Since October 1989 I've lived in Sebring Gardens, a trailer camp on Brunns Road in Sebring FL. Brunns Road looks rural. On the east side there's a section of pine flat woods, and another of open meadow grazed by cattle, visited by flocks of egrets. I miss the horse that used to be pastured there. Sometimes in the distance you can see the Spauldings cultivating their caladium farm.
But don't be deceived: a dense population lives tucked out of sight. It wouldn't surprise me if the population density exceeded that of some parts of Brooklyn, or the Bronx. There, it looks dense; actually, many of the buildings are abandoned, house only squatters. Turn into any of the side roads, so innocent looking, and you'll pass dozens of mobile home trailers not visible from Brunns Road. They're all culs-de-sack: Brunns Road is the only access. Some snowbirds dwell in them, but more and more people stay year-rounder. Many non-resident vehicles use Brunns Road as an alternate N/S route, avoiding the lethal Highway 27, one half mile to the east. The posted speed limit is 25, but clowns with cell phones drive fast enough to flip over lengthwise when they put a wheel in the soft drainage ditch the plunges to the side of the pavement.
There are no sidewalks, no bicycle paths. Yet platoons of elderly pedestrians, especially in season, flex by in warm-ups. Bicycle pelotons pedal by. Cars, trucks, come ramming through.
Brunns Road is deceptive: not, I believe, by accident. The illusion of rural sparsity serves the developers who built the trailer parks. Their market is modest retirees from the north. These suburbanites from Detroit, Toledo, Lansing or Toronto wouldn't spend their life saving to move into a Bronx of burglarized low-rents festooned with broken glass and soda can pull-tabs; they do bestow their wad on a dream of woodland with a meadow with horses and cows. Instead of ten cows per person, Brunns Road is more like one hundred Yankees per cow.
Growing up on Long Island I'd heard of highschool kids racing to Fort Lauderdale for Easter vacation and getting caught in southern speed traps. Ticketing New Yorkers may have been the only cash crop of some of those burgs along Route 17. The rednecks and hillbillies with their gun racks in their pickup trucks, behind the driver's neck, don't intimidate by accident either. (When Hilary and I drove to Florida for a quick taste of warmth in the February of 1965 we were intimidated every stop of the way. Huge bellied guys would block the door to the convenience store. One sheriffs car would peel off our tail at the town border, synchro-replaced by another from that next town, radio-warned that the nigger-lovers were coming: we had given a ride to a black hitch-hiker: therefore, we were no more welcome than he!) (In 1965 it astounded this New Yorker how many of these arms-bristling trucks said "KKK" right on the door panels! Weren't there any liberal-assassins around to balance things?) (In another year or so Hilary and I (and our passenger) might have been shot!)
The Sebring locals years ago promised themselves that they could have government services without taxes if they just suckered in some Yankees: the Yankees could then pay the taxes for all.
pk, a veteran victim of the government-managed "education" swindle, would up here because I was too broke, too defeated, too resource-less, to go on: caught in the same trap with the Yankees lining-up-to-be-fleeced by the red necks. (Even had I a wad of my own, I could have done worse than wind up stuck in Highlands County: I do love the famous Hammock: and the waterways.)
(Don't for a second believe that this once-upon-a-time Yankee ever thought that Yankees were innocent — of anything! My comparisons between Yankee and Dixie are accurate, not invidious.)
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