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More Down Yonder

• It should always be about the people
• And then, in the blink of an eye, she walked away…
• We better keep watch on the coastline

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The road map was yellowing and brittle, tearing at the seams.

It showed a Florida with lots of green and white space and only small bits of colored-in “city” dotting the shorelines.

Miami was only a small town, its urban designation didn’t even reach out to the Palmetto Expressway let alone the much farther Florida Turnpike. It wasn’t much larger than Fort Lauderdale or Hollywood, and Palm Beach seemed on the map an eternity away.

Road U.S. 27 was only two lanes from Okeelanta to the Broward County line. Florida City showed up on the map as being much larger than Naples, which was displayed on the maps the same size as Vanderbilt Beach, Marco and Goodland.

Highway I-75 ended at Immokalee Road and going north it ended at Apollo Beach on Tampa Bay.

The Avon Park Bombing Range was the most significant feature in the central part of the state between Lake Okeechobee and Orlando, which didn’t even much colored-in “city” part.

Walt Disney World was on the map, designated only by the “campground” symbol and was a long way southwest of tiny Orlando.

Alligator Alley was a two-lane road stretching from County Road 951 to U.S. 27.

The most distinguishing feature attributed to Naples by the road map was that it had a campground.

The map showed nine miles of open space between the “town” of Naples and the “town” of Vanderbilt Beach. The town of Naples, the map indicated, was just north of the Four Corners. (Quick Quiz: identify the location of “Four Corners.”)

The “city” of Fort Myers was only a narrow band running south along the banks of the Caloosahatchee River. There were only tiny towns on the islands of Sanibel and Captiva.

Everglades National Park was on the map, of course, as was the Big Cypress National Preserve. But neither the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve nor the Florida Panther National Refuge appeared.

The interior part of the state was dotted with little communities like Paolita, Devil’s Garden, Hall City, Palmdale, Venus, Hicoria, Nocatee, Brighton, Basinger and others.

Florida still retained its mostly rural characteristic. Cities formed less than 1 percent of the road map’s total space.

What’s alarming is the map wasn’t really all that old. MCMLXXXIII, read its copyright, 1983.

The 25 years since that particular map was printed have seen the rapid urbanization of rural Florida. Visitors to the Sunshine State today are often shocked to learn cattle-ranching is still a big business here.

Who knows what Florida will look like 25 years from now. Heck, part of it might be under water! Despite economic down-turns and threats of climate change, we’ll just keep building because, well, that’s what we do. We can also make sure, as we’re building, we have plenty of green-space left for future maps.

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Steve Hart is a sailor, angler, explorer, raconteur, amateur citrus-grower and semi-professional theologian who masqueraded as a Florida journalist and pundit for the last 25 years. A fifth-generation Floridian, Hart comes from solid cracker stock but revels in the changing face of 21st century Florida and its patchwork quilt of people, their cultures, traditions, shades and ideas. His book, “Tales from Down Yonder, Florida,” is available in local bookstores and on the Web at www.downyonderflorida.com.