Spring Broken

In the midst of teenage rejoicing, I go on a quest to remember a man who never existed.

Hello. You’ve reached Time & Temperature.

It is to be the final Spring Break of childhood, she claims, and this old softie falls for it. Waves crash and recede. Favorite old paperbacks yellow and grow brittle, to the point where any Atlantic wind worth its salt threatens to separate story from spine. Sons and, in this case, daughters toss their young self onto the beach behind them as they rush into the ocean of adulthood.

Next month she’ll be 18, but for now she’s still a kid, my kid. And when she says “Spring Break,” I say, “Yes ma’am.” It is to be my daughter and three of her friends — other people’s daughters, girls I’ve watched grow up in carpools and swimming pools. So I research in earnest. According to collective wisdom, the best place for teenagers to Spring Break (two verbs, which together make a noun, which I am using as a verb), it turns out, is Fort Lauderdale, Florida. When that answer emerges from the hive mind, I take it as a sign.

Fort Lauderdale is the home of one of my favorite fictional characters, John D. MacDonald’s “salvage consultant,” Travis McGee who starred in 24 novels between 1966 and 1984. The stories are in Trav’s voice and overflow with his inimitable personality — a cranky knight-errant, saving damsels, without suffering fools. His Florida is perpetually on the brink of collapsing into a dirty, plastic future. Between adventures, he can be found lamenting the decline of his corner of the natural world from the saloon on his 52 foot houseboat The Busted Flush, which he keeps docked in slip F-18 at the Bahia Mar Marina in, you guessed it, Fort Lauderdale.

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Imagine my surprise when I discover that one of the only affordable and decent-seeming hotels in Lauderdale is in the Bahia Mar Marina. I book it without alerting the family to my ulterior literary motive. Turns out the marina, like everything else in Florida, has changed in the almost 60 years since MacDonald installed McGee there. There was never a slip F-18, but there was and still is an F Dock that housed many a humble houseboat back in the day. Now it’s all super yachts, which… ugh. But I am on a pilgrimage, and I can hear the ghosts of McGee and his hairy economist pal Meyer calling out to me. These are their whitecaps, their sunsets, their salty breezes, and, sadly, this is the dirty plastic future they’d envisioned

I knew there would be teenagers in Fort Lauderdale, so I was ready for them in theory, but the reality is more than I bargained for. The drunkenness and stoned-edness, the volume of the girls’ party-screams, the swaggering shirtlessness of the boys, the music — did you know, for instance that there’s a “chill-dance” cover of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon?” There is. Of course it’s by an artist called Poolside, and it’s currently clocking in at 110 million spins on Spotify. And while it plays WAY TOO LOUD on the brunch patio, it’s the best musical moment of the trip, though that’s a low bar.

The eavesdropping is phenomenal.

“Zack figured out that he didn’t get punched last night,” A young woman named maybe Dylan tells her friends while waiting on an açaí bowl at Oakberry. “He just, like, walked into a wall. He thought he got into, like, a fight or something because he had a bloody nose and he was like so wasted. But it was just, like, a wall.”

The teenagers move in packs, their outfits perfectly coordinated within each group, very much like the gangs in the 1970’s cult classic film The Warriors. One gang of stoner-looking boys with sleeveless tees and backward baseball caps; a bunch of gamers in Hawaiian shirts and jeans; a brood of jocks in board shorts and the white ribbed tank tops that people still somehow refer to as “wife-beaters;” and an absolute army of young men in swim trunks and nothing else — like, all day — on the beach, on the streets, in the restaurants and shops and hotel lobbies and literally everywhere. I won’t describe the myriad gangs of girls and their respective outfits, but suffice to say that while the color of the halter top may vary within the group, every member of the group will be halter-topped.

I suppose it was the same when I was their age. I was, myself, in turns a goth, a hippie, a duct-taped rocker, etc. And whatever crew I found myself in had its own similar coherence. And amazingly, like me and my Gen-X friends all those years ago, these kids are not on their phones. They are living real life in real time. Their rejoicing might be a little on the loud side for my taste, but by god they are rejoicing.

If Travis McGee is sipping Plymouth Gin on the deck of his Busted Flush, he hasn’t gotten much in the way of relaxation. These kids are on fire. They’re screaming from the pool deck, the Starbuck’s patio, and most insistently from the moonlit beach. Unbridled. Insane. Celebrating their youth, their invincibility, their manic oblivion. Not gonna lie, it’s a hard environment in which to be sober, to be middle aged, to be sensitive to loud noises. I’m all of those things and more, but I am on a quest, parallel to the daughters’ fun that I’m sponsoring and loosely chaperoning.

Mine is a small, quiet mission to remember a man who never existed. I find the F Dock at Bahia Mar where Travis McGee once moored his fictional houseboat. I know that back in 1987, a year or so after the death of Trav’s creator, the brilliant novelist John D. MacDonald, a plaque was installed on the dock, commemorating the series and the grumpy old sea-bum at its heart. Of course the plaque is nowhere to be found when I go looking. An antique website informs me that during a renovation the plaque was moved to a “nearby gift shop.” I spend the next two days befuddling the employees of local gift shops. I’ve all but given up when, wandering along the inter-coastal, I spot the Bahia Mar Marina Office. The place is open but it’s very much not a gift shop. This is the nerve center of a marina that houses some of the world’s largest yachts. The woman who looks up from the desk, regards me with kind eyes which sparkle when I say sheepishly, “I’m on a kind of pilgrimage…” And before I even finish my question she points to her left and says, “Is that what you’re looking for?”

We live for such a short time. Ask John D. MacDonald, gone these 37 years. What lives on? The love we share with our daughters? The love we share with the world through our work? The love. The love. The love. That’s what echoes after the tide has carried us out. Standing on a balcony with three of your best high school friends, singing to the full moon at the top of your lungs. Time passes. Everything changes. Everything someday will end. And not even the commemorative plaque will last forever. But it doesn’t matter. Because forever is just right now, spinning out into infinity.

[This is the final resting place of John D. MacDonald and his wife Dorothy in Poland, NY, not terribly far from where I’ve lived these last twenty years. Note the bottles of Plymouth Gin.]

I’ll leave y’all with some of Travis McGee’s timeless existentialism which is, in large part, the reason the novels endure. Here’s an excerpt from John D. MacDonald’s Pale Gray for Guilt:

Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger ones stand braced on the bar down river. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swiftly by, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away. Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of sand and gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. A Churchill, fat cigar atilt, sourly amused at his own endurance and, in the end, indifferent to rivers and the rage of waters. Far downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.