Swamp to Swamp
This week I am hopping from swamp to swamp here in Florida, visiting friends while Kim spends more quality time with her cabaret pals at Disney, in the middle of the Orlando swamps. I have at least eight sets of friends littered up and down the East Coast of Florida from Delray Beach up to Daytona Beach. I lunched in Palm Beach Gardens with Terry and Paula and dined with Kevin and Karen in Wellington. It seems that wherever one lives down here, you have to head away from the water to find affordable property and a friendly community, conducive to your interests (lunch was about golf and marsh wildlife, dinner was about horses and exotic tropical plants), but you have to drive back towards the water to get to decent restaurants. Today was Sunday so its hard to tell what normal restaurant trade might be like, but since I imagine a retirement component of 80+%, I’m not so sure the day of the week will matter much. Retired people dine out when and as they please and are more or less unconstrained by the calendar, which is a very nice state of affairs in which to find oneself.
Today, Monday, Kevin and I will take a motorcycle ride out to some lunch spot he knows on Okeechobee Lake, by far the largest lake in Florida and what might well be (I’ve only eyeballed Google Earth for this prediction) the next largest lake in the United States after the five Great Lakes. It is certainly bigger than any lakes in New England except possibly Lake Champlain, in the Midwest only Lake Winnebago and the combined Upper and Lower Red Lakes of Minnesota could compete. It is on a par with the Salton Sea in Southern California. That makes it a damn big lake. The most noticeable feature of the lake is that it is surrounded by a levy made by the Army Corp of Engineers, who set it up as a major trans-peninsula waterway with canals heading East and West to the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico respectively.
Kevin has told me a tale of intrigue about Batista-supporting Cubans who fled to Florida when Castro barreled his way into power. The U.S. Government at the time was very supportive of these people (you may remember a little incident called The Bay of Pigs Invasion) and wanted to hurt the Communists in Castro’s retinue as much as possible. The main cash crop of Cuba in those days was sugar from sugar cane. It was called Donna Azucar in deference to the power of the crop. No one knew sugar better than the Batista Cubans who had been the plantation owners, and they saw in Central Florida the right tropical mix of sun and water to recreate the vast cane fields they had left behind. This would serve the dual purpose of reestablishing the wealth of this previously landed aristocracy and hobbling the communists by embargoing Cuban sugar to prevent Castro from getting much-needed hard currency with which to arm up. It seems the U.S. Government with its various good agencies and offices, decided that helping the expatriate Cuban cane growers required not just selling them attractively-priced tropical swamp land, but building out agricultural infrastructure to help them water, transport and grow their newly replanted Donna Azucar. Lake Okeechobee was the main vehicle and tangible result of that support.
Florida is flat as a pancake from what I can tell with a maximum elevation of 345 feet near Cape Canaveral and an average elevation of six feet. Stop and think bout that. With Global Warming raising sea level a few inches at a time and accelerating over the last decade, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that in this century, Florida is in big trouble very soon. Miami is already regularly flooding as an advanced warning of sorts. I am hardly the first person to point this out, but I must say that looking at the map from the perspective of someone trying to get smarter about housing on the East Coast has given me a perspective and made me wonder a good deal about the nature and sustainability of this land mass, as it were. I have never been a big fan of Florida, mostly because my youth in the tropics has soured me on the hot and humid, but I have also never been a big fan of swamps or marshes or whatever you choose to call extremely soggy land.
Well, today, riding out to Lake Okeechobee I saw all the reasons for me not being a fan. The coast is very congested. The land is flat flat flat and wet wet wet as far as the eye can see. The motorcycle riding is, in a word, shitty. The roads were gouged by the sugar can trucks. The swap seemed to be ready to rise up and reclaim its dominance at any moment. And the region of Central Florida seemed to be in the category of destitution you find in the northern Adirondacks or Native American desert reservations of the West. This was not land of prosperity. This was land of subsistence at best and really now the land of cheap agribusiness. I was happy when the ride ended.
Tonight I will be staying with Roger and Edwina at their house in Jupiter, right on the Intercostal Waterway. We will use that opportunity, weather permitting, to putter up to Hobe Sound to a preferred lunch spot to meet up with Arthur “Living Legend” Einstein who lives near there (I’m guessing Mimi, Arthur’s wife, will opt out since I rarely see her gathering with the motorcycle crowd. It is, of course, way cool to take a boat to lunch so I wouldn’t want to miss that opportunity to waste a lot of diesel and take far longer to go ten miles than it would take us if we went by car. The plan is then to drive up to Vero Beach to Andy’s house to spend Tuesday night with him and Betsy. Betsy, Edwina and Karen are not diehard motorcycle enthusiasts, but they do occasionally join the ride crew (Edwina and Karen more so than Betsy), but we have long since adopted a liassez faire attitude when it comes to spousal attendance. Happy wife, happy life.
The thing I am currently most curious about in looking at the map of Florida is the extent to which this low-lying peninsula is water-logged. As I have Google-Earthed all of the homes of my friends to GPS my way around the state, it is impossible not to notice that everywhere you look there are bodies of water. In fact, I have learned while here that the normal development process for a parcel of land is to dredge the swamp so as to deepen the areas that will remain ponds and to use that fill to build up the areas where houses and roads will be built. There are several basic patterns for that sort of layout for a community, but almost any way you do it ends up looking more or less similar from the air or overhead view with a fairly uniform and repetitive pattern of houses adjacent to waterways or bodies of water. Those which are bodies of water and therefore are not flowing and being continually replenished are aerating fountains to insure the absence of stagnation. Those ponds and fountains are less for aesthetics than they are the necessary outcome of reclaiming swamp land for residential construction.
None of these characteristics make me in the least bit interested in looking into living in Florida. I am far less interested in living in Waterworld than others. Hopping from swamp to swap is literally for the birds and I am happy to leave them to it.