North/South Reflections

The area I live in was originally settled by Tequesta Indians and Bahamian scavengers, hearty individuals who were immune to the constant heat, alligator-choked swamps, and inundating humidity. In fact, it wasn't until 1896 that white folk were crazy enough to stake a claim on this land and attempt to Europeanize it. At the time when all the major industrial northern cities were prospering, Miami was still a swelteringly hot mangrove forest. Unlike the civilized, temperate world, we only have two seasons down here: hot and dry, and monsoon season (which is even hotter).

Just as the automobile transformed the urban landscape of Los Angeles in the 1950s, two inventions are responsible for modern Miami: first was the popularization of the air conditioner in the 1940s-50s. This led many northerners to believe that it's actually bearable down here; with the promise of an air-conditioned paradise in mind, many bored northerners pack the family sedan to shoot down I-95 and homestead their own little piece of the tropics. The next major invention that changed Miami demographics (and this does not count the boats that brought over all of the Cubans) came fifty years later and didn't even dry your skin. It is the reason I can live here and work for a company in San Diego - yes, the internet was pivotal in bringing a new group of people down from the north to try out the tropical life. Miami Beach is composed of many over-educated, young, white professionals just like myself who work for companies in Boston, New York, Charlotte, and Chicago. With fast, reliable internet service, my tribe of wanderers are freed to live wherever we want; and, honestly, why stomp about in the snow up in Minneapolis when you could be laying on the palm-blanketed beach with your laptop and getting paid the same amount?

Right now is Spring Break for universities across the country, and Miami is flooded with young people eager to do stupid things that they will either regret or not remember the next morning. They come from all over the place: Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Michigan. But the vast majority of people going crazy on the beach right now are from one place - the north. It's true, people in northern climates love warm beaches, palm trees, sunny skies, and scantily-clad people. Canada is not a Spring Break hot spot - Cancun is.

I spent a week up in frigid Boston at the beginning of the month, and it was interesting to see all the posters for tropical paradise vacations spangling travel agency windows and billboards. Down in Miami, we don't have pictures of bleak, cold Boston on our travel advertisements: we have the same things they do, palm trees, hammocks, and pristine beaches.

The south is an alluring, seductive idea to the north. It is hyper-real, and thus the object of fantasy. On my Boston trip, someone told me how they could never live in Florida because it's "not the real world." "Well," I said, "to many folks down there, it's unreal how anyone would actually elect to live in a place that's buried under snow half the year." That seemed to end the discussion. Indeed, to many well-off northerners, the south is synonymous with vacations and retirement. In other words, it is a place where you go when reality - you know, that pesky career, education, family, etc. - doesn't quite apply. It is a place where you go to lose yourself, not to be yourself.

But the rest of the year, when northerners aren't shooting tequila and passing out on the beach, they have a very different relationship with the idea of the south. If the south is not a hyper-real paradise, then it is something far more negative and complicated in the eyes of many people. For hundreds of years, the north has treated the south in a condescending, patronizing (if not outright colonial) manner, and this isn't just true of the US. Northern Italians look down on the industrially late-blooming south; Russians vacation in Crimea but make their fortunes in Moscow; denizens of Tokyo talk about the quaint native life in Okinawa. When northerners aren't partying in warm, southern places (or at least fantasizing about it), many of them are smugly satisfied that they live in more civilized places.

The south represents a fascinating paradox: it is the beckoning smile of warmth, relaxation and fun; it is also the symbol of cultural backwardness, poverty, and danger. If you look at a map of extreme poverty on this planet, it clings pretty closely to the equator. Similarly, heinous diseases and violent crime tend to occur at the highest levels in places with palm trees and only two seasons. In this regard, Miami is to rich, industrialized Boston what Kinshasa is to Koln. All the desire northerners feel towards the south and the southern lifestyle is accompanied by an equal amount of dread. In your dreams (and your vacations), these places represent carefree relaxation; in reality, they are scary.

Nothing underscores this complex dynamic more than the cruising industry (which Alan Biller memorably documented on this blog last month). On cruises, well-to-do northerners make stops at carefully manicured "towns" across the Caribbean to get a sense of the local life and buy cheap bric-a-brac. Tour maps supplied by the cruise lines show the area where it is safe and acceptable for moneyed white people to wander about; they encourage guests to stay only within this area, lest they be confronted with the reality of equatorial poverty and crime. A cruise-loving friend stayed in Haiti for a day. "It was beautiful!", she said. Of course, her experience of Haiti was a small island off the coast of the hemisphere's most impoverished nation that is owned entirely by Carnival Cruises. No doubt she got what she expected: sunny skies, beautiful beaches, and swaying palms. With a little luck, maybe she didn't even have to deal with any real Haitians.

While it's a fact that many tropical locations have crippling problems with their economies, ecologies, and governments, a good deal of the push/pull dynamic at play here has to do with a simple fact: it's nice living where it's warm. People in the north tell themselves that it's not real down here, or that people who live in the southern climes are slow and dimwitted; but fundamentally, this is just masking a deep resentment. I can get up in the morning (after only using a sheet at night), toss on a pair of shorts and flip-flops, and go walk down the street - leisurely, there's no rush - for a nice little cup of Cuban coffee. My body never tenses up because of the cold; I never have to hurry to get out from the biting wind. That's more than people in Chicago can say for over half the year.

It used to be that people lived up north and retired down south because there were more jobs in the big northern cities. But the internet is allowing a whole transient population of people to flow into places like Miami and realize that - it's true - life is a little bit better when your body is happy. Perhaps in another 50 years the old dichotomies between north and south will break down a bit; perhaps chilly places will be the vacation novelties; perhaps everyone will live on the beach (all of this, of course, will be made possible by our accelerating global warming. Thanks for making a warm, southern life possible for everyone, Exxon Mobil!).

I will most probably be leaving Miami soon. Nevertheless, the thrill of writing this post on my balcony at 11:30pm with a t-shirt on has sold me on this whole tropical-life thing. And for all those who can deal with the (messy) reality beyond the hyper-real beaches and palms, it too could be yours.