In the Land of Good Living Read online

  ALSO BY KENT RUSSELL

  I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Kent Russell

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt of “The Florida Poem” from Florida Poems by Campbell McGrath. Copyright © 2002 by Campbell McGrath. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Russell, Kent, author.

  Title: In the land of good living : a journey to the heart of Florida / Kent Russell.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. | “This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019045678 (print) | LCCN 2019045679 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525521389 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525521396 (ebk)

  Subjects: LCSH: Russell, Kent—Travel—Florida. | Florida—Description and travel.

  Classification: LCC F316.2 .R87 2020 (print) | LCC F316.2 (ebook) | DDC 917.5904—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019045678

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019045679

  Ebook ISBN 9780525521396

  Cover images: (sunset) Mats Silvan / Getty Images; (palm tree) Old River / Shutterstock

  Cover design by Tyler Comrie

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kent Russell

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Mile 73 — Destin

  Mile 87 — U.S. Highway 98

  Mile 93 — Seaside

  Mile 183 — Apalachicola

  Mile 205 — Carrabelle

  Mile 260 — Tallahassee

  Mile 312 — Perry

  Mile 358 — Branford

  Mile 372 — Alachua

  Mile 403 — Gainesville

  Mile 403 — Gainesville

  Mile 446 — Palatka

  Mile 475 — St. Augustine

  Mile 510 — State Road A1A

  Mile 560 — Cassadaga

  Mile 607 — Orlando

  Mile 661 — Lakeland

  Mile 674 — Plant City

  Mile 695 — Tampa

  Mile 873 — Golden Gate Estates

  Mile 957 — The Everglades

  Mile 994 — Miami

  Mile 1002 — Miami Beach

  Mile 1015 — Coconut Grove

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Florida, and Ders

  Even if Florida does not believe in history

  it cannot help but believe

  in the tide, and the tide for its part is

  a compelling historian.

  —CAMPBELL MCGRATH, POET

  We went there to serve God, and also to get rich.

  —BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO, CONQUISTADOR

  FADE IN:

  EXT. U.S. ROUTE 98—HIGH NOON

  Three friends—GLENN, NOAH, and KENT—walk a SHOPPING CART loaded with hiking packs and film gear along the shoulder of a beachside highway. Occasionally, one or another steals a glance at the backward-facing CAMERA mounted atop their cart.

  Trudging rightmost in its wide shot is GLENN, a blond, blue-eyed, dad-bodied man in his early thirties. Were it not a contradiction in terms, UNAPOLOGETICALLY CANADIAN is a phrase one might use to describe him. The puzzled smile permafrosted across Glenn’s face shows him to be too alive to nuance and contradiction to be American. He often fusses with the camera’s framing, as he is the only one with experience in documentary film.

  Pushing the cart next to Glenn is NOAH, a short, scowling IRAQ WAR VETERAN. Noah’s formerly bulging muscles are swaddled with a layer of fat, as if the action figure of his past life has been packed away under Bubble Wrap. He would be more intimidating if the tattoos sleeving his limbs were related to anything other than DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. Written in two rows across the knuckles gripping the handlebar is the phrase I CRY OUT / FOR MAGIC.

  Limping closest to the westbound lane is KENT, a PAUNCHY NEBBISH and the youngest of the three. Because he once contributed essays and reviews to magazines, Kent considers himself something of an ARTISTE and/or INTELLECTUAL. He grew a long and flowing mullet in anticipation of this return to his home state.

  GLENN

  (adjusting camera)

  Okay, so. We open on us walking like this, only we’re arguing over what the tagline of the doc should be.

  NOAH

  Dudes, where’s our car.

  KENT

  We could riff on a real one. State’s tagline.

  KENT (CONT’D)

  (scrolling through smartphone browser)

  We’ve got: The Sunshine State, obviously. The Orange State. The Peninsula State.

  Inches away, an eighteen-wheeler barrels past the men, SHATTERING the stillness of the sun-dazed landscape beyond their shoulders. They don’t flinch, but the lovebugs hovering about their faces scatter with the displaced air.

  GLENN

  We have to consider tone. What is the tone we wish to convey?

  KENT

  Elegiac. We want this to be the state’s swan song. The last, most comprehensive postcards from Florida as we know her. Before she takes the waters.

  GLENN

  What about a riff on that sign from Waffle House? “You had a choice, and you chose us.”

  NOAH

  Every buddy movie should begin at the Waffle House.

  GLENN

  Only it’s Florida: You had a choice, and you chose this.

  KENT

  Florida: Would we lie to you?

  NOAH

  Florida: Where America goes to die.

  The friends fall silent for a few dozen paces. They pass tacky condos and T-shirt shops. The lovebugs return.

  GLENN

  What a saltwater-taffy shithole this is.

  NOAH

  (pensive)

  What we should do…is draw an n at the end of that Ramada sign. At the end of every Ramada sign we pass. And then film what happens.

  KENT

  Florida: If it weren’t true, we’d have to invent it.

  NOAH

  Then we’d get to the real-real about this place.

  GLENN

  (lifting camera from cart)

  Hold up. Say that again?

  NOAH

  This has already gotten old, my dude.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  So, okay, I’ll film you two—

  NOAH

  Fuck outta here with that. We need to stop and eat first.

  KENT

  Then we’ll come back and set it up. Yelp says that that auto shop over there’s got good Mexican in the back.
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  GLENN (O.S.)

  (resignedly)

  Our heroes steel themselves with four-pound plates of chimichangas. Just like in the other grand adventure narratives.

  FADE OUT

  —

  MILE 73 — DESTIN

  TO ARRIVE WHERE WE STARTED,

  AND TO KNOW THE PLACE

  FOR THE FIRST TIME

  We’ve been lying here—on drainage swales, mostly, but also in the beds of pickup trucks—for nigh on four hours now. We’ll be lying here when Ocean Drive is returned to its namesake, feels like.

  Noah and I have grown stiff as marks in this mini-mall parking lot, where we’re waiting for Glenn to conclude his business with the Geek Squad. It appears as though Glenn’s laptop broiled inside his pack yesterday while we walked the seventeen miles from Wynnehaven Beach to the resort town of Destin. Or maybe these seventeen miles were the last straw, who knows. We’ve walked (and filmed) seventy-three sweltering miles during this first week of our journey.

  If Glenn’s computer is toast, we are well and truly boned. Lose that hard drive, and we lose what we’ve shot, sure. But we lose future footage, too, because what are we going to process it on? We have not the wiggle room in our budget for a new MacBook.

  So to calm my nerves, I jot this while huddling in the shade of a decorative sapling. I’m a freelance writer in my civilian life. This means, firstly, that I am a failure in the practice of ordinary existence. Secondly, it means that I get by on my wits. I make my living inside of language. What I can’t control out there, I refashion in here.

  But writing’s not writing unless it’s got a figure of address. An other, real or imagined, at the opposite end of the bargain. O Muse, it used to be. Then O Lord. I think I’ll go with “friend.” O friend, since friendship starts with invitation. It begins at the point where it offers itself, be it with an extended hand or a once-in-a-lifetime proposition. Therefore, friend: I propose you join us as we sit here praying that our angle isn’t botched before it’s had the chance to get off the ground.

  Speaking of which—the blacktop in this plaza is rippling like a runway post-takeoff. Not a car or shopper is stirring, nor has one been for a minute now. Things are still as a tableau in this commercial garden, where we’ve got, what: a liquor outlet, cigar store, fitness franchise. A beach-supply warehouse with an array of rafts and limp flags out front, along with neon poster board promises of Free Hermit Crab with Every Purchase. The usual. A Chinese buffet. A Big Lots! Bibs of evaporated oil in each empty parking spot. Itchy air, thick with humidity as well as biotic chaff. Chain pharmacy, cell phone service provider, real estate office deigning not to advertise. Between this and the few rags of cloud above are power lines like musical staves. The thrum I feel seeping into me—couldn’t tell you if it was from the coursing of grounded electricity or the buzzing, writhing, germinating plainsong of Florida under the late-summer sun.

  And, as if summoned by this thrum—out from under the dumpster behind the Sonic Drive-In a snake came writhing. A flaking snake, in the midst of shedding. It undulated across the asphalt, slithered onto a swale parallel to mine. Then it slipped into a sluice pipe. As soon as the snake had disappeared, it’s like a switch flipped—cars turned in off the highway and shoppers pushed carts down storefront aprons.

  “Hey, Noah,” I called out. “Kind of snake was that?”

  “What snake?” Noah responded. I twisted my head and saw his hot-weather combat boots poking toes-up from a lowered tailgate. “Is it a coral snake?” he deadpanned. “Is it coming directly this way?”

  After a minute or two, I asked: “You think Glenn’s getting his computer fixed in there?”

  “I don’t care if that computer is dead and buried,” Noah said. “We’re walking. We’re shooting on goddamned iPhones if we have to.”

  “I hear you,” I replied. “The sunk costs are very great. And it’d be humiliating as hell, calling my uncle to come back and get us one week in.”

  “Hell, man,” Noah said. “This guy’s not even a real videographer. Who even knows if he’s been hitting record half the time.”

  He’s not wrong, I thought. But what I said was: “Glenn’s legit, man. Everything’s gonna work out.”

  * * *

  —

  Ten years ago, Noah was fresh out of the Marine Corps and I was his college-boy neighbor at a run-down apartment complex near the University of Florida named, what else, the Ritz. The Ritz was a favorite haunt of junkies and armed robbers. It also was dirt cheap and had rooms to rent month to month. Most importantly, it’s where Noah and I became fast friends. Though seemingly different as different can be, the two of us discovered we were complementary. Noah was a standoffish loner and a tough guy, a legitimate one, having finished more bar fights than he’d started. I was less dweeby bookworm than incautious Kerouac wannabe; this half observer, half shit-stirrer who hovered between worlds while dwelling for the most part in the one of my own fashioning.

  Noah grew fond of me in the manner of a big brother. Whereas he to me represented this original source I’d been too long and too far removed from. We fit together and dangerously so, like a motorcycle and its sidecar. What kept us connected was the ability to articulate self- and world-loathing in a way that made the other laugh. So we’d crack wise over old horror movies or while tossing around a football. Some nights, we’d have what you might call “adventures.” Other nights, we’d sit in silence in front of the Xbox as Noah cultivated the remote and private air of a man who had seen some shit. Midweek, we’d suffer through our “Wednesday Night Throwdown,” wherein we housed suitcases of beers before squaring off in the courtyard and charging one another like rival rams, shouting “Defend yourself!” all the while, Noah slap-boxing as if hoping to knock the timidity out of me like dust from a rug.

  Fast-forward to 2014, when I was hosting Noah in my Brooklyn apartment. “Hosting” being maybe too euphemistic a word. Noah was deep in student-loan debt and without a place to stay after (1) graduating from a criminal-justice master’s program in Manhattan, but (2) breaking up with the girlfriend he’d moved to New York to be with. He had sold his pickup truck to fund the initial relocation, so he couldn’t even live out of that. Owing to our history at the Ritz, I offered Noah an air mattress on the floor of my “home office.” Temporary, like. After he’d stabbed that Coleman GuestRest to death—in his sleep, with his Ka-Bar knife, during some kind of PTSD-inflected night terror—Noah received a cot. Months later, jobless still, he got his own bed.

  Noah spent his days applying to jobs online. His nights he spent drinking hard while blasting Poison’s Open Up and Say…Ahh! from my stereo. His employment history read as such: dishwasher, fry cook, USMC artilleryman, apprentice carpenter, assistant medical examiner, security guard at an Alabama island for millionaires. Lots of jobs, yet Noah lacked a coherent skill set. He could bench-press three-hundred-plus pounds but could not touch-type. I asked him what his ideal job would be, and he said, “Hasn’t changed since I was thirteen years old. Front man in a cock-rock band. Failing that—professional wrestler.”

  Thus did we find ourselves one evening in my apartment: Noah was unemployed, I was between freelance assignments, and together we were whiling away the hours watching a Little League World Series doubleheader on TV. It was serendipity, perhaps, that we were many Coorses deep by the time a commercial for the film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild came on.

  “Dude,” Noah said. “There it is.”

  “Only if you’re buying the tickets,” I drolled.

  “The answer, dude.” He placed his beer on the coffee table, knuckled himself upright on the couch. “You need to find something to write about, right? I need to find something to occupy my time, lest I blast myself and others. We both need to get rich, and quick.”

  “Agreed on all counts,” I said after emptying my beer.

  “So…?�
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  “So?”

  Now, once he’d worked out of his…funk, let’s call it…post-Iraq, Noah used his G.I. Bill benefits to study history at his local University of West Florida. At UWF, he became enamored of Walkin’ Lawton Chiles, our former governor and senator, the cornpone “He-Coon” who is remembered as one of Florida’s favoritest sons. In my apartment that evening, Noah muted the TV and explained it: In 1970, Chiles was an electoral nobody—only 12 percent of Florida voters recognized his name—so he decided to canvass the state on foot, county by county, town by town, on a “walking-talking and listening campaign.” Some 1,003 miles later, Chiles had captured the imagination of the state and launched a high-profile political career that lasted until his sudden death in 1998. “No one’s sure if Lawton really, actually did it,” Noah said, “or if he took rides in the support trailer behind him. All we have to go on is his journal, which spends about a third of the time describing the meals he ate.”

  “Huh,” I said. “So you’re saying—try it again fifty years later.” I hopped off the couch, began to pace the apartment. I got a little worked up, I must admit. I pattered aloud about how Florida is absolutely bereft of mythic infrastructure. How it is symbolically impoverished, how it has no hallowed grounds besides golf courses and no great cathedrals outside of adventure parks.

  Florida, I said, is the only megastate in this union—is in fact the most important place in America—that has never defined itself. Florida has always been construed by outsiders, has been typecast by those with allegiances to elsewhere. “Imagine New York without its media or literary champions,” I said. “Or California without Hollywood.”