Florida: Why I Love It So Much, and Why I Can't Bear to Visit It Again: Part 1
The place I’ve forged such lovely and joyful memories has been poisoned by Alligator Auschwitz.
(Listen to the radio version here.)
In November 1988, when our kids were 3, almost 5 (Katie was exactly the age Walter is now), and 7, our family took an extended road trip to Washington D.C. and Florida, spening time at a lot of cool, kid-friendly places including the National Zoo, the National Air and Space Museum, the Kennedy Space Center, Cocoa Beach, Walt Disney World, and Everglades National Park.
It was my first visit to the Everglades. As always, I was focused on birds, but the kids were especially charmed by alligators (of course!) and the cool grasshoppers.
Looking back, this was probably the best vacation we ever took as a family. After we got home, the kids were bubbling over with excitement to tell Grandma and Grandpa all about it. What would they talk about first? Seeing Giant Pandas? Touching a moon rock?
Riding on Dumbo? Cooking tuna-noodle casserole on a camp stove and eating it in our tent on Thanksgiving?
Every night I’d read a chapter of Oliver Butterworth’s The Enormous Egg about a little boy on a farm finding an enormous egg that hatches into “Uncle Beazley,” a Triceratops. We hadn’t seen the TV movie, but the life-sized statue depicting Uncle Beazley was outside the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian at the time, and children were allowed to climb all over it. My kids LOVED that!
We expected the kids to start by telling their grandparents about something Disney, dinosaur, or space related, but nope—what they gushed about first, still taking off coats and boots, was the bathroom at our Everglades campsite. Tree frogs hid in the sink drains, and at night a bunch of them gathered in the toilets. We’d gently chase them out before—well, before using it, which would have been the height of rudeness. On the long drive home, we came up with a song about all the things we saw on the trip, and of course the kids sang everyone’s favorite verse to Grandma and Grandpa:
There’s a treefrog in the toilet, in the toilet.
There’s a treefrog in the toilet, in the toilet.
Please don’t flush or you could spoil it
For that treefrog in the toilet.
There’s a treefrog in the toilet, in the toilet. 1
We returned to Florida as a family in 1999, when we were all 11 years older. This time we stayed closer to the Orlando area and, in addition to the regular touristy things, we went to Lake Kissimmee State Park, where even our family mascot Piggy got to see the #600 bird on my life list—the Florida Scrub-Jay.
At Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, everyone enjoyed the huge wading birds, especially Roseate Spoonbills.
In January 2003, our son Joe moved to Orlando for Disney’s college program, and our whole family came along to help him move.
That led to his full-time employment there, and we’ve visited Central Florida many times since then.
I’ve been a speaker and field trip leader at the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival a few times, taken pelagic trips to photograph Northern Gannets and other splendid seabirds…
…and went on a birding familiarisation tour of the Kissimmee area in April 2023, visiting some parks and natural areas that Russ and I particularly treasure. On that trip, a boat captain got us close to a family of my lifer Gray-headed Swamphens.
After I reconnected with my beloved fifth grade teacher Arthur Borkowski in 2013, I visited him in Sarasota a few times. He took me to see my lifer Nanday Parakeet, and when Russ and I went together to see him, we stopped at a place I’d never birded in before, Oscar Scherer State Park, to see Florida Scrub-Jays.
I met a wonderful woman, Cathy Brown, at a Space Coast festival and learned about the Florida Scrub-Jay Trail, a wonderful organization centered at B.B. Brown’s Gardens in Clermont. I visited during my Conservation Big Year. She and her husband, the late Bruce Brown, worked tirelessly to teach people about these splendid birds and to encourage landowners to maintain the scrub habitat essential for so many iconic Florida species.
In April 2018, my friend Heather Nagy took Russ and me birding at Fort DeSoto.
Heather also brought us to visit my very first birding mentor, Joan Brigham, whom I hadn’t seen since we left Lansing, Michigan in 1976.
In October 2021, Russ and I spent a day with another dear friend, Liz Kearley, who took us on the Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive.
Russ and I have returned to the Everglades several times over the years, and I’ve taken bazillions of photos and sound recordings of splendid birds.
We always make a stop at Russ’s favorite fruit stand on the planet, intriguingly named “Robert Is Here.” In April 2018, I even got a photo of Russ with Robert himself!
I’ve spent about three full weeks on birding tours in south Florida and the Keys with one of my favorite people on the planet, Rafael Galvez, a superb artist and wondrously knowledgeable naturalist with as warm and gentle a heart as Mr. Rogers himself.
On his South Florida and the Keys tour, Rafael brought me to my #700 species for my ABA Continental List.
On October 11, 2023, Russ and I went with our son Joe to Fred Howard Park on the Gulf of Mexico to see an American Flamingo that had been blown off course by Hurricane Idalia. I’d seen flamingos in Cuba in 2016, but this was the first one I’d ever seen in the United States, making it #701 on my ABA Continental List. Joe was the one who spotted it!
I often develop an affection for places and have a visceral love for a few—Picnic Point in Madison; several spots in Duluth and Port Wing, Wisconsin; and of course my own backyard. I hold these so especially dear because I know them so intimately. I’ve visited so many places in Florida so repeatedly over the years, forging so many lovely memories of family and friends and birds, and it’s been home for my firstborn child for over two decades, so small wonder it’s my most beloved state after the two I’ve lived in the longest, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
No person, place, or thing is perfect, and I’ve had to overlook some serious issues over the years when visiting Florida. But the state has moved so far over to the dark side that I can’t imagine going there again, not while the state hosts and even celebrates horrifying ICE facilities, including a concentration camp within the Everglades. How could I even begin to explain the huge road sign glorifying “Alligator Alcatraz” to my little grandson?
My friend Michael Agosta, who focuses on practical ways we can resist effectively, wrote an extremely helpful post about what we can do in his post, Wrestling Alligator Alcatraz. Michael also shared this useful graphic on Facebook.
I was taught that America is an idyllic melting pot whose good is crowned with brotherhood from sea to shining sea, and that all men are created equal. Every school day morning I stood with my hand over my heart to pledging allegiance to a flag that stands for liberty and justice for all.
I have way too many close friends who are female, LBGTQ+, Black, Latinx, and/or Native American to believe that this nation has ever lived up to those Norman Rockwell ideals, but like most Americans, I took for granted our nation’s scientific, environmental, educational, and medical institutions and basic human rights. I expected to be able to teach my little grandson about democracy and freedom and clean air and water and protecting endangered wildlife and why we must treat all human beings with respect and decency, but MAGAts eviscerated those fundamental human and family values.
I don’t know if we can restore what Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their toadies and minions have destroyed, at least not during what’s left of my lifetime, but I trust Martin Luther King’s words: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” So one fine day, if it hasn’t sunk into the sea, I hope my little grandson will be able to enjoy Florida the way I once did.
The kids usually used the word “pee” or “poop” instead of the more sanitized “flush,” but not in front of Grandma and Grandpa.
Your post is such an accurate reflection of the abandonment of our national ideals that I am in complete agreement with your feelings of disappointment and betrayal. I do hope Doctor King is right.
We just want to say hi and that we hope Florida is around in 100 years too.
-Piper and Greg from Ohio