The real Florida

When an American says, 'We're going on our first trip to England this summer,' you can lay an almost certain bet that England means London, Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Let me come back quickly at anyone who's inclined, on hearing this, to break into a tolerant or superior chuckle. Let me say that I have just been for a long weekend in Florida and let you say, at once, without a second thought, what name, what city comes to mind! I think I'd be safe in betting that to at least 90 Europeans in a hundred the name that comes to mind is Miami.

From time to time, I get invitations from tourist clubs, travel agents, various Anglo-American societies to suggest an itinerary of compulsory stops on a proposed American tour of their members or their clients. I ought to get out a form letter for my reply is always the same. I say New York City, a quick trip through the state of Vermont, Washington DC, Natchez, Mississippi, the Carlsbad caverns of New Mexico, in California, San Francisco and Yosemite National Park. Most compulsory of all, if anything can be more compulsory than another thing, Bryce and Zion Canyons in Utah. Period.

Sometimes the enquiring group thanks me and is kind enough to tell me the itinerary it has chosen and it is New York City, Washington, Miami, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Disneyland.

Well, it's true the whole world over. We're conditioned in childhood, I suspect, by pictures in the mind that have been planted there either by old songs or by advertising agencies. You say India and it's certain that you'll go to Delhi on the way to the Taj Mahal. Ireland is Killarney and the Blarney Stone and Mexico, I'm afraid, thanks to insistent and lavish advertising campaigns, means Mexico City and Acapulco, which is Miami Beach on the Pacific.

Well, I haven't been in Miami in many years. This time I spent a couple of nights about 50 miles to the north in Boca Raton on the east coast and then flew across the Everglades to the west coast, landing at Tampa. Florida then, though it has a huge citrus industry and some aerospace factories and food processing and metal and electrical equipment and a cigar industry, gets most of its income from real estate and tourism. Real estate is the means whereby the old, the retired, the adventurous young can be made to believe that tourism can be a year-round occupation. In other words, if you'll only come and live in Florida, you can fish, swim, sail, all the time with a permanent suntan.

Now I don't have anything against Miami, understand, but to get a picture of what's open to you, I ought to say that Florida, which is shaped like a gun holster, is in the main a long peninsula over 300 miles long and that the state is exactly the size, the area of England and Wales put together. This leaves a lot of room for movement and for visiting or living in places far removed from the city that used to be nothing but one, long beach with a cluster of frowzy suburbs but is now the eighth-ranking city in population in the United States.

Thirty years ago I did a talk about Florida and really looking back on it now I get the feeling that I'm reading George Borrow or some other early nineteenth-century character ambling through a semi-tropical, sleepy landscape on a donkey. Listen to this account of the long approach down the east coast to Miami.

You cross the Georgia border and streak monotonously over bare, cut over pine-lands. You may just glimpse a few blacks (Negroes, I wrote then) chipping the pine trees for gum which is then distilled into turpentine but mostly you see nothing but sandy wastes decorated at times by piles of lumber, a few cattle and pigs snuffling in cypress swamps, cabbage palms blob by and, at the water's edge, you see cormorants trundling. You race through quiet, rundown shrimp ports and slowly the vegetation, such as there is of it, gets more tropical but never lush. The last hundred miles are an assault and battery by advertising. Haphazard battalions of billboards go by advertising miraculously profitable orange groves, nightclubs, trailer, motor caravan camps, ice cream, real estate, your mileage is calculated for you by roadside signs ticking off 'Only five miles to the alligator farm' and occasionally there's a crude sign painted by some wandering Evangelist 'Prepare to meet thy God'.

A sign that you might remember when you open the state guidebook and find, on an early page, this warning, 'Caution to tourists. Do not enter bushes at the sides of highway. Snakes and red bugs usually infest such places.' Flipping the pages of this same guidebook, I notice a pencil mark against the little town of Fort Lauderdale, population 8,000. It says, 'Fort Lauderdale is a popular winter headquarters of yachtsmen and anglers. In winter, Seminole Indians come into Ford Lauderdale to sell hides and game and see the sights and shop at the dime stores.' It then describes the colourful costume of the Seminole women. The pencil mark reminded me to go there and – this was 40 years ago – I went and, sure enough, I saw the Indians.

Well, today you might just as well take the highway to Canterbury in the hope of coming on Chaucer's Pilgrims. The stretch I revisited this time, Fort Lauderdale to Boca Raton, had left no sign, no landmark, no symbol, nothing that I could remember. Instead of 8,000 people, these two little towns now house a permanent population of 200,000. There are no bushes by the highway and the snakes must have developed flippers and dropped into the inland waterway. For most of the 200-mile coastline, you have an endless platoon of high-rise blocks of flats, condominiums laced together by equally endless platoons of small bungalows and trailer camps or what they call mobile homes.

I remember a famous old American economic geographer who used to say – he said it only 30-odd years ago – that if you blindfolded him, put him on a train or in a car and drove him 50 miles in any direction, in any state and then took off the blindfold, he'd tell you in the first minute or so what the main crop was, what was the livelihood of the inhabitants, their average income and their likely country of origin. Obviously in Florida, for instance, if he regained his eyesight at Tarpon Springs and saw the sponge fishing fleet, he'd know he was among Greeks. On Thursday afternoons in Fort Lauderdale, he'd spot the Seminoles.

For many scores of miles inland through the so-called 'lake country', a dolt would have no trouble guessing at the crop and the livelihood by seeing orange groves running to the horizon. No more. Citrus concentrate, adding five parts of water to the original distillate, gives most people a satisfactory substitute for the real thing. It was invented by the American government during the war as a brilliant reply to the challenge of the Nazi submarines which, just then, were sinking Allied tankers and freighters every night, from the New Jersey coast to the Florida Keys. Under the Lend-Lease programme, the Americans undertook to ship orange juice for the children of Britain. They needed only one ship's bottom to carry tins of concentrate for a volume of juice that would have needed five ships.

Well, Florida, like southern California, discovered soon after the war that real estate is a good deal more profitable than orange and grapefruit and lemon groves. Today, that old geographer, with or without his blindfold, would have a difficult time telling where he was. I drove for many miles on both of the Florida coasts and I might have been in Texas, in Ohio certainly, anywhere in California. Mile upon mile of pizza parlours, hamburger joints, Momma's deep-fried chicken, Fred's second-hand car lots, dreck and dreck and then high-rise, expensive blocks of flats, supermarkets, shopping plazas and then, forests of bungalows, then more quick food places, diners, bars, second-hand cars again and on and on.

The surest hints that you're in Florida came from telltale little enterprises bang up against the restaurants and the bars to remind you that for many old folks, Florida is a waiting room for heaven. In one block I saw 'Diagnostic X-ray Clinic. All welcome' and nearby 'Chinese Acupuncture Centre' and 'Salt Water Crematorium.' For $150 they will provide the boat and dump the ashes of your beloved in the Atlantic, not in a swampy inland lake.

The landscape was mostly hideous, stripped of all its natural vegetation and its messages were depressing. I was roused to stop and partake of good cheer by a rousing sign which said, 'SPCL BFT 2 (the figure 2) E ham pot' – special breakfast two E (eggs) ham (ham) pot (potatoes) 95 cents, that's 50p.

Another, and menacing, telltale sign was that of big condominiums, 10, 15-storey blocks of luxury flats with no windows in, all work stopped. The recession has arrested hundreds of condominiums that were a'building. About 30 food chains were listed in the Florida edition of the Wall Street Journal as having just gone, or about to go, bankrupt. And how about Miami, the coral strand, the pleasure beach of the carefree, the lover and the varicose old folks?

Well, Miami has a population of one and a half million; 200,000 are Cubans, very many of them illegal, which does not include 125,000 who arrived on the 1980 boat lift; 50,000 Puerto Ricans at petrol stations and general stores, better speak Spanish. The city council is controlled by Cubans.

In the past decade, Miami has become the national centre for importing cocaine and marijuana. Its crime statistics and its handgun sales are unmatched anywhere in the country. Some people say that its waterfront and its huge drug traffic make it, also, the national capital of the Mafia. There's much more to go on about but I don't want to spoil things for those blue-eyed tourists who itch to stretch on the beaches of Florida.

I tink I go home.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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