And Still We Love Our Sunshine State
Floridians regularly observe that Florida is trying to kill us. Venomous water snakes lie in wait for heedless kayakers paddling down the wrong slough. More people die of lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state. I-4, from Tampa to Daytona Beach, is the deadliest highway in the country. Mosquitoes the size of tire irons carry several sorts of fever and encephalitis, and the guacamole-colored algae infesting our waters can cause severe respiratory distress and liver disease. Despite claims of perpetual sunshine, the weather in Florida is often horrendous: 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 95 percent humidity.
Then there are the storms. In three months, we’ve been hit by three hurricanes, of escalating severity: Debby, Helene, and Milton. Governor Ron DeSantis may have barred any mention of climate change from state statutes, but the seas are getting hotter and hotter, brewing the fuel that powers these bigger, badder storms. Towns from Siesta Key, on the Gulf, to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic, are in pieces, roofs ripped off and thrown around like Lego pieces, boats snatched from their moorings and dumped onto people’s front yards. The damage is estimated in the billions; the storms have caused about 60 deaths in the state.
Many of us are asking the question that has long occurred to onlookers from elsewhere: Why on earth does anyone want to live here? What’s the fatal charm that entices hundreds of thousands of people to move to Florida every year and keeps them here?
To paraphrase Henry James—who visited Palm Beach County in 1905 and didn’t think much of the place—it is a complex fate to be a Floridian. Still, millions of us embrace the complexity, finding our own Florida in the kaleidoscope colors of the state. If you want a rich mezcla of food and music, we have that; if being near water uplifts your spirit, we have lakes, rivers, lagoons, bays, and beaches where the sand looks like icing sugar; if you want to fight against the “woke,” Florida is a good base of operations. For me, it’s the landscape of my childhood, my history, the place that made my family and made me, no matter how infuriating I often find it.
Florida can be every bit as alluring as advertised. Despite the best efforts of drain-and-pave developers hell-bent on monetizing every square inch of potential real estate, it has areas of blazing beauty: the Everglades in early summer; saw grass lit by a pink and orange dawn; the turquoise waters of the Forgotten Coast; the millennium-old mounds standing in green dignity on the shore of Lake Jackson; the bald-cypress trees that were saplings when Augustus Caesar ruled Rome and 100 feet high when the Spanish arrived to colonize the land they named after Pascua Florida, the Feast of Flowers. Florida was multicultural before multicultural was cool, drawing immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula, France, Britain, Greece, Latin America, and the Caribbean, interwoven with the native peoples who survived my forebears’ arrival and the descendants of enslaved Africans brought in to work the rice and cotton plantations when Florida became part of the United States in 1821.
Politicians, condominium touts, and tourist-board boosters will tell you that Florida is paradise, a Garden of Eden at North America’s southeastern corner. Citizens of the upper 48 are sold a daydream Florida of poolside cocktails, low taxes, and conservative-leaning politics. They imagine a life spent tootling around on golf carts or lolling on pontoon boats, liberated from shoveling snow and having to pay for public schools and social services.
For them, Florida operates in a state of amnesia, promising an endless vacation wasting away in Margaritaville. If people actually faced the fact of climate change, we’d stop building on barrier islands; we’d retreat inland; we’d demand a halt to the destruction of mangrove forests and wetlands that mitigate storm surges. But that’s not happening, not while money’s to be made creating an illusion of paradise.
As a teenager, I declared I’d move away and never live in Florida again. My issue wasn’t the hurricanes: We taped up the picture windows, filled the bathtubs with water and got on with it. It wasn’t the politics: Florida in the 1980s was a progressive state, determined to cure a pounding Jim Crow hangover. Mainly, I just wanted to experience places where college football wasn’t the biggest social event and not everybody knew your family.
So I left: first for university in England, where I stayed 10 years, then for academic jobs elsewhere in the United States. Yet here I am, right back where I was born, in Tallahassee. I chose to return, partly because Florida is congenitally eccentric, a story gold mine for writers, partly because of the startling loveliness of my part of the state, with its icy springs and red-clay hills, and partly because it’s where my kinfolk are. We’ve lived in Florida for more than 200 years; I feel a deep sense of ownership and responsibility.
Life here can be challenging. I teach at Florida State University, where, despite DeSantis’s efforts to legislate away all learning about race and gender as “woke,” faculty and students persist in fostering diversity and seeking knowledge. Yet several colleagues in my department are leaving, saying they refuse to raise daughters in a state that denies them reproductive freedom. Families with trans kids are also moving in order to protect them from repressive state laws that impede gender-affirming treatment.
You now can’t get an abortion in the state after six weeks. But you can buy pretty much any kind of gun and carry it concealed to the beach, church, or Walmart. As of last week, Florida had suffered 24 mass shootings this year.
Florida is also home to Moms for Liberty, whose self-proclaimed mission is to “protect childhood innocence.” I’m with the comedian Wanda Sykes, who says, “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit.”
Florida has a long history of focusing on the wrong shit, from defending slavery in the Civil War, to trying to drain the Everglades in the early 20th century to make the land turn a profit, to pretending climate change is not real despite regular flooding in the streets of Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Nevertheless, Florida’s stubborn refusal to accept certain realities is perversely fascinating. I kind of admire it—and enjoy living in a place that embraces the aspirational over the actual. I just wish that we could find a way to be more generous toward our people and our environment.
The right stuff to focus on would be fixing the insurance market—Florida has the most expensive premiums in the country—and doing something to move us toward sustainable energy. Yet the governor and legislature’s culture-wars obsession excludes dealing with these very large, very real problems. As a result, people whose lives have been wrecked by the hurricanes struggle to scrape together the money to rebuild their splintered houses, hoping next year will be different. And if they can’t afford to rebuild, a developer will come along and buy the place, restarting the cycle by putting up bigger and more expensive residences for new Floridians convinced that their beachside dream house won’t be smashed in next year’s storms.
So, ineluctably, people will keep leaving their old homes and heading south, craving the fiction that is Florida while ignoring its unsettling realities. Sometimes, I wonder if people move here to be absolved of the need to ever think again. Then again, who am I to preach? I can tell you all the reasons to leave, but I choose to stay. Spending so long on one patch of ground shapes the soul. I know where home is. And someone has to bear witness to the Florida that’s daily disappearing.