Contradictions of Naples, Florida

I.

The sun:

Domineering and vindictive.

I can’t look at it.

I can only observe it, 

As heat rising off the road

Or as the perimeter of shadows.

This heavy-in-the-sky sun,

Above me now, 

Tanning my skin as I run—

This is the same sun that was blotted out by the moon

For a few minutes last April.

Looking at the sun for the first time, 

We hollered and cried,

But even then, what we saw

Was the moon,

Like on so many nights.

The Solar Eclipse, April 8th, 2024., as we saw it from Meadville, PA.

II.

It’s 90 degrees outside and a lethal coating of humidity hangs over everything. With one mile to go, a chill radiates from my torso down my arms and legs, flesh of my skin pricking up. I recognize the shock feeling of cold, counterintuitively, as a symptom of heat exhaustion. Lonely, anxious, sweaty, and wrung out—with cars roaring past me—the hot beating rejection of the move throbs in my temples. I make my way back inside our apartment and lean against the kitchen countertop, nursing an electrolyte drink, waiting for the fuzziness to pass.

Here I am: In Naples, Florida, in June. We moved down from Washington, D.C. because Sophie got a good job at the local art museum. We packed up the car and drove down over the course of five days. One-way road trips tend to elicit a mixture of excitement and trepidation, and this one was no different. We got our apartment sight-unseen, the whole move made in a rush. Once we got here, and began to settle in, the initial excitement quickly wore off. I missed my friends and my family. My routines, those of which I could continue, felt unmistakably changed. For instance, much of my running now took place unceremoniously along concrete sidewalks baking flat and exposed under an oblivion of sky.

Filmy, shallow waves in August.

III.

The sand stretches dull and white down to the Gulf. Flat waves break filmy and shallow, receding slackly into the hot sea. Somewhere far off there is the hum of air-conditioning units buried behind hedges. I’m standing here, at the water’s edge, but that doesn’t really matter. You could have been standing here. Or anybody else. The long desolate beach is anonymous and all looks more or less the same. 

I’m thinking about how Naples, Florida was recently named the best place to live in America. Even in my current state, I’ll concede Naples is probably in the top fifty percent of places to live in America. But surely it isn’t the best. Something doesn’t add up. In my mind, the best place to live in America has to be livable for the average person, and, what’s more, it has to be desirable and sustainable to live there. I thought the best place would be more average and more good than this place.

This is one of the first things that struck me about Naples: It’s a place defined by how it is advertised—a vacation paradise—that falls short of those hyperbolic claims. Perhaps it used to be great. Before all the traffic and rising cost of living and climate change^1. Naples is a town in a state riddled with contradictions that form the basis of its identity. Even the air—light, ethereal, hardly noticeable air—is thick, vegetal, heavy, and damp.

It is that same mixture of air, heat, water, and sunshine that draws people here. They come for a sense of paradise and freedom but end up in sprawling, often private communities disconnected from one another.^2 In Florida, the sum collective of individual freedoms often converge on systems nobody truly wants—an emergent property of lavish spending coupled with the impetus to design everything around personal convenience.

Many houses are newly built or are in the process of rebuilding. They’re sprawling concrete constructions of hard straight lines that lack the necessary harmony and history to cling together as truly compelling three-dimensional spaces. Most will have a garage and a lawn, many a pool, and some a dock. There’s a Floridian tendency to maximize waterfront value that dictates the shape of entire communities and makes strange, unnatural maps where houses look like metal filaments attracted to the magnetic pull of water. These houses tend to look entirely computer rendered, even after construction. They’re maintained by groundskeepers and landscapers who are engaged in a near-constant process of upkeep. The goal of their labor is to obfuscate their very existence, to create the illusion of natural manicure.^3 Naples has the aura of a golf course fairway.

In addition to allegedly being the best place in America to live, Naples also boasts the record for the most expensive house ever listed on the U.S. market—a 9-acre waterfront estate that until recently had an asking price of $295 million (since lowered to $210 million). The property has water on three sides, and boasts private yacht and beach access; though the beach itself is fundamentally the same as the other patches of beach that are public.^4

So many spaces here are private. And many are literally fenced off.^5 But from what, exactly? That’s a question I keep asking. Perhaps from an imagined threat, the same sort of bogeyman invoked when I tell people in Naples I moved here from D.C. 

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. It’s good you got away from all the crime,” they say.^6 

But the impetus can be as mundane as drivers cutting through a neighborhood to avoid traffic. That’s how my friend’s HOA decided to gate their community: because too many cars were cutting through to avoid traffic. If the multi-million dollar house with access to water is one image to sum up Naples, then the other is this: A large, gated community with the majority of its land dedicated to parking, run by an HOA that has decided to fence it off from the surrounding roads to protect its car-dependent inhabitants from the tyranny of automobiles.

One representation of the Naples, FL real estate scene.

An actual house.

IV. 

Sophie and I often joke that living in our apartment building feels like living in a kind of purgatory. For all its resort-style conveniences, our building feels both poorly made and poorly maintained. A door might be off its hinges for a week; broken pottery left in the stairwell for about as long. I pick up trash when I can but it’s not much. The strange mix of superficial flair and the sense of having fallen makes me like we are being punished by some absent God.

But, hear me out: I don’t consider myself to be a negative person. And I don’t intend to seem ungrateful for the relative ease of my life. Even this apartment building that I resent represents, for some, the ultimate goals of comfort and convenience. I suspect, even for all my high-mindedness, I am also after these things.

I’m struggling because I don’t want this essay to be, at its core, a complaint. But much of my writing is about place, and I don’t like it here, and I want to write something true. So what am I to do?

I try to imagine the landscapes that used to be here. The wetlands and the pine flat-woods. Now mostly gone—cleared to construct yet another strip mall. And that just makes me so damn sad.

Sometimes I feel like I’m wilting spiritually. Sometimes I feel like a circle being drawn to a point, a knot tightening in on itself.

I want to erase the boundaries of myself and meld with something unknown. I don’t want more time for myself. I am simply not that interesting. I am interested in people, in animals, in the land. And I’m trying. Sophie is trying. We’re trying together and I am proud to say we have made some friends. 

There are other positives I could enumerate. The light and warmth available to us in February. The cold salty ocean and the feeling of wriggling around in the surf after sundown. The staggering sight of the stars in Big Cypress. 

There are times I’m running on the Gordon River Greenway and it’s so spectacularly quiet, as if the water molecules in the air are dampening the vibrations of modern life—traffic, planes, and the rest—and the noises of insects are a background sound to my animal brain. I’m running through this unfamiliar land feeling like I could, yes I could, find some happiness here. 

When it’s November and still hot and I miss the contemplative, northeastern autumns of my youth and I’m down here so far away from all that but I’ve just finished a good run, red-cheeked and relishing, even in the barefaced beating-back of the bright sun and the constant warmth. 

When it’s finally twilight and the cool sweeps in on a soft breeze and I think: this could be a new kind of autumn for my soul.

When I think: what if adult life is, at its core, the practice of growing accustomed to the situation in which you find yourself?

But I also wonder: Am I wrong for wanting more?

Sunset on the Gulf.

The Gordon River Greenway, Dirt Trail.

Footnotes:

1. South Florida is literally sinking into the sea. I often think about how this will happen gradually and then, with one bad hurricane, all at once—how nobody is likely to dismantle this place before it’s gone. 

2. Some European nations, like Sweden, Scotland, and the UK, recognize the right to roam, which allows people to access certain stretches of private land for select uses, like walking. In the UK, rambling—walking long stretches of countryside—is a popular pastime. Because property rights in the United States include the right to exclude others, no such right to roam exists.

3. Many of these workers are Hispanic and spend more time here than the largely white snowbird crowd whose properties they are maintaining. You could easily make the argument that they are more “Naples” than their employers.

4. The beach! Great democratic watering hole—where people of all ages can coexist in relative peace. Where little is needed except for a towel and a bathing suit. Where one can practice modesty and be situated in something approaching community. Yes, the beach. How much better it must be to consume the same thing by yourself.

5. Fences and gates, even if deployed preventatively, affect how you perceive the world. They’re a visual reminder of danger. They say: you are a little less safe than you think.

6. I find it interesting that just as the people of Florida have a skewed perspective of the people of D.C (i.e., “Crime!”), many of our friends in D.C. reacted with similar bias towards their idea of the people of Florida when we told them we were moving here (i.e., “Florida man! Eccentric crime!”). 

thin places

I.

I’m waiting to board an airplane, which is something I do a lot. This morning, I’m standing in a suspiciously bulbous line where nobody seems to be asking, “Why are we hurrying to wait on the runway?”

Maybe it’s perceived scarcity, wanting a spot in the overhead compartment.

Maybe it’s a way to signal status, being the first on the plane.

Maybe it’s internalized obedience, being in line, following orders.

II.

The core claim of Existentialism is that “existence precedes essence.” In other words, we come into this world (birth), and at some point thereafter we have to figure out what to make of it (life). This is a reversal of most previous philosophical viewpoints, wherein essence (life, vis-a-vis, the soul) precedes existence (birth) and, in most cases, continues even once our existence ends.

This is an important reversal. As far as three-word phrases go, “existence precedes essence” may describe the modern world better than any other. We live in times where the majority view is moral relativism—meaning is made by each of us. We exist; we decide what matters. Not just bodily: Our online profiles, avatars, and yes, even our blogs, exist.

At some point thereafter we must decide what to do with them.

III.

Camus wrote that the only true Philosophical question is whether or not we should commit suicide. He ultimately answers ‘no’, and in doing so, articulates an important concept: That of the absurd.

To Camus, the absurd describes the futility of searching for meaning in a universe devoid of it. It is the conflict between our desire for meaning, as well as order and happiness, and the natural universe's refusal to provide it. As such, we persist in whatever constellations of meaning we create for ourselves, even as our actions consistently fall short of our ideals.

In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus illustrates the absurd through the image of Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill only for it to roll back down, again and again and again. To Camus, this is just life. It’s all we have and therefore our best recourse is to imagine Sisyphus happy.

IV.

The concept of the sublime is much older than that of the absurd. The first recorded mention of it is from the 1st century AD, ascribed to Longinus. He described the greatness of certain rhetoric, but more generally, the sublime refers to incomprehensible grandeur as a quality writ large, be it in speech, thought, action, aesthetics, or something else.

In the 19th century, Romantic artists popularized the sublime through artwork depicting the epic vastness of nature. Clouded mountaintops and sprawling seas that we could explore but never fully know.

That the sublime can never be fully known is crucial. All divine things are like this. The extra-regular would cease to be such if we could comprehend it fully. Similarly, we would cease to exist as regular beings if we could transcend into comprehension of the extra-regular. We’d be Prophets. Or at the very least Enlightened.

The theologian Frederick Buchner put it like this: “without destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”

V.

I board eventually. Wheels up, hurtling through space in a long metal tube, wheels down. 8am in Boston. Deplane. Large black coffee. Zoom call. Car rental. The whole chain of incongruous events that constitutes travel.

As I begin the drive up I89, headed to a conference in Hanover, NH, the traffic is heavy. But with each passing exit, more road stretches unencumbered to a horizon that doesn’t get any closer. An hour in, there’s a break in work calls, so I take an exit, following signs that deposit me on the shoulder of a rolling dirt road.

The sun is fully risen, beating down overhead, hot for this far north. I strip off my shirt, and, kicking up dust, do a few lackadaisical warm up skips that feel particularly silly done in the private of this rural landscape.

I begin to jog under the unflinchingly clear sky. Experienced runners will concur you typically know the quality of a run within the first ten minutes. Enough time for the endorphins to kick in, or not. Thankfully, despite my lack of sleep, my body responds as it should: leg muscles, stiff from travel, loosen and lengthen as my heart rate increases and my skin dampens to keep all systems cool and functioning. It is particularly comforting to feel one’s body respond to a situation in the way that it should.

I jog about a mile down the road, back past the exit, and shoot a narrow gap in the trees to a slender path that winds up through a meadow. Smooth ground flanked by wildflowers and the grassy smell of plants in early summer enjoying the aftermath of a hard rain. At some point, running with increasing limberness through this verdant inlet, it dawns on me that I’ve passed the the familiar, retrospect division that separates all places into close by and far away.

After running. New Hampshire

VI.

In Recapture the Rapture, author Jamie Wheal argues that, “as we have demystified the world, both our selves and our doubts have grown heavier.” I propose that the inverse of this hypothesis is also true: by selectively re-mystifying the world, ourselves and our doubts lighten.

One way to do this is to experience the sublime, to feel that which cannot be fully comprehended. In being overwhelmed by an experience, the hard edges of our capital S self break down such that we feel communion with something greater. We go from a third person observer of the world to second person communion with it, and, in the most extreme circumstances, a first-person union—so fully immersed that we escape ourselves.

But this can only last so long. Our everyday third-person relationship with the world is like being on shore looking at the ocean. Our second-person communion is like being on a boat on the ocean. Our first-person union with the extra-regular is like being submerged underwater.

VII.

The unity of opposites is an even older idea than the absurd or the sublime. It dates to at least the 5th century BC, where Heraclitus wrote about it, describing two opposing things that contradict each other and are yet codependent, held within a field of tension.

A popular aphorism of his goes: “The road up and the road down are the same thing,” in other words, though the road may slant upward and away from you, to someone standing at its crest, it slops downward. The single concept, road, contains the unified opposites of up and down.

One important attribute of the unity of opposites is its ubiquity—the unity of opposites extends to far more than just roads. Hegel, who came much later than Heraclitus, proposed quite a few examples of the unity of opposites, including, among others, the finite versus the infinite, subject versus object, means versus ends, heating versus cooling, and chance versus necessity.

One important conclusion of the unity of opposites is that dynamism powers the world, and to have dynamism, you need conflict generated by significant difference. At the same time, such difference, which is fundamental to nature, makes stasis impossible—nothing lasts forever.

VIII.

On this same trip, I stop for a long-overdue lunch with colleagues with whom I have worked virtually for months. Here, on a bright afternoon at an anonymous restaurant with these people I know so much about and yet so little, my friend Gab introduces me to the concept of “thin places.” They are places where you feel proximal to something extra-regular, where you and your everyday perspective are scarcely separated from the divine, the spiritual, or, to substitute a related phrase, the sublime.

As much as I am taken by this concept, in reflecting, I come to believe thin places are more than simply an experience of the sublime. They have an immersive quality that extends the experience.

IX.

Many scientists believe life on earth began in an estuary.

An estuary is a type of ecotone, a biological ecosystem straddling the overlap of two or more distinct habitats. Estuaries themselves are semi-enclosed bodies of fresh (albeit brackish) water with one or more inlets and an open connection to the ocean. The mixing of freshwater and seawater results in a nutrient-rich soup that makes estuaries some of the most productive natural habitats in the world.

They are full of beautiful, life-giving dynamism as well as a type of algae that emits a sulfur compound called dimethyl sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs.

X.

Thin places are a unity of opposites: they are the dynamic coming together of the extra-regular (the sublime)—which is infinite and experienced by chance—with the everyday (absurd)—which is finite and experienced by necessity.

I think Camille Pissarro, grandfather of the impressionists, knew something about this. He was, among many things, an avid proponent of painting outdoors.

Once, while working with a student, he explained his technical approach to capturing an outdoor scene as such:

"Work at the same time upon sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression."

To Pissarro, the painting of an outdoor scene was to be felt generously and unhesitatingly as much as it was to involve the technical deployment of line and color.

Put another way, we activate atmosphere by bringing ourselves to it. Our spirit must be present to create an impression.

XI.

I arrive in Hanover, NH, after the absurdity of boarding the plane and flying to Boston and driving up with a brief stop to run in a sublime meadow.

Now, after attending a conference, I’m running again, through a landscape familiar to me but changed, with an old friend familiar to me but changed.

Feet landing pitter-patter picking places among the roots and rocks to plant and propel.

Hips sashaying as we slalom through the woods.

Smile half-cocked talking about life since we’d last met, namely his new son and my new job.

In between these large subjects, we banter many quotidian things made humorous through prolonged analysis. He and I share a trait I like in anyone who possesses it: a propensity for gleefully overthinking things.

So we go, along the pond now, he on the soft clay shoulder and me on the pavement, striding over the gentle hills. Up past the houses, through campus and across the Green down along Wheelock Street completing our circumnavigation and returning to where most things in running begin, the track. We part ways as he returns to childcare and I, being young, single, and childless, celebrate by sauntering down to the Connecticut River.

Finding my place among those on the dock, which, to most, is the destination itself. Many dry bathing suits worn as pretext to conversation. Various positions of repose. The smell of sunscreen and pine needles. Radiant sun which means little compared to the remarkable thermal inertia of bodies of water.

All the more reason to jump. Two steps back and one bound forward plunging—gasping, splashing—wiping wet locks from my forehead with reddening fingers. The instant adrenal spate of cold water. Shivering immediately. Hoisting myself onto the dry dock and laying soft like a peeled orange appreciating awhile the golden ebullient river shimmering under the heavy sun. Hovering gnats like pretty grains of dust. Muffled exclamations of excitement drifting across the water from the opposite bank. Laying to dry in the cooling air of the coming night of this thin place.

the coming night

XII.

A fair bit of time and travel have passed since I wrote this. It’s proper summer now. I’m at a cafe in Europe re-reading and I feel the need to add this post-script.

In the airport in early June, before boarding my plane, I decided to go for a walk and stumbled upon a prayer room. I found a seat in the corner and like many people my age, I closed my eyes to pray to something.

Others were praying, and, as far as I could tell, came from different religions and communed with different gods in this small space. A Muslim man performed Maghrib from his knees next to an altar with a Star of David above it, and, just off to the right, a hefty-looking cross. All in a random corner of the Dulles airport.

I can’t say how many of us felt this was a thin place. But for me it was a better way to wait to board an airplane.