The Battle for Florida

David Holloway

I moved to Florida from Wisconsin when I was ten, but Curtis “Wild Hair” Kensington had been born there. I remember him running across the vacant lots, shirtless with his chaotic hair flying, his skin red from the sun in those pre-sunscreen days. His feet were so tough from going barefoot that the sandspurs that pained the rest of us bounced from the callused soles of his Floridized feet.

We grew up as neighbors in a Florida suburb built over a bulldozed orange grove. The grove itself had been planted over a razed thicket of sandspurs and slash pine. Possums, frogs, the occasional alligator, and snakes never got the suburb memo. Whenever it rained, wild creatures showed up on porches and in garages.

These included the impressive eastern diamondback I found in my garage. Hissing at one end and buzzing at the other, thick as a bicycle tire, it turned to look at me with an air of boredom. As if to say, “I was here long before you and I’ll be here long after you’ve gone.”

By the time I found a shovel to kill it, the snake had disappeared. That snake or his cousins would show up in driveways, swimming pools, and manicured lawns throughout my years in Florida, reminding me who really owned the place.

When we were in sixth grade, we joined the junior sailing club and splashed around the bay in little sailing dinghies. They called the tiny boats Optimist Prams. Once when I was a hundred yards from everyone else, an enormous creature, longer than my boat, swam up next to me. He rolled on his side to look me in the eye and showed me his sharp white teeth. People gush over the dolphin’s cute smile, but I recognized it as a warning, not a welcome.

Senior year all of us on the football team gathered magic mushrooms from a local cow pasture and ate them after losing the last game. We passed out in Matheson Hammock Park and woke in a single huge cocoon of chigger-infested Spanish moss. We crawled out covered in red swollen chigger bites, itching, and moaning. Curtis blamed a vividly remembered alien abduction.

The state decided to expand our little town’s perfect beach by dredging up rough coral stones from the bottom of the gulf and throwing them onto the smooth sugar sand, trying for more of a good thing. They ran out of funds before covering the acres of sharp, rough stones with sand, and the prized beach resembled a blasted moonscape for decades.

Curtis loved weird Florida and took me to visit Spook Hill in Lake Wales to watch my car roll uphill. He took the ghost tour at the Riddle House in Palm Beach and swore that he once saw the elusive Florida Skunk-Ape, the state’s favorite cryptid.

Curtis attended Seances in Cassadaga, home to more active spiritualists per capita than anywhere else on earth. His favorite medium, Nika, had moved to Florida from Dubrovnik as a child. Nika had a spirit guide named Tiger Miccosukee, a Seminole Indian in life. At the last séance Curtis attended, Nika asked Tiger about the future of Florida. The spirit’s sobs were deafening.

By the time I went to college in South Carolina, high tides had begun to cover the sidewalks, lawns, and roads in my little Florida town. During one visit home, Curtis drove my car through a puddle that turned out to be a deep-flowing stream. It pushed my old Honda Civic off the road and into a canal. Curtis waded out laughing, drunk with relief at his escape. His joy washed away my anger as quickly as the flood had swept my car away.

Curtis called me to say that the beefalo herd escaped their ranch in Ft. Lauderdale again, causing havoc by wandering out onto I-95. He said that they were the perfect livestock for Florida. Ridiculously tough and too dumb to understand fences.

I got a job in Charlotte, North Carolina, and my friend stayed in Florida. The last time I talked to him, he described his house. “Right on the mouth of the river. I can smell the stink of low tide from the screened porch.” Three weeks later, Hurricane William roared through with a thirty-foot storm surge, washing Curtis and his house away. They never found his body.

I visited for my 25th high school reunion. I drove out to the beach for old times’ sake, planning to drink rum and enjoy the psychedelic sunset. Florida gives great sky. I hadn’t heard about the latest red tide. The stench hit me like a pro linebacker. Hundreds of dead fish of all types and sizes, along with the bloated body of a huge dead manatee, rocked back and forth in the gentle surf. Even the gulls wouldn’t scavenge their too-noxious flesh. Florida had signed a suicide pact.

I keep a football-sized horse conch shell that I found on Clearwater Beach on the coffee table in my living room. Visitors insist on holding it up to the side of their heads and listening for the sound of the ocean. When I listen, I hear Florida whispering, calling, cursing. I don’t hear the hiss of waves, but a fat snake’s belly scraping along the concrete floor of my garage.

Author: David Holloway

David Holloway writes from Savannah, Georgia. He has lived most of his life in the South, primarily Florida, and has always loved spending time in nature and reading about others’ experiences in the natural world. His publications include stories published in Abandon Journal, The Mad River Review, The Offbeat, Agnes and True, and Gargoyle, among other magazines. Due to early traumatic experiences, he does his best to avoid bagpipes and parrots.

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