Native’s Guide to Florida Separates the Fake from the Really Good Fake

Before you go to Florida, you have to decide if you want to see the Authentic Florida, the Fake Florida or the Authentically Fake Florida.

The Authentic Florida features places such as the Everglades, which has the minor defect of being a gigantic swamp. There’s an outrageous amount of ooze out there. Personally, I recommend that everyone see the Glades before it becomes little more than one big mercury-poisoned water hazard for a series of suburban golf courses.

I’ll never forget the night I had the pleasure of going on an airboat ride in the Glades with a professional “frogger” named Norman. He zoomed down saw grass trails at 40 m.p.h., airboat screaming, a helmet lamp shooting a lone beam of light into the darkness and illuminating the pale green orbs of floating, doomed frogs. Norman would gig them with a 15-foot lance, never slowing the airboat, and deposit the still-squirming creatures into a tube between his legs, leading to a burlap sack in the bottom of the boat.

Later, while heating a 7-Eleven sticky bun on the airboat engine, and while I kept lookout for gators, Norman told me the best part of frogging was “getting next to nature.”

I would say that’s the Authentic Florida right there.

The way you know you are in the Authentic Florida is if you find yourself thinking the phrase “local color.” Where I’m from, in northern Florida, there is local color down every dirt road--you know, Papa harvesting his peanuts in the field, Mama frying some okra in a big skillet, the neighborhood Serial Killer playing catch with the kids, etc.

Also, there are sinkholes. Florida must be the sinkhole capital of the world, and I’m amazed that this hasn’t become an official slogan. When I was a kid I liked nothing better than to play in the mud or hunt for caves down inside a giant pit called Devil’s Millhopper, just outside Gainesville. It was hundreds of feet deep, totally wild, unregulated; people drove motorcycles down the steep trails, they ripped out exotic biota, they built fires on the sink floor, whatever. It kept getting muddier, nastier, crazier. Naturally, the government had to step in and make it a state park. The old treacherous path to the bottom became a wooden nature walk, and any straying from the official pedestrian zone was prohibited. Last time I checked, the place was extremely EC--environmentally correct--but without kids running amok and destroying the vegetation, it just didn’t seem as natural, you know?

You can still find wild sinks, but they’re all in pastures off obscurely numbered county roads. You can only get there through dej a vu-- a barbed-wire fence might look strangely familiar, a shack in the distance tweaks a dormant neuron, and then you see a certain arrangement of trees in the center of a field, where trees oughtn’t be. The trees, you will discover if you trespass across the dusty pasture, are encircling a sinkhole, which might be a 50-foot-deep vertical shaft in the earth, where the top of an underground limestone cavern has collapsed. There should be a pool of blue, very cold water at the bottom. I can tell you there’s a good one just outside Newberry, protected by a farmer who carries a club just like Sheriff Buford Pusser in the movie “Walking Tall.” (Think: local color.)

I doubt many tourists ever find places like this, because instead they spend their time in the Fake Florida. The Fake Florida is any place that has a brochure and a theme, though if it’s been around long enough--like Parrot Jungle in Miami--it can become the Authentically Fake Florida. It’s very subtle. If you’re in a place named after a recent popular song (say, “Kokomo”) and the drinks are $5 a pop, you’re probably in the Fake Florida. But if you’re in a place where a parrot rides a bike across a high wire, you’re in the Authentically Fake Florida.

Unfortunately, the Authentic Florida will probably turn slowly and inexorably into the Fake Florida. Miami’s Art Deco District, while still wonderful, is bound to turn into just another Quincy Market-style aggregation of fudge shops, souvenir stands and overpriced daiquiri outlets. Someday, the Everglades itself will make the final transformation from a national park into a theme park (“Mosquito World,” or something like that). You’ll be able to walk in solitude down a pristine nature trail, but only after standing in line for two hours. There will still be birds and alligators, of course, but they will all have humans inside, sweating and talking in cheerful voices.

The Authentically Fake Florida is largely composed of vanishing tourist attractions that were popular long ago, such as roadside alligator wrestling stands, the Cypress Knee Museum, the Florida Citrus Tower, Spook Hill, the glass-bottomed boats at Silver Springs and so forth. The down side is that, frankly, there’s a reason these places haven’t been popular in decades. It takes a special person to have an affinity for the root malformations known as cypress knees.

I always get a bit misty-eyed when I see the Florida Citrus Tower in Clermont, about 15 miles northwest of Orlando, because there is hardly any citrus within miles of the place. The groves were wiped out by freezes. Now all the oranges are grown far south--like in Brazil. But the Citrus Tower is still open, and for three bucks you can take an elevator 226 feet up and see a vast expanse of orange tree stumps. Run, don’t walk, to the Citrus Tower!

You will instantly know if you are in the Authentically Fake Florida. For example, you might find yourself in an underground amphitheater staring through a huge glass window at women swimming in a deep freshwater spring, wearing bikini tops and mermaid-fin bottoms, smiling, doing spins and flips and occasionally sucking on air hoses to stave off drowning. This would be Weeki Wachee Springs, a.k.a. “the Spring of Live Mermaids,” in the town of Brooksville, about 45 miles north of Tampa. (I called to make sure the spring is still open--you never know with businesses that depend heavily on underwater air hoses--and I was told they are still going strong after 40 years and that the mermaids are now performing “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen.)

For a particularly goofy example of Authentically Fake Florida, go to Spook Hill. This is nothing more than a street in a quiet neighborhood in Lake Wales, a lovely town in the rolling orange grove country of central Florida. You follow these tiny signs all over town until you come to a cheap-looking archway saying “Spook Hill,” spanning a normal-looking street. There’s a line painted on the pavement, purporting to be the exact bottom of the hill. The idea is, you stop your car there and wait, and it will roll up the hill. How spooky! Like, you expect aliens to beam you away any second. The only flaw with Spook Hill is that the painted line is quite obviously not at the bottom of the hill, and so your car is actually rolling downhill, in confirmation rather than defiance of Newtonian physics. But then I always was excessively linear in my thinking.

I guess I forgot to mention that I spent 80% of my life in Florida--the first 17 years in Gainesville and, later, eight more years in Miami--and though this was obviously a damaging experience, it does qualify me to be a Florida expert. There is no similarity between Gainesville and Miami (that’s like comparing “Deliverance” to “Scarface”) except that both have very good college football teams.

Only a fool would go through Florida without doing a little beach driving, which is to say, driving right on the beach, crushing shells and coating your car with powdery white sand. Hey, it’s legal. In much of Florida, a beach is legally a road.

I was in Daytona Beach last year during spring break for about one hour and the only driving rules that I could discern were: 1) the beach is one way, and 2) you have to be a jerk. This is not meant in a negative spirit, it’s just that I happened to be there not only when there were billions of college students, but also an equal number of bikers attending a huge national biker festival, and the situation simply called for a sudden outbreak of plague. If you have children, you needn’t worry about a tourist guide, because naturally you will head straight to Walt Disney World for theme-filled fun. Make sure to check out the replica of the 1950s diner at Disney-MGM Studios--each booth has a tiny TV that plays ‘50s-era black-and-white shows. But only snippets of these shows. Otherwise, people would just sit there and watch TV. Instead you merely enjoy the imitation of sitting there watching TV. It’s kind of a fake version of the Authentically Fake Florida.

My recommendation for Disney-goers is that you stay at Ft. Wilderness. This is the Walt Disney version of a forest. I went there in a 24-foot recreational vehicle that got about two miles to the gallon. The forest is pleasantly equipped with numerous concrete parking spaces, barbecue grills, electrical hookups, you name it. There are also some trees.