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Published: January 19th 2014
So why Florida, I hear you wondering. One reason is Miami, which I am now compelled to add to Barcelona, San Francisco, Amsterdam and others on my short list of favorite cities.
An endless white beach separates the Atlantic from a wall of skyscrapers. This is Miami Beach, a narrow archipelago separated from the rest of Miami by Biscayne Bay. Miami Beach is paved with money. The waterways are lined with absurdly large mansions -- yachts parked out back, Bentleys out front. No place to squeeze an extra guest for this weekend's bash? No problem. There are plenty of absurdly lavish hotels a few blocks away. And no one needs to be more than a two-minute walk from their broker's office.
Sitting on the white powder beach in front of the Fontainebleau, watching a crew film a TV show involving jet skis, I waited for someone to step on the jellyfish that had just washed up in front of me. The jellyfish was about the same size, shape, and texture as a used condom. After an hour I decided to take pity on the jellyfish and the sunbathers. I used the tip of my sandal to flick
it back into the water. For the rest of the day the top of my foot burned.
The southern end of Miami Beach is South Beach, backdrop for the Jackie Gleason Show, Miami Vice, and—not accidentally—Scarface. Gleaming vintage Cadillacs share the SoBe roads with Lamborghinis that resemble chrome pizza slices on wheels. Music pulses from nightclubs, one attempting to drown out the next. In 1926 a hurricane destroyed much of South Beach. The timing couldn't have been better as South Beach became a showcase for the Art Deco revolution in architecture. Debra and I stayed at Hotel Shelley, which resembles a large box tightly wrapped in cream-colored paper and tied with a decorative purple ribbon wrapped around its middle. It is one of many buildings that compelled me to stop, admire, and wonder what South Beach must have been like in the 1930s.
Across the bridge, in the shadow of the Marlin's stadium, is Calle Ocho, Eighth Street, the art district of Little Havana. Eighth Street is lined with galleries, cafes, and, of course, cigar stores. Debra and I bought a small painting in an open-air market, paid our respects at the
Bay of Pigs Monument, and ate an incredibly cheap but good meal in a local restaurant.
Of course Debra is plugged into the tango community wherever she goes. We had a milonga to attend every evening. One was in a large hall in a nondescript Miami suburb. We were the only non-Spanish speakers present. The hall was filled with Latinos and Latinas from a more elegant decade. They were gathered to hear a famous tango orchestra. The orchestra performed in front of a huge flag of Argentina. People tearfully sang along to some of the songs. Although the event was sold out, the organizers managed to squeeze us in at one of the long banquet tables that surrounded the dance floor. When we arrived at our table a man who looked like Ricardo Maltiban stood smartly, shook my hand palm down, and bowed to Debra.
The next night the milonga was in a tapas bar in Espanola, the Spanish Village. There was a short lesson before the milonga. The teacher was Diego, a muscular ultra-macho Latino who took me in his arms to demonstrate how a woman must be led. The secret,
Espanola
Entrance to Miami's Spanish Village.he explained, is to give her freedom while confining her in your embrace. I swooned just a little bit. The milonga ended when Diego began dancing with a local tanguera. The dance was so dramatic and beautiful that everyone got discouraged and started drinking.
An hour outside of Miami is the only road that leads into Everglades National Park, the next good reason to visit Florida. Debra and I drove to a trailhead, a raised walkway that loops around a saw grass swamp. A box in the parking lot contained blue tarps. A sign on the box read "Use tarps to protect your vehicle from vultures." There are lots of vultures in Florida. We often saw them circling retirement homes. A dozen vultures were perched on the railing that separates the trail from the alligators. The vultures didn't even pretend to fly away as we walked by them. It was like walking by a line of muggers. They took turns looking us over, "Soon," they thought, "soon your rotting flesh will be our dinner."
A week earlier and inspired by an
Archer episode, I hired an airboat to take Lana -- I mean Debra
-- and me into a swamp in southwestern Florida to see alligators. Basically, an airboat is a flat metal raft with several chairs bolted to the deck and a massive fan bolted to the back. The fan propels the boat at alarming speeds over the swamp. After an hour of racing through tunnels of vegetation and making dramatic fishtail turns to avoid colliding with other airboats, we finally found the swamp's resident alligator. But along our trail in the national park alligators are piled like cords of wood a few feet away from where we walk. Are they sleeping or waiting to snap?
Drive south another hour and the environs make another dramatic change. The Florida Keys is a narrow hundred-mile-long coral cay archipelago that hangs off the southeastern tip of Florida like a comma blowing in a hurricane. If the Everglades are America's Africa, then the Keys are its Caribbean.
The tip of the comma, 90 miles north of Cuba, is Key West, aka
The Conch Republic, Truman's winter white house, stomping grounds for Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, and now choked with tourists from cruise ships who peer into the gay bars on Duval street.
Diving is
big business in the Keys: diving for salvage, diving for treasure, spearfishing, and of course diving to ogle the other-worldly plants and creatures while trying to ignore the fact that if anything goes wrong -- run out of air, bad cramp, choking claustrophobia, lionfish sting, or puking in the regulator -- the instinct to surface immediately must be ignored and the problem resolved "at depth."
Our second day of diving was cancelled because of the freakishly cold weather that followed us through Florida. I was secretly relieved: I had cheated death another day, but my love of life soon dissipated when Debra insisted we visit the world famous diving helmet museum.
The west coast of Florida is also interesting, interesting in the sense of history, nature preserves, and profligate life styles; otherwise it is a repeating scroll of strip malls, churches, retirement homes, and pharmacies. It's never far from my mind that Florida is a reddish state, the state of hanging chads and stand-your-ground. Ads on TV feature trailer park residents testifying that they unexpectedly received large sums of money after purchasing a vial of holy water from a local minister with greased-back hair. Why aren't their bullshit
detectors ringing, I wondered.
We spent a few days on the west coast in Fort Meyers, visiting my aunt and uncle. This is another reason to visit Florida. Visiting my uncle Noel is like seeing my father again. Aunt Eloise, Weezie, is pure fun. She gets so excited when she talks that she sometimes uses a word that sort of sounds like the word she means; "designation weddings" instead of "destination weddings," for example. At dinner she breathlessly told the table about a son's friend who had been in graduate school working on his feces but gave it up for a high-paying job.
Noel and Eloise took us to the Ding Darling nature preserve on Sanibel Island. While exploring the mangrove swamps I received a text message saying that my sister fell off a horse and had to be rushed to the ER. Smartphones are amazing. While sitting in the middle of the swamp I managed to look up the number of the Stanford ER and track her down. She had broken both wrists. A minute later I received a photo of her sitting in a hospital bed with both arms in casts.
Outside of Naples Debra
Calle Ocho McDonalds
Even the McDonalds in Little Havana look cool. and I visited Koreshan State Park. In 1880 Koresh was the leader of a hollow-earth cult. He and his followers believed that God wouldn't create an incomprehensible universe and that therefore the universe was finite, contained in a sphere. In fact, the sphere was Earth, and we stand on the inside of the crust looking up to the center. This can easily be proved using a contraption Koresh invented that looks like a wooden bow with weights hanging off the ends. What's on the outside of the sphere, we might have asked. Void, was Koresh's answer. But is the void infinite, we might have pursued. I imagine Koresh would have reflected for a moment and then dismissed us as annoying trolls. The Koreshians also believed in celibacy, so there are no Koreshians left, and their compound is now a state park.
Unfortunately, Debra and I arrived at the park around nine at night. The park had closed four hours earlier. We thought it would be fun to sneak in and explore the compound by moonlight, so we left our car at the gate, slipped past the barrier, and sneaked down the road. A short while later I heard two
cars approaching. Obviously these were authorities who had keys to the front gate and must have wondered where the people were who went with the parked car. Debra and I scurried into the bushes as the cars passed. One sped off to the left, the other to the right. We quickly made our way back up the road toward our car. I could hear hounds barking in the distance. A moment later I turned to see a dog a few feet behind us. He wagged his tail and ran off.
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Andre
non-member comment
Thank you, now I know what my favorite Symphony partner is up to and who she is with. I approve. Yeee!! Wouwouwouwou!!!!!!!!!!!.