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Outside Magazine, August 2004

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Code Orange

By Bob Shacochis


	(Chris Buck)

IN THE SUREAL CULTURAL MATRIX of the Sunshine State, in which all oddity and strange extravagance are entertained, Carl Hiaasen, born and raised west of Fort Lauderdale on the erstwhile frontier of the Everglades, has emerged as an icon of the peculiar craziness that is Florida, in some ways its troubadour, in more important ways its homegrown Old Testament–righteous scold.

Why, a friend once asked me, is Hiaasen so pissed off? Say what? If you love Florida as much as Hiaasen does—purely, passionately, obsessively—you have two choices: Get mad and leave or get mad and engage the plague of vermin. Even as he eulogizes a Florida buried under landfills, Hiaasen is a brash champion of a future that should, and must, generate hope for a better way of doing things. The two published collections of his columns, which he began writing in 1985, are titled, pugilistically, Kick Ass (1999) and Paradise Screwed (2001). He seized upon Mickey Mouse like a monitor lizard in 1998, ranting against the corporate soul-rot of the Walt Disney Company in a book-length attack called Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World.

For the relentless, muckraking scorn he has directed at South Florida's institutionalized axis of greed—politicians, developers, multinational carpetbaggers, agri-industrialists—the Miami city commission once passed a resolution condemning Hiaasen. Former Miami mayor Xavier Suarez, thrown out of office in the midst of an election-rigging scandal, wrote an open letter to the Herald shortly after Hiaasen's first novel, Tourist Season, was published in 1986, suggesting that the author issue an apology to "the entire human race." Hiaasen had indelicately asserted on Good Morning America that "there's nothing wrong with Florida that a force-five hurricane wouldn't fix."

So he regrets such a seemingly callous comment, right? Hiaasen's eyes light up. "Do you want people to die? Do you want carcasses floating down Biscayne Boulevard?" he says. "Of course not. But nature's here to remind us, and it does, that it can kick our ass, that we're just gnats."

Let's face it: They are narcotically uplifting, the apocalypse-by-nature scenarios in Hiaasen's fiction. But the truth is, he despairs of South Florida's slide into unlivableness, its apparently irreversible decline as a habitat for anything, even as its population rises at the rate of 800 a day, not counting a zillion googans—exceptionally clueless tourists. He drives the crammed highways and looks at the solid horizon of concrete where he used to ride his bike and fish and go out in the woods, and part of him knows it would be easy to get beaten down and surrender. "Half the time I feel like just turning around and driving to the airport and getting on a plane to Patagonia or Alaska or somewhere," he says. "But then you can't walk out on a fight. How do you walk out on a fight?"

"HALF THE TIME I FEEL LIKE TURNING AROUND AND DRIVING TO THE AIRPORT AND GETTING ON A PLANE TO PATAGONIA OR ALASKA OR SOMEWHERE," HIAASEN SAYS. "BUT THEN YOU CAN'T WALK OUT ON A FIGHT. HOW DO YOU WALK OUT ON A FIGHT?"

Lately, Hiaasen's fight of choice has been the Everglades. Few battles in Florida's history have been as combative as the effort to restore the Everglades, and even as the restoration moves ahead and he permits himself cautious words of praise for Jeb Bush's no-brainer leadership on what constitutes an apple-pie issue for Floridians, Hiaasen still won't let go of the bone, even making his latest villain in Skinny Dip, Chaz Perrone, a thievin', lyin', cowardly, chickenshit . . . field biologist.

"The truth is, the Everglades are gone," Hiaasen says. "They're trying to put something back together that is a very, very pale sort of plumbing system that basically reenacts what nature used to do. You're never going to have the old Everglades back—it's already been carved up. You can't make it pristine again, but you can restore the flow, and at least Florida Bay and the reefs and everything downstream can be helped."

Of greatest concern to Hiaasen now is the looming philosophical battle over the why. Why are they doing it? Who are we really saving the Everglades for? The developers? Big Sugar? How much of the $8 billion budget to restore the Everglades will be outright stolen or funneled to lobbyists and contractor pals? "There's going to be an ugly, seamy side to this whole thing, as there is to every big public-works project," he says, "and it's still not an excuse to stop it. There's going to be scandals. Already the sugar industry is backing off some of its commitments. That's no surprise. You need to keep the heat on those bastards."

Skinny Dip, you might say, is a blowtorch on the unwashed hairy underside of their balls.

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Contributing editor Bob Shacochis wrote about Kathmandu for Outside's 20th anniversary, in October 1997.

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