week of 1/8/03
 
 
 

Trailers parks — the best of the rest of Florida
By Jay Hardwig

Astute readers will recall that Eli and I were in Naples, Fla., last month, soaking up the sun, combing the beach, and thinking about all the grilled swordfish we weren’t eating. It was a pre-Christmas visit to my grandparents, all hugs and photos and scalloped potatoes, and it was lovely. A few weeks ago, I offered a few thoughts on solstice and suffering in the Sunshine State; today, a few more words on South Florida before I leave that coast and return to the mountains to wait out the winter.

Astute readers may also recall that I spent a good amount of time tooling around town in my grandfather’s poofy Buick, gliding under palm trees and reflecting on the charm and curse of South Florida. The charm is in the sea breeze, the warm winter sun, the shorebirds pecking about, the cypress knees and mangrove swamps that have somehow survived the commercial onslaught. The curse is the commercial onslaught. The development of Naples runs the gamut from tacky to garish to predictable to obscene, and after a while it becomes difficult to distinguish the strip malls from the golf resorts from the retirement villages from the tony downtown shopping district. It is hard, that is, to tell where the tacky leaves off and the garish begins.

Sorry to be so grouchy about it. There is great cultural and natural history in South Florida, but there is not much of it left. It has been paved over, shoveled under, and forgotten. What is left is a well-coiffed blend of upscale indolence, Spanish architecture, and a sinister form of least-common-denominator culture, one that expresses itself not as the come-one come-all bonhomie of a truly democratic town, but rather as an antiseptic corporate come-on to the nth degree. It feels rootless, trumped-up, and not very real.

Which is why I like to go to the trailer park.

The Naples Mobile Home Park, to be precise.

The Naples Mobile Home Park shares a driveway with Stone’s Courtyard Inn, which is the fading hotel that we generally haunt when we visit my grandparents. The Naples Mobile Home Park is an anachronism. It is modest, muted, a touch dingy. It reminds me of an older, less ostentatious Florida. It makes me feel good. I take my walks there when Eli takes his nap.

Many of the trailers are aged, dented affairs with the wheels long since removed. Perhaps a bit of moss works its way up one side. The windows are small and foggy, and inside it is easy to imagine older couples drinking sweet tea and playing canasta. And while I’ll never really know, I imagine the owners as hardscrabble folks who worked all of their lives in the mills and mailrooms of Gary, Ind., or Buffalo, N.Y., and have, at long last, managed to retire to this Naples trailer park, where most of the residents ride three-wheeled bicycles and a few still collect aluminum cans to stretch out their Social Security checks. Don’t get me wrong: at a Naples trailer park, you won’t find barefoot kids running around playing with rag dolls and drinking tainted well-water. You won’t find crushed adults grasping paper bags and fading memories. There is not much evidence of real need here— for true poverty you’ll need to go a few miles inland and pay a visit to Immokalee — but it is modest. And modest is something you don’t see much of in Naples.

I’m deep in my Lot B22 aluminum-sided reverie when I’m stopped by one of the residents peering out his screen door. His look is suspicious: perhaps something about a stranger in a raincoat pacing up and down the narrow lanes of his trailer park and talking quietly into a tape-recorder makes him nervous. (Some people I’ll never understand.) When I tell him I’m staying up at Stoney’s, and just out for fresh air, he relents with a grunt. He eyes me for a moment.

“You ought to walk down that street there,” he says evenly, pointing out of the trailer park. “And take a right.”

I get the picture. I nod genially and walk on, back to Stoney’s, saddened by the thought that the place I liked best in Naples has just kicked me out.

Sigh.

It’s a bad habit, I know — going to places that were never meant for me, and then complaining that they’re not my style. Naples was not built for my enjoyment. There are plenty of snowbirds, golf pros, and German tourists who like it fine. There’s no use begrudging my grandparents a warm place to rest their bones in their golden years. But why couldn’t they have chosen, I don’t know, San Miguel de Allende? I’ll have to suggest it next time I’m down.

Our last full day in Naples included a visit to the local Train Museum. It promised a restored caboose, a miniature train ride for the tots, and a roomful of Lionel trains chugging around their appointed tracks. By this time, I had given up on Naples, but I went anyway. I did it for the boy.

My heart warmed a bit when I saw the depot. Built it 1927, it was graceful, contained, and well-restored. No trains stopped there anymore, but there was still something of the old spirit around the place. The depot literally crawled with giddy seniors out for a dance with the past. I was amazed to see how many adults took solo rides on the miniature train - what I in my naiveté had been calling a “kiddie train.” I suppose they liked the forgotten feel of wind whistling in their ears, even at 5 mph. The engineer even wore a trademark pinstripe cap, although the effect was mitigated somewhat by his sweater vest and New Balance sneakers. The historical record is somewhat spotty in this respect, but I don’t believe the old-time engineers wore running shoes.

After the ride, Nita, Eli and I crawled into the restored caboose. As we rambled up the iron ladder and tumbled into the bunk, I realized that even I had a bit of residual romance for the rails. I fancied myself staring out the window as the Great Plains rolled by, shoveling coal (but not too much coal), drinking rotgut whiskey, and singing folk songs about fiery train wrecks.

The club car was a bit younger and a bit swankier - festooned in magenta, orange, and red naugahyde, it cried out for a cold gin cocktail and some Josephine Baker on the speakers - and while the retro chic was lost on Eli, I positively reveled in it. I called out a request for “Blue Skies,” but no one obliged.

Our final stop was the Lionel Train room, which boasted something like a dozen vintage model trains running on a series of interweaving tracks. It was built and run, of course, by old folks remembering old toys. (It made me wonder - in Eli’s dotage, will there be Nintendo Museums, where doddering old men go and fumble with lovingly maintained Playstations and X-Boxes? “Feel that beautiful action on the thumb buttons, Taylor. Don’t it take you back?” Perhaps they’ll try to best old high scores on Grand Theft Auto while their grandkids wait outside shape-shifting, having telepathic sex, and taking joyrides to Mars. You never know.)

Thirty minutes later, I left the Lionel Train Room with something approaching real regret — I had an airport run to make — and as I stepped into the sunshine, tiptoed over the miniature tracks, and walked once again into the maw of Naples, I felt refreshed and renewed.

It did not change my life, and I still won’t retire to Naples. But I will be back, one way or another, and when I come, I’m riding caboose.

(Jay Hardwig is a teacher and writer who lives in Western North Carolina. He can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)