trees, beautiful blue water and white sand, the glorious sunrise and sunset; it’s much harder to appreciate the interior of this state, the “Florida scrub” and cracker history, and to see around the behemoth that is Disney (see Team Rodent by Carl Hiaasen) in the messy middle of it all.  

It’s difficult to face and fully acknowledge the state’s bloody racist past (see Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove and Beneath A Ruthless Sun) not to mention present, hard to reconcile what I love with the cruel conservative politics, “individualism” unto lawlessness, the ignorance, and greed-fueled ecological destruction happening ever since Florida was discovered by the larger US population (find a wonderful description of “the way it was” in A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith). 

It’s tempting simply to mourn the beauty that has been lost (The Everglades: River of Grass, which I’ve actually not read but just got from lib.), or get stuck in thinking about how the state could have been developed in a more sane and rational way (For Sale: American Paradise).  

It’s easy to get distracted by routine zaniness that seems to happen only here, in a state where everyone is from somewhere else, and half of them seem to be running from something. Where vacationers don’t know where they are going and some people are too old - or too busy texting - to drive properly and so the car accidents are numerous and phenomenal in nature.There’s a saying, or maybe I made it up, that you shake the country and all the detritus ends up at this bottom-most state. And it can be off-putting, I mean, we all laugh at “Florida Man” but no one really wants to be him.  Or even have him as a neighbor, let’s face it.   

Still, I love this place, crazies and all, to me it’s somehow just the Best.State.Ever (Dave Barry) and to appreciate it you have to read Florida by Lauren Groff, Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel or Swamplandia! by Karen Russell; Tourist Season or anything else by Carl Hiaasen; my husband loves John McDonald and Randy Wayne White but I never really got into those well-known Florida authors as much as Hiaasen, who can make you get angry, laugh, and cringe about this state we’re in, all at the same time. 

And of course The Yearling, which started my Florida love affair that went beyond the beaches…years ago I wrote Fear & Loathing on FaceBook Etc. in part about reading that book and seeing the movie, thought I had also written about the trip we took to Ocala and Majorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Cross Creek homestead, now a state park, and how we actually magically did see a couple deer from afar, standing in a riverbed now completely overgrown with vegetation (drought being just one of the ecological problems we have here), but apparently I didn’t cover that at all. I have photos in my head from that trip which I can’t find on my phone or FaceBook…all lost and merged in the jumble of time I guess.

But my book club’s selection this month just happens to be The Life She Wished to Live, a new bio of Rawlings by Ann McCutchan, and reading it has brought this all back to me again. Along with reliving my discovery of interior, rural and small town Florida, I’m also learning something new: what an incredible, and incredibly flawed, woman she was - the NY Times article states  “This is the most recent biography of Rawlings, after Elizabeth Silverthorne’s “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek” appeared in 1988. It’s a pleasure to meet this cursing, hard-drinking, brilliant, self-destructive, car-wrecking, fun-loving, chain-smoking, alligator-hunting, moonshine-making, food-obsessed woman again on the page.” 

Also how she struggled with her writing - the article goes on to say - “She wanted the unvarnished truth about it, and about everything else. She warned Perkins: ‘I will bring up a live rattlesnake and drop it on your desk if you are ever polite about my stuff and I catch you at it.’ To a friend she wrote: ‘Sexual failure, lack of happiness, none of it matters if I can say the things I want to say.’”

So, as I identify with and admire this woman’s life and I struggle to “say the things I want to say” about the Florida that I’ve come to know and love (maybe a little bit like her), I feel that I am in such great company.