The Other Half

I recently traveled by car, train, and bus to Florida to provide health care support for some friends.

I thought about my Dad a lot while there, because he loved it so.

He didn't subjectively love it: as in, there were all these favorite places and people he was eager to see each winter.

No, Evert Hjalmer Nelson -- only son of Signe who immigrated from central Sweden to New Britain, CT, when she was 17 to help her sister, who was ill, raise twin girls -- OBJECTIVELY loved Florida because of what it represented to him.

Climbing aboard the mid-size motor home he and my mom first rented, and later purchased; and hitting I-95 south for Florida for several winters in the 1980s - 1990s meant, to my dad, that he had "made it."

He'd achieved one of his lifelong goals: to be a guy who could afford to spend part of his winter in the warmth of the South rather than battling the coastal ice of New England.

Like the motor home itself, the place they landed every winter was very modest: Woodsmoke Campgrounds in Fort Myers, on the Gulf Coast. Because it wasn't really "the South" in which they were interested. It was Florida, very much its own nation-state in White American culture.

Evert Hjalmer and Mae Louise Nelson
circa 1980's

Woodsmoke is directly on the "main drag," the infamous Tamiami Trail ribboning south along the coast from Tampa and then cutting across the Everglades to Miami. I don't remember how they ended up at Woodsmoke, but it became a place both he and my mother loved. Dad could ride his oversized tricycle around the park; Mom paddled around the pool, walked the camp loop and made a few friends. They forewent the omnipresent shuffleboard (I've never known anyone who played, although having shuffleboard seems, in those days, to have increased the camping appeal) and stuck mainly to their slab of concrete and picnic table. The one time I visited them there the whole place was very neat and tidy. No mud, no puddles laced with thin ice.

This winter pursuit was a bit of a busman's holiday. My Dad's other big dream, the one of many that had resulted in this big dream, was to a) quit the machine factory in which he was working on my arrival b) own his own business that was preferably c) a franchise (this was the 1960's, we were in awe and desirous of McDonalds) and, ideally d) a KOA (Kampgrounds of America) campground.

Here is one of the big gifts my Dad gave to me: he was a dreamer who actually pursued and obtained this creative dreams.

Very cool.

And like any first generation, mid-20th century veteran of World War II, a good number of Dad's dreams had to do with attaining what other guys had, and this of course had a lot to do with what was pitched to them and what privilege they had as White men in the post-war era. A house with a (small) yard in the (white) suburbs rather than the rooming house in Connecticut's "Hardware City" in which he had grown up: a completely multicultural place whose tool factories drew workers arriving from Sweden and especially Poland. After World War II, Puerto Rican immigrants were recruited to fill a labor shortage in the tobacco fields of the Connecticut River valley, and by the 1970's the demographic had shifted to that New Britain and Hartford now have some of the largest per capita percentage of Puerto Rican people of any cities in the U.S.

Other aspect of Dad's post-war dreams: being the boss of his own business. Cars, decidedly plural. Boats, same.

My dad was fascinated by and envious of how "the other half," as he called them, lived.

He liked to drive through neighborhoods with bigger houses than ours. He and my mom would go out for dinner by picking up a takeout burger and motoring down to Stonington Point (CT) where they could watch the beautiful sail and motor boats go by. It was kind of like a pre-internet shopping trip for my dad as he decided what boat he wanted to buy in the future: that far away and mostly imaginary day when he might have the means. Or they would grab a pizza and take my brother and I, and sometimes aunts and uncles and cousins, to sit at a picnic table at a rest stop on Interstate 95 so my dad could count the campers going by. In retrospect, I suppose this constituted some form of market research.

When realized, our own campground in Mystic was scraped together in 1970 from a gravel pit. Like much about their adult lives, I have no memory of how my dad connected with his partners -- Woody, who owned the land and the bulldozing equipment to make it into a campground; and George, the thin, sharp-faced lawyer, maybe the one who financed and brokered the deal? -- but there we were, by 1971, having moved 25 miles east down the coast from the mouth of the Connecticut River where my mother, and then we, had been born and raised.

We went as a family twice to Florida during February vacation: because that's how "the other half" lived, by my Dad's definitions, and he wanted, and worked hard for, that "better life" for his family as well. In kind of the same way he wanted us to have the college educations neither he nor my Mom had.

Going to Florida was a big deal. My parents didn't fly (or ever have credit cards), so we had to be gone for at least two weeks, which meant my brother and I had to miss a week of school in addition to vacation week. After some soul-searching and minor arguments between them on the merits of this, they took the plunge anyway.

Year #1: camping outside Disney World, not long after it opened and pre- any other associated theme parks. The monorail! Going through the fancy hotel at which we could not afford to stay! Pretty magical.

Year #2: a tiny rented houseboat on the Intracoastal Waterway. Pretty harrowing.

That first trip to Disney was kind of de rigeur -- i.e., "everyone" was going, now that we had access on the east coast to the "wonderful world" which had opened in 1971, the same year as the campground. The second and last trip the four of us took together was more of a family tragi-comedy.

I was 14 that year, as in: a ninth grader who was not happy about being dragged away from my basketball team, music, and friends. It was 1975, the U.S. appeared to be falling apart as our last troops were evacuated in a panic from Saigon following on the President's impeachment and resignation and the Watergate trials, Captain & Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" was the #1 song and I wanted to believe it desperately about one of the first girls for whom I had a self-identified crush. As in: if I went away, she would forget me. Out of sight, out of mind. No cel phones, no email, no texting.

Despite having an angry, unabashedly surly teenager in tow my Dad decided the best option was to put us all aboard a houseboat and float us away from any chance we had on land to escape each other. In retrospect, this choice had nothing at all to do with us and everything with fulfilling another of Dad's Dreams.

And, in perfect metaphorical fashion, he ran the boat aground on a sand bar.

We could have just waited for the tide to come in which, in fact, we ultimately were forced to do.

But that was after hours of Dad, inexplicably in his extra large whitey-tighty underwear, and me in my swim suit jumping in and out of the very warm, very shallow water, heaving our combined weights at the boat while our feet sheared out from under us on the sandy bottom, and screaming at each other in frustration, blame and filial anger.

By the time we motored back and I was able to jump to the dock, I never wanted to see Florida or how "the other half" lived, at least in Dad's imagination, ever again.

New development in Sarasota County, FL

Almost 50 years later, the dreams Dad shared with others of his generation -- the White, U.S., what-was-then-the-middle class dream in which you get a car, you get a car, you get a second home, you get a boat, you get a vacation, you get a vacation, etc., the impact of which was then inflated with each handoff to the next generation -- has overwhelmed Florida and is the engine of desire perpetuating our culture's widening gulf between the "have's" and "have not's."

Like California's, like Texas's, Florida's roads are nearly impassably clogged with vehicles. In Sarasota alone, 20,000 new building permits have been issued and three story elevator shafts, to facilitate living spaces now mandated to be 13 feet above ground to prevail over the king tides of climate change, lurch from the muddy, bulldozed remains of the Florida scrub like so many extraterrestrial gophers.

Most of us raised as members in White American culture have been, for the most part, "trained to obtain" since birth, especially when it comes to property and other material goods already owned or obtained by others. Our colonist ancestors wanted the land/beaver/trees/labor/wealth those resident on this continent had, and every generation since we've strived to obtain that material definition of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If someone else can have it, why not I?

I've had to wrestle with this monster ever since leaving the campground and attending Bowdoin College: a realization of another of Dad's Dreams, to have college-educated children who could more easily attain and experience how "the other half" lived. But once I landed at this small, elite institution populated by the children of some of the U.S.'s wealthiest and most powerful citizens, the gulf between those "have's" and me and my family proved too dangerously wide to cross. The few times my parents ventured onto campus, Dad was stricken by horrible migraines and had to hide from all social events in my dorm room.

Now, as I witness the gentrification of the small, Downeast Maine island I have called home for almost 25 years -- watching as the urban wealthy buy multiple homes and invest in rental properties to acquire more wealth while gutting our community by reducing workforce housing -- I sometimes feel as if I am standing on a sandbar where multiple seas, each representing "the other half," intersect. The tides, winds, and currents of the wealth, power, and control of others rip, buffet, and swirl around my calves, threatening to pull me -- with my one foot in and my one foot out -- to death? to paradise? Certainly to a place that no longer resembles our authentic, year-round communities.

It takes a lot of energy, muscle, and intention for each of us to stand tall right where we are against the values and dreams of "the other half."

Yet stand we must.

#gentrification

#theotherhalf

#newblogpost

#connecticut

#florida

#daddreams