Treasure Island

Going back to the future of Old Florida

This is the opening of Treasure Island, my first of several books written about, on, or during time spent settled down and around Treasure Island, Florida. This first book, about characters who discover it early in this century, was written immediately after my initial visit so long ago.

The island was beaten hard by Hurricane Helene last Thursday. Nobody there had ever experienced anything like it. The entire island was submerged in storm surge to a minimum of six feet—front to back, every home and structure got it and every car on the ground was totaled. As of today there’s still no power, no water, and enormous sand dunes everywhere, mapping out an alien terrain. Nothing like this has happened there since at least the late 19th century, although many residents have told me—in wary, ominous tones—that in recent years the storms have gotten both stronger and more frequent. So this one wasn’t quite unexpected, and I’m not sure that it’s necessarily going to be the end in our time.

Photo of Sunset Beach by Michael Thompson

Right now this book’s a time machine and a lost, almost forgotten history—there’s no going back to what Treasure Island was back then, nor to what it could have been, to that vision we had ages ago when we saw the incredible and exclusive-to-right-there potential, and we believed it would soon become something big and famous in the world. It was a historic goldmine with an inimitable feel, and with the right leadership it could’ve been spectacular. But despite changes over the years—good and bad—there’s something great happening right now in all the ruin, and I’ve seen it from a lot of friends and acquaintances who are down there now and cleaning up the mess. Their spirits should all be broken, but instead a lot of them seem to be working doubly hard, together, to make it all stand up. Area reports from Hubbard’s Marina in Madeira Beach to the cleanup in sand-capped Sunset Beach show that the Gulf Beaches are going to be back, and they’re going to be back sooner than a lot of people think. It’ll be different, sure, and the vision forward is going to have to be a new one, but it just might be a good one. It certainly doesn’t have to become a dumb wall of concrete canyons without the small-town beach soul that everyone loved it for. Landmarks like Tropic Terrace have already announced that they’re coming back and not giving in. The island spirit lives. It’s a new chapter, and as crazy as it sounds, it feels like it’s going to turn out to be a pretty good one.

Paid subscribers get an advance proof copy of the book the moment that it’s ready to mail, as do any subscribers in the Gulf Beaches affected by the storm—if that’s you, send a message to get on the list.

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I.

A month ago we came back from the lost world of paradise, boarding a Continental plane in Tampa where all the hot roads shimmered, and found ourselves stepping out back home into a snowstorm. Before the trip, I’d been messed up because my nerves were killing me and although we’d planned the vacation well in advance it came at the most opportune moment because I was about ready to collapse—I’d been twitching and having vision problems where the colors looked different in each eye, and my hands and arms would twitch all day keeping me away from work and I’d be shaking and my hands would be suddenly going numb—we had to eventually go to the emergency room because I thought I was dying and we’d seen a lot of doctors but then this wise kind neurologist saw me and after a long thorough exam he told me that I was completely healthy but that I simply needed rest. I’d been overworking myself, he said, that’s what it came down to. The part of the brain that worked as an attenuator was focusing on things it would usually ignore, I was picking them up, and they bothered me. What I needed to do, he said, is slow down—and when he did I heard Allen Ginsberg saying it in his voice, “Slo-o-o-w down!”

Both the doctor and his assistant, a young purefaced woman with big round glasses, were looking intently—and when I told them that I’d be leaving for a vacation to Florida in less then a week, they laughed. “That’s perfect timing,” he said, ending everything. “It’s just what you need.”

So we were going on doctor’s orders and I decided to just stop worrying about work. I had been working on a giant novel that had been a waking dream of mine for years—I called it My Virtual Life and it traced out the story behind every mouseclick and keyboard clack I’d ever made. It already ran to over half a million words and the story was only halfway told and I was beginning to wonder if it would ever get finished and whether or not it would be publishable when it was done and would anyone ever read it—and in a crazy scheme to make a little money I had written a computer book, a book that shows regular, plain old people how to use the new, great software that was available today for free and for the sharing, and that was a long, drawn-out process in itself, and it'd been a noose around my neck for years, I’d been waiting to see the damn thing off to the printers so I could calm down and then get working full-bore on the novel—but at every turn there was a new setback and delay, it seemed as if the book would never see publication in this lifetime.

Everything would just have to fall into place in time, I had to relax and accept that. So these were the stresses hanging over my life, along with wanting to get out of the city of Clifton for good—I lived here with my wife and we both hated it, had no friends here, felt it was slowly sinking into the black morass of a ruined America—we were both born here, even went to college here and afterward, both of us together and in love, we even settled here without thinking or caring about the consequences. We were the truest rebels of all, with a house full of books and big plans to shake up the Internet. I had money then, was working at an Internet job that paid pretty well, and had settled down into that lifestyle—but then we finally broke free of it and wanted to see something through, we got sick of weblogs even though a friend of mine invented them; now we wanted to unplug from it all completely and to travel and really see the country, and find a good place that had withstood the ugly sprawl that was eating up the world like a festering cancerblot. We were not happy in our quiet suburb and we weren’t happy with Clifton or anywhere else in the whole state of Sohola—everything good here was rapidly fading, life was dead—we wanted to make a go of it somewhere else, a place where things were better and it was hard, finding a way so I could finish writing, and figuring out how to go there on a budget and what to do when we arrived, whether to buy a house and settle or to rent cheaply on the run like vagabonds ... it was hard to figure out and it was all taking too long. We’d thought about Seattle and Portland on one coast and then brisk New England on the other—Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Ithaca in upstate New York, the shores of New Hampshire, I was swaying between everything. I wanted to step over the whole country and know it all. I dreamt of California cliffs, Texas heat, the Twin Cities, arid horsefarms in Wyoming—and what of the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, or Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay? Options were everywhere. It was all a tangled mystery.

So our house cleaned and half-packed for a move to we did not know where, we had ourselves readied for this trip to Treasure Island. A pretty fair number of “retro,” “kitschy” places—motels, diners, tiki bars—were rumored to exist there, and that’s what we were into, so we figured a week out there would be fun, exploring these things, and sitting on the beach, and swimming. It would be a time to forget about our work and worries—we’d just enjoy the sunheat and bright airy open skies, just swim and sit along the boardwalk, walk down strange sunny avenues and gorge out on seafood and explore new parks and woods.

It was a cold Monday morning when we had to leave. We had an eleven o’clock flight and my dad had volunteered to drive us to the Clifton airport, which was very close by. We lived not far from it at all, just a five minute car ride. My dad would also take care of the cats while we were gone—he always did when we went on trips—and he’d feed them a couple times a day and give our sick boy cat his daily medicine in the morning. I’d had each day’s worth of meds measured out and put in plastic bags which I labelled and stuck in the silverwear drawer behind the tray. I always grew worried about the cats before trips—would they be scared and lonely? Would they barf all over everything, and tear up the house? Would they think we left them forever? But we needed to go, and that was no reason to stay.

My dad came and gave us a card in a big envelope—it was our fourth anniversary, and when we were married, which had been a small affair at the city hall with only my sister and a friend in attendance and afterward we all got drunk on margaritas, we made a rule that every year we’d go off on a honeymoon for our anniversary. So far we haven’t broken that rule.

I showed my dad what to do around the house—it was all very simple, really—made sure that we had everything, said goodbye to the cats, and then loaded up my dad’s SUV with our stuff. We had one large duffel bag and each of us had backpacks. I’d printed out a list of things that my dad had to make sure to do and I’d stuck it on the fridge with a magnet. The house would be taken care of. We didn’t wear jackets because it would be warm where we were going, but in this morning air we were cold—I had a sweatshirt on over my t-shirt and Marci had a thin parka over hers. (We brought parkas for both of us, for going in places in the rain.)

The drive to the airport happened fast, there was small chitchat and it ended with my dad pulling out a wad of cash from his wallet—for us, for a nice dinner somewhere—and I thanked him and took it. They always did that before we went on trips like this.

At the gate two white-sideburned black men in neat caps took our bags and asked us the standard questions, between a joking morning conversation they were carrying out with each other—“Has anyone asked you to carry something for you?” one of them asked, his voice muffling the end of a laugh he’d had with his friend. “Have you been in possession of your bags the whole time?”

He saw our photo IDs and had us fill out a nametag for the big bag, and they took it ... he told us what gate we were in (C5, Continental) and we went inside the building.

I always liked the rush of boarding a plane ... travel, like this, was like a fever—when you were moving, when you were actually going, it was a rush, a great thing—you felt free and open, part of the world … new options were open, and the blues of the world came into you—it could be sad and tense and angry but no matter what it was it was blues, and that was music—so it was always good. I loved to travel and I loved this feel, but before any trip I was always nervous—sometimes to the point of actually cancelling the trip. At home I felt safe, secure, and unwilling to move. It was a time of reading books and writing and learning, slowly, letting my own thinking unfold at my own pace. Travelling wasn’t like that—it was a time of letting the road and new places come at you at your travelling speed, your mind taking in a constant stream of new thoughts and ideas and sensations—the colors and lights like a scarf in a bazaar, flipping over a woman's shoulder, you turn and look and there’s a shout long and drolling you know it’s in a foreign tongue and there’s a drumbeat and the smell of fish, and foreign dishes ... a clang rings out from inside of a shack and you’re tangled in a crowd ... the ground is like desert, sandy ... you’re a stranger here, invisible, and this is not your world ... but yes, it is the world, and now you see it. Now you are seeing it. That is the feeling of travel, and that is why I love it while it is happening. That is also, I think, the reason I fear it when I am at home.

Up at the terminal we went through the x-ray machine. They passed my SmartMedia cards for my camera ok—I hand it to the guy and he examined the plastic blue case turning it over in his hand and I said, “They’re memory chips for a digital camera,” and he said ok, but he said it dumbly like he let me take control of the situation and I thought that crap, there could've been nitroglycerin in there and he wouldn’t have noticed ... then we approached to the lady at the terminal and I gave her my tags and I knew we were already checked in at the departure doors by the men in caps, but I liked to do this anyway—I get habitual about travel and this was a part of that.

She pulled them out of their sleeve, looked at them, and said, “Ok, you're all set.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking them. We sat down at twin chairs. All the chairs were connected in little chair-islands, the black leather seats jutting out of a steel center. Steel elbow rests came out too, and we put our backpacks down in front of us and we just sat there when Marci said she wanted water—so she left and I looked around and saw that our gate the actual place where we walk through to the plane was further ahead, we were closer to another gate and while people around us were for our place, it’d be better to sit further ahead—when they call for boarding I like to be the first one up. I saw a pair of seats empty right by the place we were supposed to go, like right in front of it (but with the backs toward it) and I made a resolve that we would get up and move to there when Marci came back. I saw an intent businessman reading a newspaper near there, balding—he had a few strands of dark hair combed over his bald head in a circle, but he looked like he was only in his early thirties.

I turned and looked toward the hall area in the crowd of moving people both directions blue navy dress and suits and coffees and bags and there’s Marci in her horn-rimmed glasses coming back at a brisk pace ... she came back and I gave her her backpack and I stood up with mine. I said, “Let’s go over here,” and she followed me and she went to the new spot with me and we sat down; she did not know, coming back, that she’d never again sit in that previous spot but now from the new spot I myself would never sit there again and I quickly put it out of my mind.

I looked and saw a goon-shaped woman across from us she looked like the Florida vacationing type and our eyes met for a second and then passed other ways ... I pondered as I always do in airports, where all these people were going, and for what purposes ... I fooled with my zipper on my backpack and in our smalltalk I asked Marci if she’d like to read now, and she said no. We sat quietly and the plane boarding happened and after first class they called the back and that was us, and we bolted up and went to the line, the lady took my tickets for both of us and took some time tearing them in half and then she gave me my half and we went down the covered walkway to the plane ... the hum of fans and motors, the spot where it connected to the plane and you could see the outside with hoarfrost and crystalled snow dander whisking and rebounding through the grimy-gray runway area, whooshed by cold Catawba winds and then clinging to surfaces ... a ground crew worker came excused himself came in gave something to the crew he was a bulky man in orange and yellow fluorescent vest. He left and we went inside; the stewardess was nice to me and said good morning (usually they pass me up) and we went down the plane aisle and as I looked at the numbers I saw with dismay that we had middle and aisle seats, and not a window seat ... found our spot and the window seat was empty and I hoped it would stay that way.

People boarded in a stream and then an old lady in blue windbreaker whispered kind of to Marci from where the lady was standing in the aisle by the seat, telling her that her seat was the one by the window.

We both stood up to let her go though and it was with a little difficulty. We crooked our knees and she got through. She looked for her seat belt and I looked for mine and gave her one end of hers that was near my seat, I smiled and tried to look friendly. She whispered like to me asking if I wanted the window seat and I said no, that that was ok. Then I turned toward Marci and we decided to read—Marci had brought The Town and the City which she was reading at the time and I brought You Can’t Win by Jack Black, a book we’d both been wanting to read. As people boarded I began to read and I’d been reading in the airport waiting area at the terminal and Marci put down her book and read mine with me, and I waited to turn each page until she was done ... now that I pulled mine out I asked if she wanted hers and she said no, so I didn’t read mine yet, either. The woman next to me had a worn white leather purse with a gold snap and she pulled it out and got things from it that old ladies do—gum, little candies, tissues. The plane was in the air Marci and I holding hands and then we were up and the distant bellring happened I guess a signal to stewardesses and then once we were up—I tried a few glances out the window crooking my neck and Marci looked too—could see the ground and I thought that if we crashed now that would be it ... “That’s pretty,” Marci said, commenting on the puffy cloud formations we were leaving.

Marci and I began to read You Can’t Win together. At first this arrangement irritated me but I got used to it and then I began to like it—it was neat that we were both reading the same book together right at the same time. It had been hard going for me, in the airport, reading those first pages—as much as I wanted to read I wanted to look around and look at everyone, wonder about where they were going and what their lives were about. This made it hard to concentrate.

Now, on the plane, this feeling was not so strong and I was able to get into it better. I noticed that the old lady next to me would occasionally glance over at me and at the book ... I wondered if she could see it from there, if she could read the title or any of the words.

So we got into the story of Jack Black, about how he was raised by his father and had gone to a private school where they had nuns just as I’d known and how he lived in a small town and marveled at the stories of Jesse James and his gang ... and his toy gun, and playing with the other boys, and then how he began to get into a life of crime, helping a young prostitute his age escape from the clutches of her madam and the whorehouse, and how the two might live a life on the road, together, as friends ... they went into a roadside restaurant and in the wooden booth they ordered chicken and she hungrily ate more than he did, and I could picture the good hot fried chicken, breaded brown just right ... we put the book down when the steward came out with a cart of food.

Our lunches came and we didn’t have a choice—we saw up ahead that there were two styles, beef or chicken sandwiches I think, in white wrapping with red or blue labels, and that people up near the front of the plane were choosing ... I knew the chicken wouldn’t be good so even with the Mad Cow scare I thought I’d pick beef, I was in the mood for a cold roast beef sandwich. But when the steward came to us, a kindly black guy with thick, chapped fingers and a shaved head, we were just given the blue-labelled chicken. We also got an apple—a tiny little green one—and a little wrapped S’mores candy.

We hadn’t gotten our drinks yet and while some people began eating right away, others waited. The old lady next to me sat tight. I began eating; I was hungry. I unwrapped the sandwich and it was a “mesquite” grill (the chicken didn’t look good, it was like a super-processed brick of ground-up stuff) and there was a little packet of mayo you could put on it. I used the plastic knife to spread it. The sandwich had a single weepy leaf of lettuce and a paperthin tomato slice and it was all very cold, even the bun. I had a bite and ate slowly and another bite and looking around waiting for the two stewards and the stewardess to come back with the drinks.

When they did he asked us what we’d like and both Marci and I got cranberry juice. The old lady next to me got tomato juice and I helped give the aluminum can to her, remembering the trip to Florida that Marci and I had taken a few years back and how I’d ordered tomato juice on the plane that time. It was filling and good for you, and I liked to drink it on planes. I made a mental resolve to order some on the way back, and for us to buy some when we got back home.

I was finished before Marci and the old lady, who was cutting her sandwich with a knife, I think—I would look out of the corner of my eye but wouldn’t glance at her meal directly. I ate the apple, and Marci tucked hers in her backpack. The old lady might’ve put hers in her purse. Half the women on the plane, I figured, had tiny apples in their purses now. The lady stared at her little S'mores package and I stared at mine and we looked at each other and smiled—we did that again a little later when the captain came on the radio and you couldn’t hear him at all because the speaker system wasn’t working very well, it was like a random sputter of gruff mutterings.

After they took away our trash I got to talking with the lady—she wanted to know where we were going and I told her that we were heading to Treasure Island, near St. Pete. She said that she was on her way down to Key West, that she went there every once in a while. I noticed the Pass-a-Way Island logo on her jacket and I asked her about it. She said that she lived there, and I got excited and told her that I loved the place, that I had gone up there to that island ever since I was a little boy ... she said that she lived near the Miller Ferry drop in a little green cottage on the water and that it said EIER on it, that’s her name, and that we should drop by next time we were there—I said that I would. She told me her story. She was a widow. She’d lived in Parkland Village for years and they had a place there—both her and her husband had worked at NASA for decades. “I lost my husband a few years ago,” she said, and that was when she moved to Pass-a-Way to live there on the island all year round. She said it got lonely in the winter, there were not as many people and everyone stayed indoors, but that in the summer there was always something going on and the people there are real friendly, they are open to new neighbors. She was actually heading to Key West to see Pat Daily, the “famous” Pass-a-Way entertainer who for almost 30 years has sung raunchy country-folk songs at the bars downtown there, and who had this legend going about how he went down to Key West in the winter to sing down there, where he was friends with another musician just his style, Jimmy Buffett. When I was a teen those guys were kind of odd adult idols of mine—I dug their image and thought it was real, thought that a man could live in America in this world today as a pirate living the simple life on the shore going out to sea and reading yarns by the fire at night and singing songs about your life, drinking hard and heavy and tending to nature in a small town ... as a teen I yearned to make the journey to Key West and I’d loved Pass-a-Way and that whole area, and I collected Buffett and Dailey records and just bought into the whole thing. Bottles of rum held their mystery. I believed in that image, and the trouble with it was that it simply was not true—the whole thing was a business manufacture, a way to make an image to market and sell records.

Buffett was as much a pirate as any Wall Street day trader ... except Buffett was guilty of more environmental malfeasance than your average New York exec, opening chainstores in Key West and everywhere else, selling useless plastic trinkets of lobsters and ships and crabs and beer mugs, all the accessories a day trader needs to buy to transform himself into a weekend pirate in his own fantasyland. The more I learned about Buffett’s whole thing the more I hated it—in college I’d slowly morphed away and got out of my adoration of these men; I saw that he was a businessman and that what he was doing was no different from any other, except it was possibly less honest. I saw the awful truth that no out was there, that it was not a way for me ... that no I could not go and live the simple boating life as presented in the image of these songs. The music, too, was all copied—Buffett songs were typically structural parodies or blatant copies of other pop songs, but with lyrics that rhymed (often cornily) and presented this image—his whole musical oeuvre was geared to selling and marketing this image for businessmen to buy into, this fantasy of “Margaritaville,” a never-never land of frozen tropical drinks and hammocks and easy living ... meanwhile, no real-world solution existed, no way existed to be a part of society and live in the world today yet live the simple life of the water and the sea ... not that way.

So I had a pang of nostalgia to hear this lady Mrs. Eier talk about Dailey—he had a crowd of people who were becoming middle-aged by the ’80s and who followed him around and who were islanders themselves, and this lady was one of them. She was living the life that I, a teen going into the ’90s, had wanted to live. But I did not go that route.

Pass-a-Way was no longer the magical oasis I knew it as—when I was a child it was a wild land, with rough cottages and a beautiful little downtown, just a handful of storefronts and a graceful old motel and some bars. It was the kind of place where I’d like to live—but then in the ’90s I became strongly disillusioned with it as every inch of the island was sold and the place became overdeveloped ... it was eventually built up so much that everything I loved about it was gone, and there was no peace and quiet to be had there. They herded in the drunks over the ferry night after night. The old places were torn down. It looked cheap and development-like now. I went there with Marci for a weekend one year and it was sad to see the crowds and jocks lumbering to the bars because “that was the thing to do” but the place was getting cheapened, nobody was stopping the sprawl. It was not a place with an anti-sprawl element and the whole Catawba islands, in the late ’90s, I considered dead, a ruined paradise. But Mrs. Eier did tell me that they, the longtime residents, hated it—but nobody knew how to stop it, and from her talk, I gathered that nobody did much about it aside from griping. I told her how I cherished the islands but that what I valued most about it was gone now ... and she said that even Kelleys Island, long known to be the “quiet” place with nothing there, is getting rapidly built up. She said that the Frontwaters brewery, a new mid-90s addition that I’d known about, was gone. That was good—I wanted no more development there. But now many of the small businesses were also gone—the local service station and garage was gone, farmstands were gone, old faded signs were taken down. She said the downtown had built up tremendously in the years since I’d been there last—so it sounded like I would not ever want to go back. But I did resolve that if I were to go, I would look her up. We also talked about my writing and I told her about my computer book that was coming out—she said she’d look it up when it came out. We talked about the books that had been written about the islands, including Isolated Splendor by Robert C. Dodge, a book that I’d loved as a youth and that had been a model for me—I’d dreamed of writing a modern-day counterpart—before the cancer of sprawl shattered those dreams. She said she knew about that book, and that Dodge was now retired and living in Arizona. I told her about the Great Lakes series by Dwight Boyer, a set of big fat books, old friends I’d known for years but that she hadn’t heard of. We also talked about her career at NASA—she was a programmer there since the 1960s, and met her husband there. He had done some of the moon calculations back then. I asked her if she knew COBOL and she said yes, and others, but primarily Fortran—and I told her that the first programming course I took in college was a look at ancient Fortran. I said that my book was about modern software for computers—she didn’t know anything about the new home computer stuff—and how people could use it for everyday tasks. I told her that I was glad to be done with the book, that I wanted to get back to my novel, which was what I was working on, and she said she thought it was great that a young person was interested in preserving sprawl and that a person could express himself in writing—“I can sit and do calculations and write them out all day, but I can’t write poetry,” she said, in what came out as half plain admission and complaint.

About a year ago, the local NASA Lewis Research Center renamed itself to the Glenn Research Center—and when Marci and I first saw it we thought it was odd; John Glenn was a famous astronaut and he’d recently been the oldest man in space, going back for one more flight, and he’d served time in the Senate, and was very well known. There was an elementary school near where I grew up that was named after him—when I was little I learned his story about going into space and I wanted to be like him—and there was a bridge near NASA that was named the Glenn Bridge. Recently, a stretch of highway near there had been called the John Glenn Highway and that was all a lot of tribute—I thought it was weird that a research center that had already been named after someone had been now re-named, and renamed to someone who already had lots of tribute. It had always seemed unsettling, rude, and disrespectful. We drove past it a lot in recent months and each time I saw it I thought that it was embarrassing of NASA to have done that—I didn’t know who Lewis was but I thought it wasn’t respectful of them to totally rename it. So I thought of this and I asked Mrs. Eier about it.

“Oh, we were so mad about it!” she said.

“Really?” I asked. “That’s great, it’s great to know—I mean, we didn’t know anything about it but it seemed disrespectful. It just seemed odd to erase that guy’s name and rename the place.”

“Yes, it was,” she agreed. “Dr. Lewis was a very, very bright man. He was very well respected. The center has a newsletter that gets sent out to all of us, called Lewis News, and when that happened some people wrote back and said, ‘You can stop sending me your newsletter. I don't want it.’”

“Oh, wow!”

“Yes,” she said. “We were very, very upset about that.”

“Well, that’s good that people said something,” I said. “Like I said, we didn’t know anything about it, but to us the situation seemed odd.”

“Glenn had a lot of things given to him already,” she said. “He didn't need all that. But he took it, more and more. He could’ve said no.”

“Yes, that’s right!” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me: he could’ve said no!

Her voice was like a whisper over the roar of the engines—I never heard right in an airplane cabin and through the whole conversation I never really got the timbre of her voice. It was there, just over the level of a whisper, and the words were presented to me and I decoded them without hearing much depth in the voice or much character. I saw her hands and they were shriveled with age and her nails were long and she had a wedding ring on and it had the engagement ring connected to it and a sparkling diamond on top. I saw that. She pulled out her purse when we began the descent and she got out some gum or some candy to chew on.

Marci and I read some more and I took out my notepad and looked at it and we read a little and then put the book away. I talked on and off with Mrs. Eier in little fits, when one of us would think of something to talk about—NASA, computers, Pass-a-Way, sprawl. We talked about Florida, and our trip, and she said that she really didn’t know how long she was going to stay—she bought a ticket that would take her back two weeks later but she could extend it, and she said that she might if she was having a good time. She said a friend of hers was down there and the two of them were thinking about going on a cruise from Key West; she’d see when she got there. She said that she had another plane to catch from here.

When the plane landed we saw from the airport runway that we were in a sunny place. We saw tall palms near the airport building, and the ground crew were dressed very differently than the ones in Clifton—no jackets here. The sun was bright and I knew we’d be warm soon.

We both had our backpacks and I was staring at the line ahead of us and soon it was our turn—we got up and I turned to the lady who was still very quiet, and I said, “Have a fun trip” and she smiled and said something I couldn’t make out, and I turned to the aisle and walked quickly—she may have been behind me but I didn’t know. The stewardess here said goodbye to me, too, and we went to find the baggage claim.

It was quite a distance away and we had to take this subway car thing to the main terminal and when we got there we waited outside the conveyor belt with everyone else and some people had fishing rods wrapped up and camping gear and there were all kinds of packages. Ours came after a good five minutes and I grabbed it and we went to the car rental which was behind us and to the right, there was a counter where four different sections for four different brands were there and we chose Budget and spoke to the tall woman. She was a friendly warm Cuban, with a strong accent and you could tell she didn’t speak much English outside of work. She asked us what brought us into town and asked if we needed a map or directions, and I said yes and she said to where and I said “Treasure Island” and she effortlessly pulled out what looked like a little recipe box, and she chose the file marked Treasure Island and ripped off a page from a pad that was in there and gave it to me—instructions for going there on one side and for coming back on the other. We paid and signed our names and she gave us the keys and told us where to go to get the car.

The guy in line behind us looked like a scraggly beach bum, washed up in high tide. He was in faded weatherworn shorts and worn deck shoes and he had a bushy moustache. Marci wanted to carry the big bag but when she tried she laughed and said it was heavy—I insisted on carrying it anyway and I took it from her.

The car lot was right outside around a corner, and there was a lot of rental cars in the bright sun. It was like on the second floor roof of part of the airport. Our car was a white Hyundai and was the first one in one of the aisles there in the middle of the lot, an empty space was next to it and as we walked to the car a wiry, annoyed-seeming worker guy drove up to that space in a red rental car, he had a spiked head of hair and glared at us a second—my eyes didn’t meet his but I saw that he would perhaps be not friendly to us—saw him out of the corner of my eye, his white golf shirt, quick movements—so instead of going right to the passenger door, near his car, I opened up the driver’s door and then I opened up the trunk and put the big bag in there. I didn’t know what the motel would look like or how it would be where we were going and I figured that, for now, this bag would be safer in the trunk. The trunk was empty and clean, a big yawning mouth, and even with the duffel bag in it it seemed empty—that this usage of the car we would be having for the next week was only temporary, that we were only renting it for a short time, and soon we’d be going on our way and this car on its own; we were both only passing through the world here in this short arrangement, an arrangement based on money and rental and a corporation—soon we’d arrive back home and never see this car again.

Marci got in the driver’s seat and I got in the passenger side with my backpack on my lap and she turned on the car ... the car was brand new, it had very little mileage, and this might have been its first rental ... we had unlimited mileage and we’d planned on a lot of driving on this trip—the big roadtrip would be halfway down the entire coast of Florida, and across the peninsula, over to Ft. Lauderdale to see the Mai-Kai, which was now the largest Polynesian supper club in the world.

The walk to the car from the inside of the airport was very short, just a few hundred feet, but we were hot from the direct sun (it was just after one o’clock and it was crisp bright warmth everywhere). I took off my sweatshirt before getting in, and in the car I asked Marci to turn on the air conditioning. I was concerned about my new digital camera, which I kept in my backpack—it was a “camera backpack” and it’d had it for a few years. It looked like a normal backpack at first glance, but about a third of the way up from the bottom there was a latch and a zipper that opened up like a mouth and inside the bottom was cushioned foam pockets and there you could keep a camera and all its accessories. I liked the backpack except the top area was too small to keep large books or my 8x10 sized clipboard. I had just gotten the camera a few weeks before and hadn't really had a chance to use it—I had read the manual on the plane, after talking with the old lady—she was staring at it and I think she was trying to figure out what it was (I’d told her about it but I hadn’t pulled the camera out to show her). I thought about the old lady now and figured that she was probably in the air again, off to Key West and to watching Pat Dailey in the island heat, at a round table with her friends, all old retired folks from Sohola drinking beers and laughing at his off-color songs.

Now I got the camera out and popped in the first memory card (I had two; one was a 32MB card which came with the camera and the other was a 64MB card that I purchased for another hundred bucks extra). I put my seat beat on, rolled down the window and the air conditioning felt good at my feet. I had long pants on, my grey cargo pants, and I was looking forward to putting on shorts after checking into the hotel. I thought of what I’d tell people after we got back home: “We got to Florida at one o’clock and were in the pool within the hour.”

Over the last few years I had developed a strong interest in preservation, because I’d seen locally and nationally how corporations were destroying community everywhere. This massive destruction happened when franchise chains came into a town and displaced the local businesses ... unlike a family business, a franchise had to operate by rules set out by the corporation stockholders and they were the same everywhere, they demanded conformity but in all the wrong ways—they had no local character, nor could they, they did not use the wisdom of the human mind, so like a juggernaut they flattened the landscape of the world. The money was taken out of the local area because these restaurants and other chain businesses used supplies and goods from elsewhere, and they had no loyalty to the community—whereas a local business was started and operated by people who lived in the town.

Coupled with the way people were changing these days, everything got built up with these awful, ugly places ... right after school I’d made an oath to never eat chain food, never stay at corporate hotels, keep out of the malls (which almost always only housed chains). That will not stop them but it was a start. But I also began to see how things that I valued in the world began to disappear, get wiped off forever. Little things. A tiny steel diner on a corner road, and its fat Greek owner-proprietor, cooking hamburgs in its open kitchen. A dusty bookstore whose owner lived in a home a block away. The local barber. The independent restaurants all with local character and style, all who bought from local vendors. This entire chain of life was suddenly gone, replaced with a corporate grid that was exactly the same everywhere, always low in quality but familiar—and all the local residents were powerless to control it from happening. Towns began to look the same. Cities spread to countryside ... farms shut down, empty silos tilting along the road, rotting skeletons of barns, abandoned Sears-kit houses sunk into the heavy clay. Old homes I loved, that looked great, were torn down for a fake Bob Evans, another Wal-Mart, a giant chain grocery store with their big illuminated symbols painted in the night. Stripmalls were built everywhere, they were long cement-block structures with fake and ugly facades that meant nothing. The local butcher shop closed. The miles of open farmland out by the lake were gone. The little motels all along the water, gone, now a dozen heinous stripmalls in their place—the smooth little two-lane road there replaced with a hoggish four-lane minihighway and always clogged with cars, many of them SUVs and minivans ... the bucolic Sohola woods all gone, now McMansion developments all the same, all the houses expensive yet cheap-looking and with absolutely no character ... the old homes I’d loved, gone, all gone—many became run down, others ripped down, all the old bars shuttered, and same with the stores. Old signs gone, too—the good donut shop closed and Donut Connection, a chain, is in its stead. The quality was going away everywhere, the control by people was going away everywhere, the beauty of this American land was going away, America itself was an old idea falling ill and rotten. This was the corporate virus in control. It was a sickness, maybe it came from outer space, and it would lead to the death of America, the end of the world. I never got over the heartbreak of what I lost because I knew what communities and destinations existed beforehand—I knew America when it wider, younger, with a sense of situation and place. Now it really didn’t matter where you went; it was all the same. One town was as good as another, and none of them were really any good. A change in weather, sure, but the corporate chain stores and malls and traffic and McMansions were everywhere—only the window dressing was different. Gone forever were the quiet places with tradition and locality. I didn’t know how to stop this, although I wanted to. Corporations have been given more rights than humans but they can’t be imprisoned. The answer now is corporacide: the extermination of all corporations. It was a great idea. I didn’t know how it could be accomplished, through what means—possibly computers would be key. I felt sure that we would do it, that the humans would battle this virtual front and emerge the victor, but in the meantime I wanted to at least make a record of this world we were quickly losing.

This was how my whole idea of drive-by shootings came about. I disdained the idea of composed photography, hated the idea of posing and those pictures never seemed to much affect me. I wanted to take what was there. I wanted to take what happened even before I saw it. I began to use fast film speed and set a tiny aperture and fast shutter, and on these trips I’d just snap the shutter when I was feeling good and out there. I would just snap it when we were driving by anywhere of interest, when I wanted to feel and capture the instant I was in. I’d just snap the shutter and see what kind of photo it would take. Sometimes I saw a building or a sign or a thing coming that I thought would be a good subject and I’d snap one then; other times I just snapped when we were in a “good area” or when an inner hunch said to do it. Then I’d get the prints developed and see what kind of pictures it took. I was surprised by the results. The instant snapshots were often better than my most painstakingly composed and careful photographs. There were sometimes misses, but the hits more than made up for it—they often captured things that I hadn’t even seen when I was there, it got moments and places and atmospheres that were going extinct, pictures of an America that was from before the American dream had belly-upped. Almost always were the subjects of my photos gone within a year—a diner, an old sign, a farmhouse; I’d get it, and then we’d drive by the area again and the place would be gone. Now an office park, a McDonald's, a McMansion development. The sprawl cancer had taken over. Even people, the obituaries were full of them. But I’d captured them on my film, I had my snapshots, taken from the window of a passing auto. Sp I called them “drive-by shootings.” I took thousands of them and the cost of film and development was too much so I sold my camera and equipment and bought this digital camera, a brand new high-end rig, so that I could take a great many more of them, erasing the so-called bad, and they’d already be digital (for Web distribution and copyleft purposes) without the added expense of PhotoCD processing. It was 2001 now and sprawl had mostly won, although there were a few vestiges left of how it used to be. This trip to Florida, aside from being a relaxation trip away from work, had been a trip for us to see a number of these places that we’d heard about, places that were still left. We’d done our research and we had a list of them to take these drivebys of and to visit. Most were in the St. Pete area where we were staying (and we also planned on seeing the Kerouac house), but the one “must-see” of Florida was the Mai-Kai—we loved old-time tiki stuff in general, which at the time was totally off the cultural radar, but we’d witnessed the painful destruction of the great Kahiki in Creighton, Sohola. That happened in 2000 when it became a Walgreens, or really the parking lot of one; meanwhile, the Kahiki’s final owner had formed a corporation that manufactured TV dinners and frozen eggrolls with the “theme” of the old Kahiki, which to me seemed even worse than just tearing it all down; it seemed to me that anyone who did something so bad would be playing with ancient dangers. Mai-Kai was left and we were going to see it.

But now we had to find Treasure Island, and our motel. The place was called the Roadside Inn and it was on Gulf Boulevard which was the main drag on the island. We pulled out of the parking lot and I had my card from the rental place with the step-by-step instructions, and I read off each point and looked at where we were and told Marci where to go. Going out of the airport there was a long strip with a planted row of tall palms in the middle and there some of the drivers were crazy and fast—I’d hoped that this wasn’t a sign of what Florida was going to be like.

We merged onto the highway and were soon on a long strip of highway connecting Tampa and St. Petersburg. It was over Tampa Bay and was fairly low to the water, with short white concrete rails on the side. There were many lanes and the people drove fast—I was trying to gauge the crime by the way the people looked. Were there a lot of destitute-looking people? A lot of rich? What were they? They were fast drivers, that’s what they were. I searched the radio trying to find a good station but didn’t find anything after a cursory search so I turned it off. When we’d gone to Palm Beach a few years before we found a station that played big band and old standards, and we’d listened to it throughout that whole trip. I hoped to find a similar station here for this trip. I remember there was a dark green truck with Sohola plates—“Look, Sohola!” Marci blurted—and we looked and saw from the logo and address on the side that they were from Dayton, a landscaping company truck. They drove past.

I looked at the water sparkling in the bay and the fat white towers of Tampa ... then we were in St. Pete and as we passed exits with numbered avenues, starting with the low numbers, I wondered if Kerouac’s house was near, and what it looked like. We passed like 4th or 5th Avenue (Kerouac’s was on 10th) and I looked at the houses I could see from the highway, peeking out of a thick green foliage, and wondered if it’d be a rough neighborhood now, or if it would be nice, or if it would be gone altogether. We got off the highway and had to take Central Avenue down to 66th Street—it was a good 40 blocks, and in passing we saw a building whose side was a painted advertisement for the store inside: a big old bookstore, “Florida’s largest.” The sign looked neat and tidy and it looked old, so we were going to check it out some time during our stay. Then down 66th and it was a long distance and I got excited because here we were in the heat and there were palm trees everywhere—“Look! That’s a lemon tree!” I shouted—yes, we were here, and there were all these little Florida homes poor little shacks but with an orange tree or a grapefruit bush in their front yard or with a little plaster greenpainted sailfin on the front of the house, that’s all you really need in life—and here, everything was tropical-looking. A lot of it was casually rundown but it didn’t matter because it was in the warmth and in bright sun and close to the Gulf of Mexico ... I began taking some drivebys and I looked at the photos on the screen in the back of the camera and I deleted some and took more. We saw a giant new post office building and figured that if we needed to mail postcards we could go here (we’d addressed some before the trip and brought them with us to send.)

There was another street we were supposed to turn at and the tollbooth for Treasure Island would be there. I was excited because I saw a cool looking record store—there was a small yellow stripmall on the left and there was a place there called Asylum Records with the lettering written in a big wild tiger red blotch. On the right side there was another stripmall, set back further from the road and with one tall building in it, some big store, and that stripmall had another record store that looked interesting, too. I think I saw a bookstore around here as well and figured that this little area was worth stopping at some time, maybe along with hitting the bookstore which was about ten minutes behind us now. Books and the sea, and palm trees, I thought, this place is heavenly. There was a curve up ahead on the road and to the left was a retirement home, a tall old southern building with a big grounds, all flat grass tended neat as a golf course and I thought of my friend Dr. Cook who’d gone to college in Gainesville in the 1950s ... he loved the warmth and I’d wondered if he would like living down here now that he was retired.

Around the curve to the left and there was traffic and we had to stop. It was hot and there was a van in front of us and we couldn’t see. “The drawbridge is up.”

“Really? Can you see?” I tried to get a glimpse but couldn’t. I stuck my head out the window and looked and thought I could see the tips of a drawbridge but it could’ve been the back sides of a pickup truck. We waited there for a few minutes and I got my wallet out and found some change, the card said 35 cents so I got that out. I played with the radio and we talked, but were antsy—couldn’t focus on anything. We were excited. I wanted to get a glimpse of the island, so see the land that we’d soon be exploring, and I wanted to park and register at the motel. I wanted to get the room key and then go back to the car and get the bag out of the trunk and then put this all in the room and close the door and lock it, use the bathroom and change my clothes and put on swim trunks and jump in the pool. I hoped the pool would not be crowded. All I wanted to do was that, and then maybe call my dad later and tell him that we’d just arrived (“And I already took a swim!”) and make sure the cats were ok. (I got tense about the cats when we traveled—I always had to make sure that someone came and watched them at least once a day.)

We couldn’t see so we stopped here and waited and then finally the traffic moved. It was a nice little road and there was a green strip here between both lanes and the land on both sides was green, all small cottages with driveways off the roadlane and with a palm or two in each yard, some shrubbery, maybe a car in the drive. The homes seemed well-kept and I could see behind them on the right side that there was a harbor—we were near the edge now, close to the toll and the bridge to our island. There were signs which said STOP—TOLL AHEAD and then LAST TURNAROUND BEFORE TOLL and I got my wallet out from my cargo pants and looked for change—the card from Budget said that it was 35 cents but as we got closer it looked like 50 cents. We griped about that and I wondered if there was going to be a pass at the motel so we wouldn’t have to pay and Marci told me that we better keep a record of this for taxes. We pulled up to the booth and Marci had the fifty cents in hand, an old thin-armed white guy in a Hawaiian shirt was in the booth and she reached to hand him the money and he nodded to our right, where I saw a big baby-blue painted metal basket connected to the wall of the tollbooth, over it a sign that said 50 CENTS—Marci threw the money in there, he said thanks and we drove ahead ... over the drawbridge we had a view of the island just cottages in palms and bushes there and then you could see the bay and boats in their docks and I saw a few tall hoteltops ahead and in the middle between the lanes was a big colorful sign of a pirate and it merrily proclaimed WELCOME TO TREASURE ISLAND—we were here ... there was another little strip here just like before the toll, cottages on both sides, and then it opened up to a stripmall on both sides but the places looked interesting: beach shops, an old-time variety store, a redbrick Chinese place with lounge, and the Berlin Cafe, written big in an Old Heidelberg font. It looked promising, I was thinking, and we got to the end of the road where it teed into Gulf Boulevard, the main drag of the island ... and just ahead of us was a great tall hotel of silver-grey brick and no windows but a giant bird looking like a Southwest Indian quilt in red and yellow and white and green neon, and lettering to its right said THUNDERBIRD and we hadn’t expected this and we were both like “Hey-y-y!” just agog with excitement—we slowed down immediately and pulled to the right so we didn’t stop traffic, car horns were beeping, we couldn’t help it, this place we’d arrived at was simply incredible: the thing was towering over everything, it looked exactly like Vegas in its glory years, we couldn’t wait to see the lit-up neons that night, and we turned the corner to the right and down the Gulf we saw places like this left and right: The Surf with a big sweeping white boomerang gate, The Tahitian, Algiers, The Trails End, The Jolly Roger ... each one its own special retro look that matched exactly to its name, each a legit relic of the 1950s and 1960s, and all of them looking as new and happy as when they first had opened—a giant Robby’s Pancake House sign all square and orange with white bubbly frill like a placemat looked brand new, yet had a very retro feel, you knew it was old and well preserved and that the china they used was fancy and cool ... “Wow!” was all I could say, and Marci was smiling, and then I kept saying over and over: “We came to the right place! Wow, we made it! This is it! We found it!”