The Accidental Tourist in Palm Beach

by Bob Alman

“Florida?” my San Francisco friends said: “You’ve lived in California for 25 years. We have everything Florida has, but more and better. Why would you even think of moving to Florida?”

At first, I bought the argument, though I never before imagined myself as one of the migratory species who live in the north during the summer and in Florida during the winter. Though my work was taking me to Florida, why should I give up my California paradise? And having relocated myself in Palm Beach, I couldn’t help noticing that although I knew many connected Palm Beach people through my work, they were giving me fewer invitations in a month - to lunch, dinner, cocktails, and white-tie-and-sneaker balls - than the number of toes on either of the left feet I occasionally dipped into the warm Atlantic. So for a while, it was convenient to adopt the attitude that I was living in Florida only temporarily, for the job. I actually believed that. I was in Florida, but I was not a Floridian. I was an accidental tourist.

I didn’t complain. The novel pattern of my social life turned out to be rather pleasing. My work was totally absorbing, so I went at it day and night, like any happy office monk. But soon it was clear that numerous friends – including some who scoffed at my moving to Florida - had newly discovered a love for the state, especially in the winter. So when they visit - and sometimes stay in my apartment - I take a day off and behave like the Florida tourist I can become at a moment's notice. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I went with a friend to see for the first time the manatees, the “sea cows” who gather together near the comparatively warm discharge of power plants in the wintertime. Another time, I took an airboat voyage through the everglades and witnessed a man wrestling an alligator. Would I ever do that on my own? Not on your life! At this rate, it will take a decade to see all the sights - which is as it should be for an accidental tourist like me.

I do miss the steep streets of San Francisco and the green-and-brown hills of the East Bay. The natural landform here in South Florida is primordially flat. Only when developers come to distinguish the firmament and create terrain is there sufficient elevation from which to look out over all the surrounding flatness. God-like, the developers come with their bulldozers and created slightly raised dry land, interspersed with ponds, ditches, canals, sump holes, or lakes - depending on the particular spin you want to impart to the Florida real estate in question.

Most of the elevations of any considerable dimension are either on golf courses or “garbage mountains” teeming, like the disappearing wetlands, with migrating birds but off-limits for human foot traffic. Palm Beach County has 150 golf courses – more than any other county in the country – but I never visit them. Which means that my tourist-eye view of South Florida seeks out the only other alternatives to rise above the South Florida flatness: buildings and bridges. The only way to get high down here – short of the abundantly available liquor and drugs - is on buildings and bridges.

DISNEYLAND? SHANGRI LA? PALM BEACH?

One of my early dinner invitations was to a huge high-rise in West Palm Beach on the Intracoastal Waterway that separates West Palm Beach from the barrier islands. It was the 30th floor, where you get the constant Atlantic breezes from the balcony and a spectacular view of that long and magical sand bar called Palm Beach, just across the water. From the 30th floor, you can see at an instant what this place is all about. Surely there could be no more richly diverse or rigidly stratified society than Palm Beach County, and from thirty floors high, that's not merely a sociological point of view; it's vividly palpable in the stratified terrain.

You don't absolutely have to be a WASP to do well in the "Who's in, Who's out" game that is so important a part of Palm Beach life - but if you are, everything is so much easier. If you give a hundred thousand dollars to a museum or cultural foundation, doors will open for you. But access will be quicker, cheaper, and easier if you’re a WASP. To outsiders, the In/Out game sounds like a foolish waste of time for people who have nothing better to do with their lives. But when people take it seriously - and so many do - this game can become quite vicious and cruel. And it takes place within a broader social context of widespread racial and ethnic bigotry that is largely taken for granted.

What has happened here? Why are class divisions here as sharp as they were in the Deep South in the last Century? In most of American society today, if you're wealthy by any means, well groomed, and don't say "ain't" a lot, you can pass just about anywhere. But not here, not in the Palm Beaches. One writer likened the class divisions in South Florida to a crowded room full of strangers.

All the “best” people and their palatial mansions crowd along Palm Beach's Atlantic shore or - and this is usually considered second best – along the mainland shore of the Intracoastal Waterway. You don't have to look far inland, to the west, to see how the whole fabric of South Florida is so dramatically layered. The farther west you go, towards the Everglades only 15 or so miles west, the cheaper land and buildings and condos and houses in walled communities become. In Palm Beach, you have to put up a million bucks to get little more than a shack. But 10 or 12 miles west, for less than half that, you can have a large and gracious home, perhaps on the golf links and protected from transient vehicular access by security guards at gatehouses manned 24 hours a day. This produces a "very nice" and rather dull living environment, where everything is predictable. And more's the pity, the farther west you live the farther you will have to drive to find anything interesting to do or anywhere fun to visit. You'll have to head back towards the coast.

I'm very fortunate in my living situation. I live in an officially designated historic district that dates back 80 years, with lawns and dogs and well-grown old trees around single-family homes and small apartment buildings. My second-floor apartment on the old Federal Highway is two blocks from the Intracoastal, comfortably inside the narrow coastal belt defined by the Dixie Highway further west as a "desirable" place to live. The parkway along the water, lined with grass and palm trees fronting the seawall, is a warmer version of my Marina home on San Francisco's north waterfront.

Even though real estate values in the area have escalated wildly in the last few years, this is still not an expensive place to live, by San Francisco or Manhattan standards, not even in “high season” – unless, of course, you insist on being “on the water.”

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE WEATHER AND THE WATER

Local newscasts in South Florida begin and end with the weather report. Everything in between is merely incidental. And why not? Tens of millions have moved to Florida to be warm, for a change.

People had told me that the summers here are unbearable. "It's a burning, steaming hell," one wealthy seasonal migrator told me. Could it be worse than my native Mississippi in July? Of course not. If you live near the coast, you’ll find the water moderates the climate all year round, and the ocean breezes seem to blow most of the insects westward. Savvy travelers have found this out – that you can stay in a four-star hotel on the beach for peanuts in the summertime and enjoy almost everything coastal Florida has to offer in the high season at bargain rates in the spring, summer, and fall.

I enjoy puncturing the “burning hell” myth by giving northern friends in sweltering Manhattan or D.C. in July a true report of South Florida summer weather, where a frequent – almost daily – cloud cover helps keep temperatures under control. A long time ago, some PR man in Tallahassee perpetrated another myth in dubbing Florida “the sunshine state.” It surely must be one of the cloudiest states in the union – at least on the coast where I live. Along with refreshing afternoon thunderstorms and the sea breeze, those clouds make the summers more bearable than in most northern cities. And here, nobody expects you to wear a lot of clothes, not even to the office.

“Going north” in the summer is a tradition of the wealthy who summer in the Hamptons, or Idaho, or Maine, or in the Carolina Smokies, or California or suburban New York or Connecticut. But there’s a growing trend towards having only one home – in Florida – and traveling during the summer, calling in the accumulated debts of friends who wangled an invitation to stay with you in your South Florida paradise in February.

Now that I am no longer an accidental tourist but a full-time resident, I have found out that the sunsets in the summer are almost as glorious as they are in deepest winter when the smoke from burning cane-fields in the west colors the sunset sky in gaudy hues. On the rare occasions when I am home as early as sunset, I enjoy walking out onto one of the three bridges to Palm Beach, near my home, so I can take in the whole of that predictably extravagant and luridly pink Florida sunset over the Everglades. It will take a while to get tired of that view.

Now that the whole issue of hanging chads has been put to rest – to be revived briefly during each election season - weather is a big conversation item. There’s more weather than you might think. Even in South Florida, the mercury dips to freezing at times. That is MAJOR conversation right there. I find the thunderstorms here particularly entertaining. They happen even in winter but more frequently in summer – almost every afternoon. And instead of earthquakes, we have hurricanes in Florida, more exciting than any roller coaster you’ve ever been on. I’ve been in two, watching the scenery fly by my hurricane-proof windows for hours on end. There’s nothing like it if you enjoy spectacles of nature.

If you venture “off season” into South Florida, you might encounter a Category Three hurricane that will give you cocktail party chatter to last a year. Someone asked me, "Aren't you afraid of the hurricanes?" How can you be afraid of a hurricane you see coming for days on end, across the Atlantic all the way from West Africa? Unlike a San Francisco earthquake, you always have a choice about where you'll be in a hurricane. Although hurricanes are vastly invigorating, they lack the thrill of unpredictability. You don’t have to be in one unless you choose to.

While I am in Florida, I would like to see one of those sinkholes that appear overnight and begin to swallow up entire blocks. My understanding is that as the water table is continually lowered, there will occasionally be sinkholes when the dry limestone that used to be supported by water collapses, swallowing up people, cars, streets, houses. I'd really like to see that. But that happens only in Central Florida, I’m told, not here on the coast.

GRITS AND BAPTISTS

All the Deep South things are here, from Baptists to grits, the more prevalent as you move westward away from the coast. I love grits; it's part of my upbringing. As a connoisseur of grits and biscuits, I can tell you that superb examples of these staples of Deep South can be found off the beaten track. Most of those places are in poorer neighborhoods peopled by immigrants from Georgia and other parts of the rural South. Only in South Florida can you get from the Jersey Shore to the Deep South by driving only a few miles west!

My feelings about the cracker-style religious sects the migrants from the real Deep South have brought with them are mixed. There's something comforting about driving through the still streets out west on Sunday morning past dozens and dozens of churches with their parking lots filled to overflowing. Many of these churches are totally benign, I will admit, though less sophisticated than the non-denominational or Anglican variety predominating near the more sophisticated and affluent coast. But Sunday morning church is very big down here, everywhere, even in Palm Beach. Where you do Sunday morning is largely dependent on your social class – which is largely dependent on how close you live to the coast.

Baptists are everywhere in West Palm Beach, and that is a bit unsettling to my cosmopolitan soul. I was content to leave behind the Southern Baptists of my Mississippi childhood, and I now find that there are Baptist churches on every other block in South Florida. Many are offshoot sects, some quite bizarre for the doctrinal hairs they split. (The “Free Will Baptists”, for example, or the “Primitive Baptists”, who wash feet.)

Although almost everybody seems to go to some church or other on Sunday, it’s not for lack of a rich cultural life. South Florida is far from a cultural desert, with abundant theatre, ballet, opera, world-class museums, and – of course – one of the richest venues in the world for non-profit charity balls and elegant fund-raisers presenting every possible type of public spectacle, if you want to pay the tab. And why not? It’s for charity.

Here’s the clincher. It’s so EASY to do what you want to do in Palm Beach, in West Palm Beach, or in South Florida generally, because – pay attention – the entire society is built around managing water and traffic. Occasionally, you’ll be trapped on flooded streets in foot-deep water that has nowhere to go on this flat terrain, but you won’t mind because when you get to where you want to go, there will be instant and easy parking – nothing like the parking nightmares you have in Manhattan or San Francisco. Unlike most other urbanized areas of the US, Florida was planned and built mostly in the 20th Century, well into the automobile age. By law, you can’t build anything down here unless you have adequate provision for the cars it will attract.

What more dare I say about Florida? I can only give you the view from here, on the southeastern edge of the continent at the dawning of a New Millennium, and much of what I see is new and fascinating. It's an intensely personal view, of course. And in case you haven't guessed it by now, this article is largely about the value of change for its own sake. Moving from one continent to another, from one coast to another, from one climate to another, from one season to another. Giving yourself an utterly new view of life, of possibility.

That's a hell of a thing to do - especially if you've been settled in for decades, doing the same things, seeing the same things, talking to the same people, thinking the same thoughts. I would never have made this change without a good reason to become an “accidental tourist” as a transition to becoming a true Floridian. What a lucky break for me!

Change - constant change, a change of scenery, a change of viewpoint for its own sake – has to be enlivening, at the least. More than one Wise Man has observed that no-change is death itself. Moving from one place to another gives you an entirely different and new view of life, inevitably. It’s a huge part of the adventure of travel.

Can you get the benefit of all this culture shock just by visiting, either at peak-season or off-season rates? I think you probably can. But you can’t stay with me. Sorry. I’m all booked up for the season.