Florida Man
The Missouri Man-Alligator Updated
Once a charmingly rustic byway in the time of Obama, Florida’s State Road 200 now rises out of Ocala, its six lanes spanning a pitiless prospect of big-box stores, car washes and fast-food outlets. Remorselessly, the miracle mile’s roadside competes for your attention -- its architecture and signage undeniable in their zeal for appeal. Zagby’s, Bojangles, Walmart, Steak ‘n’ Shake and the others are not little boxes, but big ones, although the ticky-tacky’s pretty much the same as ever -- and both they and their surrounding billboards won’t let you by without making a stab at your notice. See the faux-colonial balustrades tempt you with their plasticized charm. Marvel at the lurid depictions of chicken wings so browned and boneless as to make your mouth water. Towering signs that advance like army ants are accompanied by legions of brilliantly smiling lawyers, their billboards promising millions to past and future victims of fender-benders.
Every now and then, a copse of trees can be spotted. But, alas, another kind of billboard, one that proclaims the property it stands upon as “Available,” spells doom for it as the Sunshine State’s Walden.
However, once you leave SR 200, the change is immediate. Green fields in which horses and black angus graze stretch for miles; each bordered by forests in which the live oak, cloaked in Spanish moss, form their hoary rooms and corridors. The sky and these fields are so saturated in their blues and greens as to seem other-worldly, while the ecclesiastical air of the oak woods leads into piney ones, this horsey part of Florida being more like southern Georgia. Moss-laden oak still gather amid the softwoods, as do the sawtooth palmettos that spice the forest with a subtropical air. They provide the delicately needled boughs of the long-leaf pine with a rough and exotic companionship.
My companion Miss Woo and I hiked here, down to a surprisingly fog-bound lake named the Rock Island.
Except for a guy who’d clearly raised his hoodie so we couldn’t see his face (other than for a pallid, stubbily chin) before slinking closely past us in the woods, we hadn’t yet seen another soul all Saturday.
Was this spectral figure a "Florida Man," we asked, while unconsciously picking up our pace. Got to wonder whom it was he just buried.
In case you aren’t already versed in the Florida Man meme (and, as I’ve been given to understand, most everyone has), he’s a creature that emerged from the swamp of contemporary culture to inhabit a place that ranges from the merely deviant to the frightfully deadly – and all of it, perversely, Floridian. The rise of Florida Man has been the stuff of worldwide headlines, as he appears in them with a consistency that no Alabama Man, Oregon Man nor any other state-linked Grendel can hope to match:
There’s Florida Man the idiot:
Jan. 1, 2015: “Florida man trapped in unlocked closet for two days”
Florida Man the horndog who’s also an idiot:
June 8, 2017: “Florida man desperate for ride to Hooters calls 911”
Another who is as surprised as you are:
Jan. 8, 2019: “Florida man insists syringes pulled from rectum aren’t his”
Like ours, a swamp-dwelling Florida Man:
July 5th, 2020: “Florida man flees into swamp after police chase gets stuck and licked by police dog”
The Florida Man who’s bound to end up in a penal colony:
Aug. 21, 2019: “Florida man arrested after botched at-home castration”
And, like the above Florida man – there’s Florida Man the disfiguring maniac:
June 27, 2012: “Florida man chews off another man’s face”
Not that I was all that worried about our passing Florida Man. After all, was I so very different? I may not have remained trapped by an unlocked closet for days on end, but — along with the help of another New York man — I did break down a restaurant men’s room door from the inside only because I’d pushed on it and hadn’t bothered to pull. Still, back in Florida, I didn’t get rattled until Woo and I returned to our car and saw that the hooded Florida Man and a confederate had set up a rough campsite no more than 20 yards from where we parked. The camp had been there awhile, and yet it was so nearby that it seemed impossible that we had missed it.
To make matters worse, the rusticating Floridians were eating something boney. We’d interrupted this meal, so their greeting – if it could be called that – was similarly cur-like, consisting of hunched, hostile glances. It seemed sure that we weren’t about to be offered any leg of park ranger or whatever it was they were wolfing down (possibly amid soft grunts), but that’s for the best.
I can’t find it in a search engine, but I remember that somewhere in the pages of “Life on the Mississippi,” Mark Twain meets up with a man -- doubtlessly a Missouri man -- who insists he’s the devil’s own brother and that the author acknowledge this as fact. Twain replied that as he never met the man’s family, he was in no position to offer an opinion. After that, he thought it best to beat it, which he promptly did.
We considered the Bard of Hannibal to have provided us with an excellent course of action.