varn.dev

While driving to the celebration of life this past weekend, I always take state roads from Tampa to Tallahassee. Typically less chance of accidents and though you have to slow down through the small towns a bit, it’s normally pretty smooth sailing. I’ve been taking this route for 20+ years now, from when I moved to Tampa from Tallahassee and it’s interesting watching things change.

I really only make the trip a few times a year but the towns I pass through are always the same - Crystal River, Chiefland, Cross City, Perry, and some other tiny towns like Otter Creek and Usher and ones like that. Most are pretty sparsely populated, with varying degrees of signs of life and economic fortune or disaster. Some, like Crystal River, have really grown and thrived in the past 5 years or so, as more people transplant to Florida and that’s lead to a lot of growth in terms of business and economic development.

Others haven’t been so lucky. Perry is the last “city” really outside of Tallahassee when taking 19/98 and it’s been through the ringer. Until a few years ago, one of their largest economic sectors was a paper mill, and you could often see logging trucks carrying pine trees on the road next to you (not to mention smell when you were getting close to Perry…you could always smell that awful paper mill smell before you were even 20 miles away). But Perry was hit by two hurricanes in the last few years, even though they aren’t too close to water, and the devastation was drastic. Massive trees down everywhere, flooding, gas stations with their roofs torn off, the usual stuff you see on the news after a hurricane. The paper mill is gone, and so it seems most of the growth prospects for Perry. It was already a pretty poor town but the storms really drove that reality into place. In all of these towns, you see the typical fast food restaurants, but more and more small businesses have closed.

The most striking thing on these trips are the hotels and motels. Before the interstates, state roads were how most people travelled our large state, so hotels and motels and RV parks would crop up right along the state road for weary travelers. Now, in a lot of cases, these hulking relics sit empty and abandoned. Motels with motor courts and drained swimming pools, overgrown weeds and boarded up doors from kids or the unhoused breaking in to stay and/or cause havoc. Billboards talking about treatment for opiod addiction and crisis pregnancies lining the road. Some of the hotels still remain open, the ones that are closer to places people might want to go (like visiting manatees or lakes/rivers) and there are a few chains that have setup shop, but seeing these husks of buildings from a previous, hopeful time is always jarring. I’ve always wanted to just pull over and poke around, look at what remains of these places - there are many old signs for gas stations along the way too, their buildings long gone but the signs remaining, or burnt out buildings and shacks that were once…something, but their history lost to time.

This is the part of Florida a lot of people don’t usually see, away from the glitz and glamour of the tourist destinations, the old Florida that was built by the folks who moved here when it was more swamp than highway, setting up their slice of the American dream, till progress and the world passed them by. That part of the state isn’t home to many roadside attractions you might find in other places of the state, but they share the same common history and scars from a Florida that once was.

It’s unlikely that any of these towns will ever truly get bigger and better again. Their residents still seem to hope against hope though, often in ways that don’t make a lot of sense - almost all of the counties I drive through are solidly red Republican “Trump Country” and yet all of the policies of the GOP seem to be the absolute opposite of what they would need to grow. The GOP and Trump especially stands for business and growth, and yet all of these small towns aren’t even a gnat they would swat away or pay any attention to, even though their residents vote en mass for policies against their own interests, time after time.

The Florida I grew up in, a weird state of transplants and welcoming to people of all, died about 10 years ago when things turned nasty, when voters decided to vote with hate and not their heads. Sure, Florida is still weird but it’s a different kind of weird - a questioning, glaring weird that is focused on hating the outsider instead of welcoming them in to try to build something. I live in a big city, so I don’t see this as much, but passing down these long state roads, the feeling is there, evidenced in the burnt out buildings and fast food joints, the mom and pop places replaced with more corporate drop-ins, stealing the original soul of old Florida one small town at a time.