by Kent Russell
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We cleared a British Petroleum of its granola bars and protein snacks. We loaded up on water. “Our Boy Scout rations,” Glenn called them. “All that’s missing is a big Maglite and some porno,” Noah agreed. The day was overcast and stale when we entered Golden Gate Estates via its one major road, Golden Gate Boulevard. There was no other avenue in or out.
Before it was Golden Gate Estates, this place was what it had always been: a muddy tract of ancient cypress and royal palms. Then two enterprising brothers, Leonard and Jack Rosen, laid eyes on it. Dollar signs danced across their field of vision. They saw an opportunity to spin swamp into gold once again, just as they’d done up the coast with Cape Coral, a 120-square-mile development adjacent to Fort Myers.
In the late fifties, the brothers had contracted dredges to drag straight lines through Cape Coral’s muck, moving enough earth to fill a swimming pool every minute. This fill was then dumped and shaped into lots along the banks of the new “canals.” Voilà—an instant maze of “waterfront” property! The brothers rebranded themselves the Gulf American Land Corporation, and they marketed Cape Coral as “a rich man’s paradise, within the financial reach of everyone.”
The Corporation dispatched high-intensity salesmen throughout the Northeast and Midwest. (The Rosen boys had experience with sales; prior to real estate, they had been in the door-to-door hair mousse game.) Their salesmen went about selling themselves as much as they sold parcels of Cape Coral. At churches’ spaghetti dinners, at women’s clubs’ garden parties—everywhere everyone got the pitch: Put twenty dollars down now and pay twenty dollars a month, and then when you’re ready to retire, lookit that! Your modern-day Venice (just south of Venice, Florida) will be waiting for you.
The Rosens expanded into television, got Bob Hope and Anita Bryant to shill for the Florida Dream. They gave away homes on The Price Is Right. They even expanded overseas, where Gulf American salesmen hawked the Sunshine State to very receptive audiences of Brits and Germans. Meanwhile, telemarketers did their best Glengarry Glen Ross impressions back home. They told prospective buyers that if they so desired, they could come on down to Cape Coral for a free stay at the company motel (where rooms were bugged so salesmen could learn how best to tailor their pitches). Prospective buyers could enjoy a steak dinner on Gulf American’s dime (where paid plants at nearby tables yelled out things like “I just bought lot number eighteen!”). They could hop in one of five company Cessnas and pick out their home sites from the air à la Walt Disney, asking the accompanying salesman to drop a bag of flour onto the lot they liked (which was rarely the lot that ended up in their paperwork).
The Rosens’ Cape Coral gambit was beautifully orchestrated and flawlessly executed. What it was not was on the level. It was a Ponzi scheme. The brothers took people’s money, built shoddy houses, then showed off the fast-growing expanse of shoddy houses to new investors. The brothers took those people’s money, built a yacht club, and the country’s largest rose garden, and a dancing fountain known as the Waltzing Waters—then showed off the amenities to new investors. On and on it went with tier after tier of dupes.
The brothers never intended to build a real community. This, buyers discovered as soon as they moved in. There were no schools, churches, or hospitals to be found in Cape Coral. No water or sewer infrastructure, no direct access to the interstate, no pristine beaches. To this day, Cape Coral lacks for higher education, office space, a commercial tax base of any kind. It lacks for everything, really, except grids of stagnant canals and single-family homes.
And yet, and yet. Even when buyers realized they’d been played, they stayed put.
In confidence artistry, you call this “wizening the mark.” You made a fool of another party, sure—but more importantly, you left them with a lesson. You showed them how readily they’d believed certain stories. Certain false narratives about the world; about themselves. After flattering them—Only you are smart enough to act on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—you unmasked their delusion and hypocrisy. After telling them exactly what they wanted to hear—You deserve paradise, and you deserve it at little or no cost—you exposed their calculative thinking for what it was: a selfish and transactional attitude toward the world.
You could say that in wizening the mark, you do the mark a kind of service. You send him or her back into the world a little less wide-eyed. A little more mature. The mark can now see past the surface of things. And some marks, having been so disabused—they come to take satisfaction in watching other people fall for the same scam.
Today, the Rosens’ development boasts 154,305 residents. The Cape Coral–Fort Myers area has recorded America’s most explosive population growth two years running, as well as a total of five years out of the last thirteen. Areas just like it—Deltona Lakes, developed between Orlando and Daytona Beach in 1962 by the Mackle brothers; as well as rat poison king Lee Ratner’s Lehigh Acres; as well as razor-blade baron Abraham L. Mailman’s Miramar—are expanding almost as quickly.
Having succeeded wildly once, the Gulf American Land Corporation expected to succeed wildly once again with Golden Gate Estates. The slapdashing brothers schemed even bigger this go-round, digging 183 miles of canal and paving 880 miles of road out of a Boston-sized chunk of the Fakahatchee Strand, the westernmost area of the present-day Everglades. “America’s largest subdivision,” they called it, envisioning a day when 500,000 marks would populate their 111,000 acres in the middle of nowhere. As per their MO, the Rosens built a few model units. They cajoled the first wave of visitors into believing that Golden Gate could be home.
This time, however, the Ponzi scheme stalled at the first stage. For you see, these unfortunate early investors bought their parcels during the winter, which is the Everglades’s dry season. When they arrived during the spring, summer, and fall, they discovered that their parcels were literally underwater.
While nearby boomburgs boomed, Golden Gate moldered like the scum in its canals. Instead of investors, its most frequent visitors tended to be drug smugglers landing South American DC-3s on the development’s desolate roads. Nowadays, the Estates is a ghost town haunted by abandoned houses, creeping swamp life, and the occasional meth syndicate. Otherwise known as: compelling documentary footage.
Branching off either side of the main boulevard were many empty lots as well as moldy old ranch homes with attached Quonset huts. Or: moldy ranch homes with big rigs in the yard; with a half dozen rusted-out Corvettes sprinkled around the property; with Mesozoic thistle bushes swallowing the garage and inground pool; with a family of unleashed Rottweilers on the prowl. An anti-Seaside, in other words, where there are no homeowners’ associations and pretty much anything goes re: land use. Golden Gate Estates, we learned, is home to those who wish to drop off the grid, as well as those who can’t afford anything else.
We stopped at the one shopping plaza amid the slippery landscape. We ate pizza at the Hungry Howie’s, we filmed interviews in front of Fayard Hardware. Why are you here? “I’m a good ol’ boy, man. This is it for me.” Did you know what you were getting into? “No gas stations for miles, Walmart’s an hour’s drive, hospitals are another hour’s drive. Yeah, I knew it. Not a bad place if you understand where you’re living. I got two campers, and I’m not paying to put them in storage. I don’t like somebody telling me how to do everything.” Do you know your neighbors? “No way. In the Estates you need to respect others’ land; everyone has guns and are waiting to use them. Going into someone’s land or house is asking for a gunshot wound. And everyone knows that, so you’re certain to know your land will also be respected.”
Gingerly, very gingerly, we proceeded east and south into the underdeveloped development. We tallied the empty shotgun shells and syringes. We wondered how long the police response time would be. “Hour and fifteen, easy,” Noah ventured. We choked on the cheesecloth atmosphere and were driven half-mad by the pulsi
ng sound of insects.
“An ibis has been following along the canal next to us,” I said. “Flies ahead, lands, waits, does it again. You been noticing this?”
“Yup,” Noah said.
“You think it is auguring our doom?” Glenn asked.
“Yup,” I said.
Here, we ( gingerly) approached homeowners as they worked on their cars or did bench presses on their front lawns. We captured a kind of home ownership that felt true (or truer) to contemporary American reality. These few citizens were recent immigrants, poor whites, and retirees whose status as property holders was unstable, to say the least. Their dwellings were continually encroached upon, constantly in danger of going under. (Dead fish were here and there washed up on the roads.) The swamp was coming at them from six sides. The banks were, too, in many cases. Nothing seemed to sleep here, much less dream.
And yet, and yet. Growth experts have been advising local politicians to expect several hundred thousand new Floridians to move into and around Golden Gate Estates in the next two decades, doubling the county’s current population of 339,000. This despite the fact that life expectancy in the United States is falling, infant mortality is rising, the real median hourly income hasn’t budged since 1971, more Americans die of drug overdoses each year than were lost in the Vietnam War, anxiety and depression are ubiquitous, social media are driving children to suicide, schoolteachers are considering bearing arms, real cooking is a luxury, personal fitness is a marker of class distinction, terms like “gig economy” and “precariously employed” not only exist but are useful, healthcare bankrupts anyone who isn’t independently wealthy, the waters are marshaling offshore, Noah is out of work, Glenn is definitely going to drop his baby, and I am in debt up to my fucking eyeballs—despite all of this, the lure of Florida lives on.
It seems as though you don’t even need to sell people on this unplanned, untenable boondoggle anymore. The spell now inheres in the place itself, is foundational, like a curse carved into an archway. (“All sense abandon ye who enter here.”) If only the Rosen boys could’ve lived to see it. Their scam of a city proves William Jennings Bryan’s maxim about Miami, which is really a maxim about Florida: “Miami is the only city in the world where you can tell a lie at breakfast that will come true by evening.”
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The green inferno was humid to the point of hindered exhalation. “It’s December, and the sweat can’t even leave my body,” I announced. Noah kicked over a rotted mailbox. A fat man on a mufflerless Harley grumbled past, the uneven road causing his jowls to flap like the slack in a skydiver’s jumpsuit. “Where could he possibly be going?” Glenn asked rhetorically.
Darkness descended. Like prehistoric hunter-gatherers, we be-came afraid. Hurriedly, we pushed through thickets, seeking one dry spot to camp. While bushwhacking, we chanced onto what appeared to be a foreclosed home. “Oh, Jesus, no,” Glenn pleaded. “I don’t even care about deportation anymore. I just don’t want to die like this.”
Yet he did not break stride while casing the joint with Noah and me. The house was a mustard-colored single-story; didn’t look that desolate. We approached it from the rear, where we found a couple of shot-apart toilets. “In Golden Gate Estates,” Noah half-joked, “no one can hear you scream.” We came around front. Roofing tiles were heaped atop a cracked apron of cement that led into an open garage.
“So, what are we thinking?” I asked, pointing my chin at the open door in the corner of the garage. “Are we going to find runes on the walls painted with human blood? A pile of VHS snuff films?”
“Only one way,” Noah said, charging ahead.
And, yeah, the house was full of junkie leavings. But it was shelter, so we took it. Outside, the extravagant prodigality of space winked to life. Inside, mosquitoes bounced against the ceiling like Ping-Pong balls in a lottery machine. Once or twice, animals squealed in the deep. A gun or two popped off in the distance.
We did not keep our ears perked for the alarming creak. In fact, we sank into sleep with as little resistance as bodies buried at sea. Fear, you know—fear begins and ends with the desire to be secure. I understand this now. Fear arises out of a yearning to be certain. Fear is me wanting to know for sure, once and for all, that I am on solid ground. And if there’s one thing this place has taught me, it’s how to make peace with fluidity.
As I rode theta waves into dreamless slumber, I smiled at the thought: Imagine the delusions this land has absorbed.
It swallowed the Spaniards’ ambition. That much is certain. They reported to their king in 1570 that the South Florida saw grass marshland was “liable to overflow, and of no use.” In 1845, the U.S. Treasury Department judged it “suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles.” Henry James took one look at the swamp in 1904 and declared it “Byronically foolish.”
This is the mire I sprang from. The first Americans to spend much time in South Florida—the soldiers who chased the Seminoles into the Everglades in the 1830s—denounced the whole region as “hideous,” “loathsome,” “diabolical.” It was “God-abandoned.” “The poorest country that ever two people quarreled for,” one army surgeon wrote. “It was the most dreary and pandemonium-like region I ever visited, nothing but barren wastes.” Another officer pithily summed it up as “swampy, low, excessively hot, sickly and repulsive in all its features.” Future president Zachary Taylor swore that he would not trade a square foot of Michigan or Ohio for a square mile of Florida.
The one reason South Florida remained so hellish and so empty for so long: water. Time was, the Everglades watershed began just south of Orlando with the Kissimmee River winding 103 miles to Lake Okeechobee. The lake then spilled water through seepage, springs, and overflow down the entirety of the southern peninsula, eventually passing into Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Couldn’t much farm on that. Certainly couldn’t build a lasting city.
The Glades appeared to be useless, malignantly so. This was a terrible affront to the tycoons and grifters who arrived in the nineteenth century. Some of these men had already made fortunes out of their refusal to accept the limits imposed by nature. Why should Florida’s great southern swamp be any different?
“Land reclamation,” they termed it. As in, reclaiming property that had been lost or stolen. In 1881, Hamilton Disston purchased 4 million acres of swampland with an eye toward draining them, improving them, transforming them into “the market garden of the earth.” He failed. Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward also tried to establish an “Empire of the Everglades”—and failed. It wasn’t until the middle of the American Century that the glaucous sheets of water began to recede. The technological wizards in the Army Corps of Engineers managed to build a thirty-foot-high dike around Lake Okeechobee. South of the dammed lake, they portioned the former Everglades watershed into the Everglades Agricultural Area, which was planted with heavily subsidized, heavily pollutive sugarcane fields. East and south of the EAA were the euphemistically named Water Conservation Areas: hypersaline holding tanks compartmentalized by a maze of canals and levees that increased in total length from 440 miles in 1929 to around 1,500 miles in 2002. Water from these Areas is regularly pulsed out to sea in lieu of the gentle, rain-driven sheet flow that once sustained the ecosystem.
The Everglades used to be the actual world of South Florida. Now, the River of Grass is drained and paved and one-fifth its former size. Most of its remaining freshwater gets diverted to the sugar plantations and thirsty South Florida cities that displaced it. There’s so little freshwater left that salt water is seeping through the underlying limestone, infiltrating the swamp. To combat this, Congress approved the largest-ever environmental restoration project back in 2000—but virtually no progress has been made in the intervening years.
What has happened is the Everglades got named a World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Preserve, a Wetland
of International Importance. Even as it is cut up, choked, and poisoned by man, the Everglades is labeled “wilderness,” is declared a cherished island in the polluted sea of liquid modernity.
This weird dualistic tendency of ours—saying that this here is nature, but that over there is an overgrown lot—I believe to be most misguided. It alienates us from our surrounds and obscures our origins as animals, as collections of cells, as interconnected creatures. There is no primal state one can point to and call “nature.” Nature is everything, or nature is nothing.
Marking off the Everglades with velvet ropes, treating it as though it were a precious museum piece—it puts nature and humanity at opposite ends of the spectrum. By imagining that the Everglades is something entirely separate from us, we forgive ourselves the world we inhabit around its edges. It’s not like my lawn is a rare hardwood hammock, so I’m going to go ahead and drain my radiator into it. We become dismissive or even contemptuous of that which isn’t designated “wilderness.” Like the Romantics before us, we privilege certain parts at the expense of the whole—the mountaintop is more exalted than the marsh, the crashing cliffside is nearer to the godhead than the level plain. The shrinking swamp is more significant than the subdivisions carved out of it.
That is, we get to say when nature’s “nature.” (Indeed, when one retreats into the “nature” of Everglades National Park, one is retreating into a product of the human civilization one is seeking to escape.) In this way, we agree with René Descartes, the Founding Fathers’ founding father, who believed that humans should “render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.” According to this instrumentalist view, nature is here to help us invent an “infinity of applications” which will not only enable us to enjoy the good life without effort, but will also emancipate us from “an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind.” Someday, these “applications” will even allow us to transcend the limits of our own human nature, freeing us from “the infirmities of age” and “rendering men wiser and cleverer than they have hitherto been.” As for the raw material that made it all possible, well—we have “dominion” over it, Descartes would say. If we want to grant a reprieve to certain portions of it, so be it. It’s our call. We can let an area be useless “wilderness.” We can grant it permission to become “nature.”