The shock of a return from Florida
I’m home. The furnace is running. OMG. After a week in balmy Florida, where I dipped into the hotel swimming pool, watched ballgames, and paraded around in shorts and T-shirts, the cold is hardly bearable.
Flying from the Gulf Coast to the hill-top airport on the outskirts of Bridgeport, W.Va., I had sat next to a Parkersburg retiree who wearily contemplated a return to the gloom and the rain, as she put it. I dismissed her complaints then. Now, I’m not so sure she wasn’t right.
Home, where the heart is supposed to be, was a letdown. It might have been different if I hadn’t had to nudge the thermostat up a degree or two.
Late that first afternoon back, I opened the front door and walked to the mailbox across the street. Tiny flakes of snow swirled in a bracing wind. I thought: 770 air miles south of Uniontown sure makes a world of difference.
The trouble with flying is the same as riding a cart to play golf: You are whisked so quickly from Point A to Point B that distance becomes irrelevant. The whole process is easy but deceiving. Like cart-time, flight-time obliterates a sense of progression. Here now, hours later some other place, without expending an ounce of energy.
It turns out the “other” is not so “other,” after all. The retailers are largely the same. Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Walmart, Walgreens. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. In Pennsylvania. In Florida. In Maryland and Ohio. In Wisconsin. In California. Our stores, our hotel chains, our restaurants unite us. We are our vendors.
Trade out Sheetz for Wawa and you’re in the Southland. Eye a Woodman’s, and you’re in the Midwest.
But a McDonald’s is a McDonald’s, whether on 14th Street in Bradenton, Florida, or on Morgantown Road in Uniontown. As for Subways and Dollar Generals, they are everywhere.
Some people cringe at the sameness. Others find the whole thing reassuring, a mark of our essential character as a people, as Americans.
Regional diversity? It seems sufficient to say that Florida has palm trees and (abandoned) dog tracks. And the sun.
And yet, all things are relative. A chilly day in Florida (a high of 68) is still chilly, to Floridians, to Northern wintertime transplants, and to visitors. At the Atlanta Braves’ spring training ballpark in North Port, I listened in as a stadium attendant explained away the nip in the air, “Well, it’s still winter, it’s still March.”
Yeah, and it’s snowing in Western Pennsylvania.
North Port, Florida. You’ve maybe never heard of the place.
The Braves played their first spring training game in North Port at CoolToday Park (Cool Today is a Florida-based air conditioning/plumbing/heating outfit) in March 2019. Including minor league training facilities, the baseball complex cost $140 million. Over the course of its 30-year lease, the Braves are projected to generate $1.7 billion for the local economy.
North Port along with West Villages, a private concern, are counting on it. “It’s about more than baseball,” West Villages general manager Marty Black told the Sarasota Herald Tribune in 2017. “It’s about creating a community….”
Or as a fan in the stands (a retired airplane parts guy removed from Massachusetts) told my brother Doug and me, “They’re building a whole city.”
It sure looks like it. There are new roads and sidewalks skirting large tracts of land being bulldozed and readied for the construction of 20,000 homes. Three million square feet of commercial space is planned.
North Port, with a population of 2,244 in 1960 and 74,793 in 2020, is projected to grow even larger.
Take that, Bradenton, where the Pirates train, which seems to have more than its share of vacated storefronts, principally restaurants.
Ah, but CoolToday Park is hardly in the same league with Bradenton’s Lecom Park. The new Braves field is charmless. Lecom exudes charm. It’s older, it’s fan-friendly.
“Hey, Cutch,” “Hey, Bryan,” “Hey, Jack,” “Hey, Mitch,” fans, within earshot, shout as the players stretch, play catch, or walk down the first base line toward the bullpen in right field.
Sometimes – not always – a player turns his head and mutters “thank you” as acknowledgment.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.