another florida

To this family, Florida is a long strip of gated communities, shopping malls and waterfront eateries. It's about conch salad, blackened dolphin sandwiches and key lime pie. It's about the little stores and the ice cream parlour in historic downtown Stuart (founded 1914). It's about Steve Weagle, Chief Meteorologist of WPTV News Channel 5. Just beautiful conditions for boaters all along the Treasure Coast, says Steve. It's about easing the rental car along the long, straight, wide roads that join up all the gas stations and Cracker Barrel restaurants. It's about using a Sun Pass on the Turnpike. It's about billboards bearing bouffanted attorneys: 1-800-I-AM-HURT. It's about looking over the golf course: men in wide shorts and crisp polo shirts climbing from their electric carts and choosing their clubs. It's about the cool, barren aisles of Publix and Winn-Dixie. It's about a truckload of Hispanics arriving daily to see that not a single fallen leaf sullies the coarse tropical grass between the $700,000 homes. 

So we've done and seen all that. Over and over for the last few years. Now that the poet of Boynton Beach has decamped to Germany, there is little on offer by way of a change of scene.

So this time we headed down to Key West for a bit of something else. Different eats. Different streets: real ones that you can walk on, the novelty of schlepping about on foot. On the way back, we kept in mind the claim that "fantastic memories are made every day in the natural beauty of the breathtaking South Florida Everglades". This claim is made on the website of the Sawgrass Recreation Park, which is located  on U.S. Highway 27, a little to the west of the affluent Broward County suburb of Weston. When you get there, you might be entitled to decide that the prose on the website is a little overdone. You pull into a dusty parking lot, across which giant electricity pylons stride, carrying their crackling load across the edge of the wilderness. A huddle of weary mobile homes is clustered to the rear of the low concrete structure that houses the shop and ticket office. You buy your tickets for the airboat ride from a young woman who is all piercings and thick eye-liner. Squidgy yellow earplugs are part of the deal, as is admission to a small zoo. Killing time before your boat leaves, you see a selection of cold-blooded specimens and applaud when a beefy dude demonstrates how to handle a huge alligator. He knows his way around its snout and the inside of its mouth.

Before the flat-bottomed boat begins to move, before the roar of the giant fan that propels it, the Captain manages your expectations, telling you that he takes parties of visitors out into the swamp several times a day, every day of the week. He can't promise to deliver the thing you've come for, he warns: sightings of even one 'gator in its natural habitat cannot be guaranteed. More often than not, he informs you, the tourist groups go home disappointed. He is a deeply tanned old geezer, in fancy jeans and immaculate sneakers. Mirror shades make the weather-beaten face seem set in deadpan impassiveness.

But miracle of miracles, after only a little time out on the shallow water, after only a short while feeling the vibrations through the squishy yellow earplugs - there it is. A slow-moving alligator that seems unphased by the close proximity of snapping cameras and appreciative remarks.

But it's obvious flimflam, right? Florida flimflam. This crafty old fellow knew exactly where to find this particular beast. He's done a deal with the docile reptile, presumably coming to this spot periodically to feed it. A knowing Indian guy (as in from India, not a native American) accuses the skipper of exactly that. He just smiles.

Then he gathers a twitter of smallish dark birds around him. They flap up from the grass and the flat water. He offers them Cheezits. Nature's pristine creatures feasting on tertiary butylhydroquinone and soy lecithin.

You know what, though? It doesn't matter if you're conned a little. It's good. It's something different. Makes a change from the attractions of the coast.

So feeling pretty good, we decide to head back to our base via the back roads rather than by reconnecting with the Turnpike. A long stretch of Route 27 takes us up to the impoverished towns arranged around the invisible shore of Lake Okeechobee. The lake is somewhere behind a high levee, along which earth moving equipment is scattered. We never see it. Having taken on gas in a South Bay place where a crowd of immensely fat children gathered around the hot food cabinet, we move through streets on which every person is black. This is in the inland ying to the all-white yang up in the monied part of Martin County where we are staying. The houses are small, cramped and built of insubstantial materials. We pass a correctional facility. Behind the mesh: black men in bright prison garb in a yard. This is poverty. This is another Florida.

Having left behind the small lakeside towns, and before cutting east, we see shacks and trailers where people seem to live. All very rudimentary. Rusty trucks and all that. Then we slide through horse ranches and before too long we are back among the gated havens we call home on our trips to the Florida we have come to know better. You drove through Belle Glade? You're lucky to be alive, our host tells us. He's exaggerating.