I have developed a slight fascination with Florida. Other parts of America are easier to grasp: the rawness of New York's immigrant experience, the 'Go West' mentality of California. Florida entered my consciousness as somewhere warm, tourist friendly, and yet slightly alien - leaving me to wonder "what exactly is this place? Who lives here and why?"
Three trips later, here's what I have learnt:
1. Florida is (or was) a unique natural treasure. Two weeks ago, I flew north up the Florida peninsula at dusk and saw Lake Okeechobee shimmering below me. Florida used to be a single geographical entity connected in an extraordinary web of life: precipitation from the Gulf and Atlantic, a glacially slow flow of water about 120 miles from 'Lake O' southwards to several deltas and bays, and the Everglades ecosystem flourishing in between.
2. People haven't been there very long. Browsing the American history section of Kramer's, I picked up a civil war history book and flipped to Florida in the index. But Florida basically didn't exist in the 1860s, except north Florida (which is practically Tennessee). The railways opened up Florida in the 1890s, pushing further south along the coast, and eventually sparking a full-on real estate boom in Miami from the 1930s - depositing some spectacular art deco buildings in the process.
3. The Everglades ranks alongside the Nile and Tigris as a fertile delta that supported early human settlements. Traveling up from the Nile to the Ethiopian highlands, you can see how water and nutrient-rich silt gathers and makes its way down to the Greater Cairo region. Likewise, pre-1900s Florida was a steady and grand-scale hydrological system transferring water and nutrients from north to south. Europeans are generally taught that permanent towns and villages only arose when people started cultivating crops rather than gathering their food. But Florida bay was so fertile that the Calusa Indians, living on Horr's Island, built permanent settlements where they lived on oysters and other fruits of the land and sea sustained by the steady, glacially slow flow of nutrients from the Everglades.
4. Florida keeps growing at a formidable pace. The population has increased from 500,000 in 1900 to 2.7 million in 1950 to 20 million today. This has been driven by sunbirds - people (like me) who want to escape the cold, whether for a weekend or retirement - agriculture, and flight capital from places like Venezuela and Argentina.
Art deco cinema in Key West
5. If the world was a logical place, Florida would stop growing at such a formidable pace. The main problem is that much of Florida's land is unsafe because of coastal flooding, river flooding from the Everglades and its canals, and hurricanes. Miami's roughly 10 million inhabitants are among the most threatened by rising sea-levels. These are not the number one problem for many low-lying coastal cities - rather, Jakarta, Manila and many others are sinking by metres each year because people keep pumping out groundwater to wash, drink and supply their businesses - but in Miami it is a real problem. A big Miami flood, defined as a one-in-100-year event (ie. one that will almost certainly happen in our lifetimes) would affect 3.5 million people and cause a lot more damage than the flooding of New Orleans.
When I asked a good friend to play word association with the word 'Florida,' he came up with this:
My impression of Florida: golf. Old slightly flashy retired people with unnecessarily big sunglasses and leathery orange skin. Beautiful weather. Disneyland. Package holidays from England, ideal for young children. Not as interesting as other places in America (almost not American in that sense). The opening scenes to 'Goldfinger', with Sean Connery flouncing around a swimming pool in his dressing gown as light aircraft pull banners across the sky overhead.
I have to agree.
That said, I like unnecessarily large sunglasses. And I always loved that scene in Goldfinger and wanted to be in it (sultry latin Bond girls being only part of the reason).
Two things really interest me about Florida: first it has hidden treasures, and secondly it tells a story (not yet concluded) about man's relationship with nature. The story has good guys (Audubon Society), bad guys (billionaire sugar-barons and some very unscrupulous real estate developers), and pragmatists trying to balance the two (Jeb Bush and other governors). I need some more visits to get to know them better.
From the air - a landscape transformed (precariously) by man.
Key West and the Overseas Railroad: One of the guys who drove the opening of South Florida from the 1880s was Henry Flagler, a billionaire co-founder of Standard Oil, who was drawn to the warm weather for his ailing wife. He bankrolled a railway linking the naval station Key West to the mainland, which opened in 1912 after vast expense, and was (predictably) washed away by a hurricane. Developing the US's southernmost point as a deepwater logistics hub was meant as a canny move to compete with the Panama canal and capture trade. So much for that - but at least Flagler gave us Key West: a gloriously quirky enclave of lime pie, chickens perched in palm trees, Hemingway memorabilia, and a whole lot of live bands.