The first time I saw infinity
was on the Gulf
of Mexico.
Almost since the day I was born, I felt it
absolutely necessary that I one day see
the ocean. Some of my first memories
are dumping worms into the lake, because if I were not to feed
the fish, they may go
hungry. I remember watching IMAX: Into the Deep and being mesmerized
by giant kelp, and gazing at the illustrations in The Underwater
Alphabet Book over and over because I didn’t yet know how to read.
And being there, beside the ocean, back when I was 10,
was like a meeting with my god.
We got there
pretty late that night, and starlight didn’t pierce the clouds. Warm with spring,
we raced out to the beach. And looking back, the condos and hotels glittered
like diamonds. And sugary gray sand dusted between our toes and billowed in the wind. And south was all the crashing of the waves.
The smell of salted carcasses
and tuna filled the air. And ghost crabs
bolted left and right of us. We ran
to it. And dark was everything
that night. And we could only see
the foam.
And there it was.
There, looking out into the void was everything. There, the sky was so pregnant with darkness that there was no line between it and the sea. The sand below was like a cliff: there, everything before me floated out beyond that place. A warm and rapturous abyss was beckoning.
As though the voice of God was all there was.
—
Reader, how do we talk about Florida?
You know you can be honest with me, right? I mean, you know, I’m queer.
How do we talk about Florida?
Because I really love Florida so much.
I work in conservation. Packed with reefs, mangroves, the Everglades, and countless other biomes, Florida’s a sinking, cybernetic Shangri-La. The warm waters of power plants beckon schools of manatees. Anole lizards prowl stucco walls. The fabrication of Biscayne and Dry Tortugas has protected some of the most sublime corals on Earth, and countless hours have been spent seeding those reefs with heat-resistant species: lab-grown super soldiers in the fight against heat waves and mass extinction.
But Florida is far from climate-proof. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that “[i]f the oceans and atmosphere continue to warm, sea level along the Florida coast is likely to rise one to four feet in the next century.” To put that in perspective, the Associated Press reports: “The impact from moderate flooding of up to one foot in an oceanfront city in Miami-Dade County will increase from 13% of total properties to 48% of total properties. Properties at risk from extreme flooding will jump from 5% to 86% of the total.”
This is not hyperbole. This is the howl of a five-alarm fire.
And I’m in Oregon reading that I’m not supposed to travel there because I might fall victim to a hate crime.
—
Realizing that it needed to win over working-class people, who, in the days of the Weimar Republic, tended to vote for Social Democrats or Communists, the Nazi Party launched its Strength through Joy program in 1933. Essentially, the Nazi government would subsidize the leisure of its Aryans, providing affordable hikes, weekend trips, and—most spectacular—exotic seaside getaways to Rügen. (Which is German, if you didn’t get the joke).
At Rügen, Hitler ordered the construction of the Prora: an enormous beach resort to house some 20,000 Germans.
It was to have two swimming pools, a movie theater, and a banquet hall gargantuan enough to hold all 20,000 patrons at a time. If completed, it would have been the largest resort in the world.
But how could one enjoy the ocean in the shadow of that monument?
How could anybody sunbathe in the grand umbra of Hitler’s own colossus?
War would force the project to remain unfinished. The Prora never opened; it only listened to the bombings of munitions plants and cities. The building’s skeleton housed refugees during the war, was captured by the Soviets and then transformed into a military base, and has decayed for decades since. Today it has been picked apart, piecemeal, by members of the tourism industry—or left rotting as ruins on the grassy Baltic coast.
As I think about these things, my brow furrows.
Florida’s governor has said that he would like for the United States to become more like the state that had elected him. I can’t help but think, is that our fate?
The high-rises are tangled in barbed wire: mandatory genital-inspection tests, silencing history in schools, lowering the threshold to sentence people to death, stripping bodily autonomy from people who can birth, and instating one of the strictest immigration laws in the country; Florida has become a prison camp. Beneath the stranglehold of fascism, every lovely shoreline is a dungeon.
Aren’t we worth more than concrete in the sand?
—
Everything in Destin’s made of plastic but
the sea.
The town’s composed of outdoor malls selling gelato, vacant
Cheeseburger in Paradise chains, towering hotels and haunted
gas stations, cigarette butts floating down the beach.
That water, though: a perfect emerald blue. O, green as any ocean can be green.
An underwater opaline frontier.
To quote the beautiful, flawed
Book of Revelation: “It has the glory of God
and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear
as crystal” (21:11, NRSV).
And so it strikes me to consider now
the precipice of ecocide: the garish, tacky wealth and what we trade for it.
All muddled up together
on the beach, sunburned, strung out with the corpses
of the moon jellies and the translucent, Faygo blues
of man o’ wars.
Stinging tentacles spread out one hundred feet across the beach.
As though the beach’s veins replaced their blood with
Baja Blast.
—
It’s almost impossible to parse Destin’s organic parts and artificial organs. The Florida Gulf’s a cyborg: truly and unyieldingly sublime, and just as filthy and degenerate and crass as it is glorious. Sacred and profane alike both roost upon the pylons of its pier.
Orbiting the Southern spring break mecca of Panama City Beach, Destin’s steeped in a state of mind that Survivor contestant Ozzy Lusth would call “bacchanalian beast-mode.” Tourists swarm and live like the Decameron.
And truly, I’m among their tribe.
I walk the beach, night after night, a Kraken passed between my hands and those of my best friend, galloping and laughing in the wind. We feel like buccaneers, if only till the sun comes up. We drink the rum and drink it spiced. We eat bananas, listening to Ween. I clean the foam-like puke my friend spills from the balcony.
And in the dawn we listen to the birds. We watch the sun blush pink the tide again.
For a perfect, quiet moment, as the dolphins breach into the air, we realize we are in God’s open palm.
I joke. I drink. I laugh. And I participate. But human hands do hurt the ecosystem here. The Florida dune ecology is all but quarantined. After all, the condos are just inches from the beach. The loss of grasses, scrub, and other plants has accelerated their decline. The sediment erodes as though it’s the Dust Bowl.
And still, there’s Henderson State Beach: a place that’s desert-jungle, deep with brush and trees, and lichens in an otherworldly landscape in the sand. You find it transcendental and unique, and you see Florida as it was before conquistadors arrived, carrying the banners of their god.
The god that now, unfailingly, the fascists worship still.
That god is white supremacy.
It bears no other name.
—
As memories swim
in again, you’re back
atop the hill. From there, you see
the highway.
Opposite you sits the restaurant, where you feed
the captive alligators; waiting for the waitress, bored,
to bring out chicken strips.
On the other side is the beatific.
All of it is yours.
And irony and glory both set in.
And though your heart is cynical, you still can’t help but love.
—
It’s all so very much.
And soon, if we don’t change, the sea will snuff it out.
The lights of all our towers will be shattered by the waves. And all that there will be, when the palmetto bugs inherit Earth, will be the rebar getting colonized by pink anemones.
And still, as though there’s a foam finger in his hand, the governor is rooting for the sea to win the game.
The US Energy Information Administration states that only 6% of Florida’s electricity production is renewable. Not only that, but degradation of mangroves, acidification of reefs, withering of seagrass beds, and unsustainable coastal development all threaten Florida’s resilience against the growing risk the ocean poses to the state.
And I just think, could I go back to nurture it?
Would I be able to feel safe if I worked at Biscayne so I could seed the reefs with corals?
Could I even go back to visit it?
What I want to know is how to make a healthy cybernetic Florida. How to accept it as it is while still helping it grow. Debaucherous, magnificent, sustainable, divine.
The memories I have of it are too precious for me to let it go. Although I laugh, I do feel bad for spearing ghost crabs as a kid—cooking them in melted jolly ranchers on the stove. My own heart steams when I remember, back when I was twelve, catching comb jellies in empty bottles of Corona. Or discovering the beach at Henderson and its infernal paradise of summer sun-baked dunes.
The governor has said that he would like for the United States to become more like Florida. But I can’t help but think he doesn’t understand his state at all.
The governor does not love Florida as I do. Nor does he love America.
He loves only ideas of it. His fantasies of it.
He does not accept us as we are.
Florida is not the calcified, Aryan playground the governor would like for it to be. It is an incredibly diverse, complex mosaic of biomes, cultures, trades, and clades. It is home to millions of Latino Americans, Black Americans, and immigrants of every coat of arms. Ybor City, Thornton Park, Key West, SoBe, and Sebastian Street Beach are all queer reefs, as active and alive as Dry Tortugas.
Florida’s ecology is one of dozens of queer species. Dolphins, like us in so many other ways, have sex for pleasure—including queer sex. Flamingos will not only mate with members of their sex, but bond for life, raise families with them. Countless native Florida fish are temporal hermaphrodites, changing from female to male, or male to female: robalo, goliath grouper, bluehead wrasse—to name a few.
God does live in Florida. In loggerheads, and velvet ants, and spoonbills, and the night. We can’t give up on Florida, or the South.
And also, too, we must see God as an amalgamation of the goodness of the strange. Composite, God is a collage of brain coral and queers. Mosaic, God is every border crossed and every biophilic skyscraper we raise.
It’s through the culling of diversity that we design environments that stigmatize creation.
If Florida’s a dying reef, then everything the governor proposes is to bleach us. And few could rest below the monuments he builds. For all his spectacle of hate, and for all the sunshine on the beach, his circuses do not sustain the heart.
Only in the freedom to exist, and to exist exactly as we are, is to find meaning in the often-toxic dregs that life will offer.
In Florida, and elsewhere, only through the effort to be recognized as equal, and only through the recognition of inherent worth in otherness, will we begin to walk the path of symbiosis.
This place is far too precious to allow it to become another Prora.
BRADY ALEXANDER is a queer writer and an Americorps volunteer. Their work is published in Catamaran, Invisible City, Miracle Monocle, Transom, and InclusiveWe, and they’re looking for an agent for their novel, Þ. When not writing, they protest and pine for healthy oceans.
