Travels in Florida

My early memories of Florida rise from the haze of time. I remember road trips in my father’s ‘55 Ford “tan car,” a stop to use a two-holer outhouse at a filling station on a country road, another gas station (in Baldwin, I believe), where the pumps perpetually proclaimed 21 cents a gallon. Like most northeasterners, my parents found Florida fascinating. Dad lived in West Palm Beach for a while between high school and meeting Mom, and every year from the time I was five we did a road trip down US 301 to seek out summer in the wintertime. I remember the sugar cane rising from black dirt along canals straight as lines outside Belle Glade, and the jellyfish washed up on the shore at the beach in front of a Howard Johnsons. How the giant grouper at the Key West Aquarium was the biggest fish I’d ever seen, and how clouds of pink birds rose from the mangroves around West Lake. After years of road trips to Silver Springs, Rainbow Springs, Cypress Gardens, Masterpiece Gardens, and more, we picked up and moved to Ocala.

These days, I roam the state looking through the lens of my 1960s road trips, appreciating where the sense of place remains the same and trying to understand where it does not. Researching my books on Florida has had me poking around every corner of the state, on foot and in the car. Here are some of my stories.


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