Jed Wolf

I received a text from a good friend announcing he and his husband were moving from St. Augustine to St. Petersburg, FL. They’d lived in a charming clapboard victorian in Lincolnville for over twenty years but without asking, I knew why they were leaving. Doomed with great weather, natural beauty, historic sites, spectacular grand hotels and home of the tacky Fountain of Youth, “The Oldest City in the World,” as is printed on tee-shirts in 420-friendly downtown shops has become Disneyland. 

Like all of St. Augustine, charming residential Lincolnville to the south continually gets rediscovered. Dripping with Spanish moss and civil rights history, it changed little ’till the 80’s when travelers’ renewed interest in it, and residents found rising property values hard to resist. Tides of trust-fund bohemians bought affordable property and new neighborhood camaraderie emerged. As folks came and went and property markets grew, investors scarfed up whatever they could and turned them into short-term rentals and Airbnbs. Now Lincolnville remains visually lovely but today’s neighbors are unrecognizable as outsiders prowl the streets wanting a piece of it for themselves, if only for a night or two.

The reasons people love and leave St. Augustine are always the same. Other than it’s interesting yet transient music scene, the town’s an expensive cultural wasteland for anyone expecting anything like city life. It and its entire surroundings are low. There hadn’t been a major hurricane in over sixty years then two consecutive ones two years ago braked the economy a bit but the bustling tourist town hardly skipped a beat during the pandemic. Growth around the surrounding county is out of control. Despite climate change threatening to turn it into Venice, city government isn’t forward thinking enough to address congestion, affordable housing or its vulnerability to anything besides cash. Government favors hotels, shops and restaurants. Weary residents can sell their piece of “The Magic Kingdom” for buckets of money and move out, but after living in paradise, where would we go?

A ten minute bike ride east leads to five miles of pristine, empty ocean beach. We can walk anytime or ride bikes on hard-packed sand at low tide and amble into town any morning while it sleeps, passing incomparable architecture, spectacular gardens and dolphins breaching beside us along the idillic waterfront. 

We hike from the home we built after Mathew to marine hammocks and attend concerts at the amphitheater voted best in the country, yet across the water, only a few thousand feet from bustling downtown, our shady new and higher home, beset with mature trees, a koi pond and a lagoon-shaped swimming pool remains a quiet sanctuary where eagles rest. There’s nowhere like it ’till late autumn when weather threatens to mow down all parts of the state and our huge trees, the first to feel the outer bands of storms from Africa begin swaying wildly.

“What’s in St. Pete,” I asked. “Well,” my friend said after a noticeably long breath. “It’s not a theme park. There’s culture there, and a gay scene.” He exhaled more ponderous air and continued, “We don’t really know, exactly – an adventure I suppose? Lincolnville’s become intolerable and we’ll do well selling before another storm or sea water remains on the streets for months.” Their news got my head spinning and I in-turn spun Dave’s then called a realtor friend who said we could ask nearly a million dollars for what we’d created.

We’d planned our first trip since being vaccinated In March to a gay campground we’d visited the summer before Covid. We had a three-hour car ride the following day and I hadn’t slept a wink dreaming of profits when we hit to road to race across the state. “It’s a Devil’s bargain,” I said clearing my tired throat, “what humans do for easy cash I mean…”

“St. Pete is fifteen feet above sea level,” I continued. “St. Augustine is seven.” “But it might as well be an island,” Dave stammered. “It’s another congested peninsula. Tampa sprawl is right there and the Gulf of Mexico has hurricanes and red tides.” As we volleyed our potential bucket-load of money back and forth hurling toward camp, we entered Trump country. 

Unlike near the coasts where bulldozers rule, Central Florida elegantly transitions between wilderness, farmland, cattle ranches and horse farms. Huge, moss-draped live oaks spread wide shade for lazy long horn steer and Arabian mares with foals while hoards of black vultures feed on unlucky roadside boar and armadillos in the blazing sun.

There’s a spot near the “Hog Wild Country Café” on state road 310 where a gushing spring pipe attracts beat-up locals with water jugs and their worse-off vehicles. We’d passed it many times on former trips to camp and as we wizzed by, even if we felt like checking out the spring, there was nowhere to park. Around the next bend an unnerving scent reached inside our truck as irrigated fields reeked of chemicals evaporating in the midday heat. “Imagine the pesticides in the wells around here,” I snorted as a stone-faced handicapped man sat by the road on his “Jazzy” hawking boiled peanuts to cars racing by, shadowed by low-flying Sandhill Cranes. 

Several years ago while investigating northern towns to re-locate to, we’d considered Saratoga Springs New York who’s grand architecture and healing waters also attracted visitors with containers. I loved the way my vascular system felt immediately after downing sulphury cups of effervescence before learning of its carcinogens. I pondered Flint Michigan and numerous other more recently toxic places throughout this country which didn’t exist when I was young. While speeding through central Florida past huge free standing “Fuck Biden” signs in bucolic rolling pastures and on the sides of gorgeous barns, I longed for escape. The hand-painted sign above the spring read, “Let Jesus be the Boss of Your Life.” “Far too late. My husband’s the boss of mine,” I murmured accelerating towards our campground packed with men.

Grateful for having no children to support in this day and age, we passed a pregnant teenager in a town called “Citra” who gave the finger to a tattoed guy idling beside us in a dark truck. He gunned it when the light changed and left rubber for us to dare cross. “Folks ‘round here, high on spring water and Jesus, ‘rather spend money on tinted windows, ammo and Trump signs than new mufflers or dental work,” I said in a southern drawl. “What about Costa Rica?”

As soon as we checked into our rented cabin at the campground, I got on the internet and googled “Costa Rican real estate” and up popped several affordable properties with mountain views. On closer inspection I noted bars on the windows. Undaunted, I searched “Gay San Jose” and learned of the country’s progressive government and a thriving LGBTQ scene. Dave had learned some Spanish from doing business in Puerto Rico and began speaking it as he wrapped a towel around himself to visit the pool. “There are tons of national parks, five active volcanoes and sloths,” I said ten minutes after arriving at our long-awaited camp. 

Engrossed in possibilities for secure happiness on my cabin bed, I told Dave I needed a nap but after he left, I remained on-line investigating the lives of gay ex-pats in Central America. If we sold our place for a shit load of money before the next hurricane, I could quit selling swimming pools and we’d be rich retirees in paradise. But, if we waited, we would’t. With that I sprang from the bed and found Dave at the pool. 

“There’s no where else we’d wanna’ live in Florida and after Trump and Covid, I for one have had it with this entire country. You know I live for gardening, glimmering light, bird calls and gentle breezes. All we’d need are shade trees and a large porch with a ceiling fan like the one we have.” Relieved and unnerved to be among only gay men again, I added, “Retirement in the tropics suits me fine, even the rainy seasons. We’ll find a place with a big porch.”

Dave and I sat beside the simmering pool-full of men while discussing Central American life when glancing at each other mirror-like, we decided then and there to sell. We even high-fived it. Decision made. We’d traded dreary liberal New England for the dreaded Southland and thrived. We’d done it before. We could do it again at the Equator!

Escaped lab monkeys have colonized remote areas of Florida but Harpy Eagles hunt indigenous primates in Costa Rica. I wouldn’t need to design swimming pools. There’d be enough to see and do in our new land to keep us occupied until our time. Then, rather than leaping from a traffic congested Florida bridge, where someone might stop me or a dolphin might save me, I’d simply unclip a carabiner and drop headfirst, hundreds of feet from a zip-line platform in a rain forest onto a big hard root. 

Dave and I were on the same page. As he taught me Spanish phrases beside the pool drinking cocktails, everyone with dark hair or any at all began looking Latino when suddenly a semi transparent UFO floated over the pool about fifty feet up. Before the object disappeared into gathering thunderheads, I imagined Dave and I retiring by a similar pool on the side of a volcano in gated gay community walled off from surrounding petty thieves and pickpockets listening to the exact same songs. I knew well how “seeing” is the first step towards manifestation and imagining our plane up in the clouds, I asked, pointing heavenward. “What’s that?” Others looked up and I heard someone say, “foam.”

Every spring, summer and fall weekend, our campground had a theme and calendar of events we rarely took part in before Covid. Unknown to us, this weekend’s highlight was a Saturday night “foam party.” Behind the scenes bubbles from vast amounts of dish soap were quietly mounding up with pieces lifting skyward as we relaxed by the pool. The foam continued growing during bingo, karaoke and the evening drag shows until by 10:00 pm in June, when it’s still eighty five degrees everywhere in Florida, at a camp surrounded by moonlit cattle ranches on a bend in the tea-colored Withlacoochee river in the heart of Trump country, a fifteen foot mountain of disco-lit foam toppled and re-grew to pulsing decibels of Cher singing “Do You Believe in Life After Love.” A blasting siren, likely heard 20 miles west at Weeki Wachee announced the opening of the event and campers in all manner of bathing attire or none at all danced into the huge kitchen sink-smelling, laser-lit clouds.

Dave wore new sneakers which would get ruined so he sat it out. “What if St. Peter asks you why you declined a foam party,” I asked. “I’ll risk Hell,” he said. Normally I’d sit things like this out too. I never kept bucket lists but last chances seem to appear frequently these days, along with forgetfulness, so I shed most of my clothes and walked in to subject my psyche to something truly memorable.

The foam was cool and gooey – not what I expected. I heard someone mention to keep it out of their eyes but it was too late. I couldn’t wipe it so my left eye had to shut. Guys were throwing foam which made things worse so I cleared my way from the crowd toward the tallest mound and entered. “An avalanche might look like this without the strobe lights,” I thought struggling to make room around my face to breath or see. Neither was easy and as the soapy air made me choke, I lost all sense of direction. An occaisional slippery body part slid by but but as I tried to remain calm, I imagined my death. 

“Typical,” I thought, “expiring this way with the illusion of joy and abandon just out of slimy reach.” Someone groped me and I slipped away into someone else who slid past me apologizing. “People are so polite here,” he said. “In the south,” I added and we both burst out laughing. As we re-emerged into the crowd where breathing was easier, more people entered and the foam grew higher and higher inside the perimeter fence. When it began toppling onto us I left.

A dude on a lifeguard chair hosed off people exiting but the water was too cold, so I slipped out covered with foam, found Dave and left to take a hot shower. That night I woke coughing imagining being suffocated by a jaguar but it was only residual lung soap.

Camp coffee is weak so at 7:00 am the next morning, we drove to Dunkin’ Donuts by the interstate. As we emerged from the truck, I noticed several suited African Americans – a woman and two gentlemen and others in their car, apparently dressed for church. On closer inspection the woman turned out to be a political candidate (who I hoped was a Democrat) and my heart ached sentimentally about abandoning America. The kid’s running Dunkin’ Donuts apologized for not having even one packet of real sugar and blamed it on Covid. The cold egg sandwiches sucked but as we drove back to camp on the bumpiest road imaginable, I began to realize how much I already missed our fucked up country and all I had back home in Disneyland.  

Where would we be without our brave neighbors – the ones who remain un-attached to possessions figuring flood insurance into their life plans. We’d miss the waves from envious tourists who stop to take pictures of our beautiful house and shaded yard – the neighborhood gatherings on our huge front porch where after a life without them, I finally learned to trust joy and laughter – our backyard ospreys, owls and eagles and our disfunctional tourist trap of a town where worry and humor unite us and where I yelled across my backyard wall last summer at my beautiful neighbor coughing day after day with Covid to, “Shut Up!” How could we leave?

On our way back from camp, I told Dave I’d like to stop at the spring below the Jesus sign. This time there was only one vehicle parked . A young woman with lovely skin and her son were pumping water with battery power into thirty gallon drums in the bed of their truck. “Am I gonna’ catch something if I have a swig of that water,” I asked ambling toward the pipe. “No sir,” she said. “We been drinking’ it our entire lives,” she said grinning with the most welcoming and whitest smile I’d ever seen. “Hit smell a bit like dirt but it’s the best thing for ya’,” her son said as he handed me a plastic cup.

As a former science teacher, Dave who wouldn’t drink from springs in Saratoga for fear of Ecoli, declined partaking this time too but said we needed to bring gallon containers with us next time we returned to camp. 

I drank several cups full. As we headed back to our historic Disneyland; Florida’s “First Coast,” originally developed by Spaniards in 1565 and now, 450 years later, me, I imagined gorgeous and still habitable Venice Italy, (though it has no hurricanes) and sighed with relief as my grateful vascular system danced us home for more.