Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 1
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 1
At dinner on the first full day aboard the New Shoreham II, Nancy Heslin, the cheerful and inexhaustible cruise director, asked how many passengers had traveled with the line before. Every person raised a hand but one. I was the lone newcomer. For one couple, this was the third trip aboard an American Canadian Caribbean Line ship in a year. The company’s unwieldy name reflects the territory its three small vessels cover, and my fifty-three fellow travelers seemed to have sailed through most of it, requiring the ACCL to devise new itineraries regularly. On this early February evening, we were trying a brand-new route that would bring the passengers from West Palm Beach to New Orleans at the height of Mardi Gras.
We were to cross Florida’s Lake Okeechobee from east to west, stop at Fort Myers, follow the inland waterway north to Sarasota, head out into the Gulf of Mexico for a gut-shaking several hours that everyone but the newest passenger would find deeply exhilarating, then chug back inland through the tangles of a remote cypress swamp. I had to jump ship in Panama City, Florida to return to work, while the others sailed on to interesting ports in Mississippi and Alabama. Having never been to Florida before, I found the shorter itinerary a good way to get a feeling for this paradoxical paradise, whose history stretches back to the earliest settlement on the continent and whose more recent past (and perhaps future) is a saga of building, obliterating, rebuilding, and overpopulating.
To get a handle on Florida, you can’t go wrong by consulting a detective novel. Any number of them have been set in the state, and virtually all the books’ protagonists feel compelled to stop chasing the villain from time to time and ponder the larger issues. Before the trip I had picked up The Heat Islands , by Randy Wayne White. “Florida’s history is a chaotic thing built upon thin layers of human endeavor that are covered or quickly absorbed by more thin layers, then forgotten entirely,” the hero, Doc Ford, muses. John D. MacDonald’s hero, Travis McGee, concurs: “They’re paving the whole state. And the people who give a damn can’t be heard.”
Cruising north from Palm Beach on the gentlest breeze, on a day that finds much of the country in deepest winter, one doesn’t want to worry about this overmuch. It is enough to settle down in a deck chair and consider oneself the envy of waterside diners at the restaurants that crowd the shore. Still, you can’t help noticing the clustering of docks and sleek yachts and the proliferation of little canals, built to provide each condominium dweller with a water view, and, as we pass into the more natural landscape of the South Jupiter Narrows, a collective exhalation into repose escapes the passengers ranged on the stern deck; this is more like it.
Shallow but broad (it covers more than 730