One of the treats at Gatorama is deep-fried alligator tail.

By Steven Knipp
steven@caymannetnews

Untold millions of well-meaning people all over the world believe they have an intimate knowledge of Florida. And that includes millions who have never even set foot there.

Of course these people `know’ Florida only from the many movies and television shows filmed there.

Florida first gained cinematic fame in the 1940s, when Hollywood’s Tarzan films were shot in the Everglades of south Florida. Twenty years later an Atlantic bottle-nosed porpoise named Flipper gained worldwide popularity.

Then, in the l980s, millions of TV viewers followed the stylish, razor-adverse detective Don Johnson, as he managed to clean up Miami’s Vice without even messing his hair.

Geographically, Florida is a southern state, but there’s very little feel of the South about Florida because most of it is populated by transplanted northerners.

In l940 there were less than a million people living there; today Florida is home to over 10 million.

Aside from permanently transplanted northerners, Florida is also invaded each winter by hundreds of thousands of Sunbirds—retired northerners who flock there to escape the bone-chilling winters. For the entire month of January every Amtrak auto train southbound from Boston, and New York, to Florida, is booked solid; then in early April the process is reversed.

Native Floridians have long had mixed emotions about northerners—both embracing them for the economic benefits they bring, and disliking them due to the added traffic, taxes and turmoil they cause.

Way back in the 1880s, when inventor Thomas Edison built a winter home in Fort Myers, he offered to pay for the town’s first ever electric lights. The town council respectfully held a special meeting to consider the kind offer but finally rejected it, fearing that the new-fangled street lights might keep the cows awake.

With the arrival of air conditioning in the 1930s (invented by a Florida doctor trying to comfort his yellow fever patients) Florida also became the favourite of not just millionaires but many middle-class Americans, too.

By the l960s, when NASA and Disney World began to pump in billions of dollars and millions of new workers into the state’s economy, the Florida of old had all but faded away.

Yet there is still another, more authentically southern part of Florida, which very few visitors ever see. A little more than an hour’s drive inland from the coastal cities preferred by affluent transplanted New Yorkers or Canadians, or Caymanians—away from the inter-state expressways, the high-rise hotels and the unrelenting strip malls—is a far older, more sedate Florida. An un-touristed, decidedly un-glamorous Florida, all but unknown to the state’s 40 million annual visitors.

While Florida’s coastline is lined with hundreds of small towns, all rapidly beginning to merge into one long metropolis, much of central Florida is a vast open land of cattle ranches, orange groves and marshy lakes filled with cattails and catfish.

Most of the people who live here are native southerners, sometimes called Crackers who make their homes in some of the state’s 800,000 mobile homes. This loamy, slightly lonesome heartland consists of thousands of square miles of flat empty scrub land used by large herds of beef cattle. While soups and salads are all the rage along Florida’s health-conscious coastal communities, here road signs read: “Beef: REAL food for REAL people!”

After driving for hours across this vast terra firma, travelers are virtually awe-struck when they suddenly encounter a bizarre natural wonder called Lake Okeechobee.

The word okee-chobee is a Seminole Indian term meaning “big water.” With the naked eye you can not see one shore of Okeechobee from the other, and even the high-speed lake steamers take several hours to cross the lake at its widest point.

At 750 square miles, Okeechobee is the second largest lake located entirely inside the US, and an easy landmark for orbiting astronauts.

Despite its immense size, however, tourist officials do little to promote the lake; it’s rarely mentioned in brochures or guidebooks.

Yet once you set eyes on Okeechobee, it’s not difficult to see why tourism officials keep it under wraps. There is a spooky, almost sinister air about the lake. Though barely 10 feet deep, violent storms can arise with shocking speed and force transforming, in a matter of minutes, a quiet day of boating into a genuinely life-threatening experience.

One wild and stormy night in the l930s heavy rains led the lake to over-flow its banks sweeping 2,000 people to a watery death. Shocked by this disaster, the US government spent the next 30 years building an immense dike which now extends along the lake shore for 140 miles.

The earthen wall, called a levee in the Deep South, was constructed in the hopes of containing the fury of Okeechobee. But even today the murky tea-colored waters of this inland ocean are constantly monitored by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Hikers along the lake’s wild swampy southern shore often see herons, eagles, white-tailed deer and wild turkey. While Okeechobee’s hunters take on turkeys, local fishermen report that the bass and catfish found in the lake are among the largest fish in North America, many measuring six feet in length.

But swimming in the warm waters is not recommended. Reason: Okeechobee is home to untold numbers of Florida’s famous alligators. No one knows how big Okeechobee’s gators get. But it is known that they regularly dine on hard-shell snapping turtles the size of microwave ovens.

A string of sleepy towns, built on cattle and sugar cane, rings the lake. Florida’s newer towns on the coast tend to build flashy physical attractions such as concert halls, museums or theme parks, to cater for northerner visitors.

Tampa, for example, boasts both a Picasso Museum and the “North American Shuffle Board Hall of Fame.” But older inland communities seem to feature more old-fashioned rural treats such as country fairs and festivals.

Each March, the little town grandly called Okeechobee City hosts its annual Cattlemen’s Association Rodeo, while May welcomes the town’s yearly Speckled Perch Festival, complete with a Speckled Perch Beauty Queen. Further along the lake’s seemingly endless shoreline is the little hamlet of Belle Glade (‘beautiful grass’) which proudly proclaims itself “the bass capital of the world.”

And just down the road from Belle Glade is Moore Haven, host to the state’s famous Sugar Grinding Festival, held every February. Alas, I had just missed it.

In July, the farm town of Arcadia hosts its annual Water Melon Festival, complete with a (possibly pleasingly plump?) Miss Water Melon, as well as a “wild n’ wacky wiver waft wace.”

At the nearby hamlet of La Belle, visitors and town-proud residents alike are entertained with its annual Swamp Cabbage Festival, though the nice lady at LaBelle’s Chamber of Commerce told me with the slightest of frowns that there were no plans as of yet for a Miss Swamp Cabbage Queen contest.

Traditional southern-style cooking can still be found around these parts. In La Belle, the house specialty of Flora & Ella’s Restaurant (“Home of Those Famous Pies since l933!”) was steak with rice, black-eyed peas, tomatoes, onions and fresh corn bread. This dish was so delicious, claimed the hand-written menu, that it was “guaranteed to make your tongue slap your brains out.” Not willing to risk that, I stuck with Flora’s southern fried chicken.

At a place called Gators Cafe, I enjoyed an order of Gator Nuggets—“real fried alligators with our own special secret spicy sauce” for just US$5, while a flock of pelicans landed in the adjacent river.

The attraction of some Floridian eateries, however, totally mystified me. At the Dogwater Cafe, the slogan was: “We treat you like the dog you are!” And a notice at the entrance read: “All meals served in Dogwater’s famous Bowls.” What could it all mean?

The largest community on the lake is Clewiston, which proclaims itself as “America’s Sweetest Town” on a huge billboard along the highway into town. And they mean that quite literally, for Clewiston is a company town and that company is the US Sugar Corporation. The privately owned company carved Clewiston out of 45,000 acres of cane fields in the l920s and even today it still owns most of the town.

Florida produces twice as much sugar as Hawaii and every month US Sugar’s 4,000 employees process 45,000 tons of the sweet cane, transforming it into 35 million gallons of sticky molasses—enough to float a battleship. Until two years ago, each spring the company imported 12,000 workers from the Caribbean to cut the cane by hand, but today mechanical harvesters do the work.

Every summer, the Sugar Corporation hosts the Clewiston Sugar Festival complete with cooking contests, barbecues and of course contests to select Miss Sugar as well as assorted ‘Sugar Babies.’ Least folks think the affair is only for company big-wigs, posters announcing the event proclaim: “We’re just ordinary folks, no sugar barons to gawk at, but we throw a good party and we cordially invite you to come and visit and have some fun!”

Visitors to Clewiston can thank the company for building the charming Clewiston Inn, an elegant southern plantation-styled lodge constructed more than 60 years ago to house visiting VIPs from distant Miami.

US presidents Roosevelt and Hoover rested their heads here and during World War II over a thousand young RAF pilots were housed in the hotel while training at a nearby air base. Twenty-three cadets were killed while learning to fly and there is now a section of the Clewiston Cemetery which is forever England; on the last Monday of each May —on Memorial Day—the airmen’s graves are covered in flowers.

Though this part of central Florida makes virtually no effort to lure tourists, there are several isolated attractions which seemed to be specifically aimed at getting cross-states travelers to pause briefly in their high-speed journey from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic. One such distraction are so-called gator farms—as in Gatorland and Gatorama. Pulling over at one deceptively sluggish and ramshackle place called Gatorama I asked the lady at the entrance if they really had live alligators?

“We have 4,000 Florida alligators and crocodiles honey,” she drawled with a slightly sinister smile. “And if you fall in the water you’ll see how much alive they are.”