DISAPPEAR HERE
FROM SOMEWHERE, ANYWHERE ELSE
Many from up north come here to get away from more than winter
BY EVAN WILLIAMS ewilliams@florida-weekly.com
The reasons why you pack your belongings and leave town might be clear and credible, easy to describe,

and relatively permanent- a great new job, true love, sunny days; or not.

Sometimes people appear from parts unknown out of nowhere, their histories broken and uneasy. They stay for a while, just long enough to become familiar, and then vanish. Two former Lee County citizens, who lived in Fort Myers from about 2003, were just like that.

Coincidentally, they were both from Alaska.

One was named Aurora, just Aurora. She was 18 and moved here with her boyfriend because Fort Myers was "about the farthest place on the map away from home."

The other was a man named Bob, commonly known as "Mr. Alaska." He looked and acted like a modern day cowboy - in his late 30s, a fisherman, a coke addict, always drunk, squarejawed

and blusteringly handsome, even after removing his false teeth - and found odd jobs washing tables or painting storefronts in downtown Fort Myers. He was leaving town abruptly by bus, he told me one morning, at the corner of First Street and Hendry Street.

"Would you do a shot of Jagermiester to see me off?" he asked, taking the bottle out of his jeans pocket. He was leaving, he said, because a lawyer friend advised him that now would be the best time to serve out the jail sentence looming back home.

Mr. Alaska and Aurora left around the same time; mostly, they are out of sight, out of mind.

"Florida has no memory besides the monarch butterflies, who remember everything," wrote Spencer Reece in his poem, "Florida Ghazals." "The sea glitters, fish disappear like keys. O, this land of exits. This land of forgetfulness."

Many Floridians who have come and gone, disappeared and reappeared, for one reason or another. In a report issued by the U.S. Census Bureau in August 2003 (the latest data available), state-tostate migration flows across the country from 1995-2000, were documented; in some cases, as an example of Florida's magnetism.

"Between 1995 and 2000, 308,000 people moved from New York to Florida, creating the largest state-to-state flow in the U.S." the report reads. "This flow has been sizable for a number of decades and reflects in part substantial retiree migration. Florida's net domestic migration of 607,000, the largest of any state, came primarily from states in the Northeast, particularly New York, which had a net contribution of 238,000 to Florida. Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania also had substantial net outmigration to Florida."

"We've seen all these images of Florida being this place where the sun always shines, where you find beautiful beaches," new Fort Myers city manager William "Billy" Mitchell, said. "It has a certain mystique and romanticism."

"Even at Christmas, hornets hiss in the kiss of the hibiscus..." Reece wrote.

But, of course lots of people left the state too.

"Neighboring states in the South received more people from Florida than they sent," the Census Bureau report goes on. "In fact, there was net outmigration from Florida to Georgia (58,000), North Carolina (39,000), Tennessee (16,000), and South Carolina (7,000). Other southern states with net migration gains from Florida of more than 1,000 included Alabama (4,000), Texas (3,000), and Mississippi (2,000). Thus, while Florida experienced sizable net in-migration at the national level (607,000), within the South it sent far more migrants to neighboring states than it received from them. The substantial net outmigration from Florida to both Georgia and North Carolina illustrates Florida's role as both origin and destination."

Are the people you meet here, in Lee County, dependably permanent, or just passing through? Some Florida residents said when it comes to that question, the truth is located directly between the lines.

There is, for example, one member of Lee County's service industry who will be known here, per his request for anonymity, under the pseudonym "Patrick Clayton." Just imagine his face as blurry, his mustache glued-on, the look of an anonymous interviewee from television's 60 Minutes.

"Florida has always felt very temporary, very transitionary," he said." Most of the people I've met are from someplace else, either Midwesterners or Mideasterners. At my first restaurant job, everybody there was from Pennsylvania, except me. I find the state of Florida beautiful in many ways. And the longer I stay, the more I say, ah, well, (expletive). But there is always the pull to go back home, the familiar places and the familiar faces. When I think of Florida, I often think of that Neil Diamond song, I think it was...'LA's fine, but it ain't home, New York's fine, but it ain't home no more...' Or something like that. I still have this urge, to go back home, though."

Clayton didn't attempt to make friends or put down roots when he came to Florida in 2001 because it was assumed he wouldn't stay long. His plan was to go back home, wherever that is for him.

Don't expect to meet Clayton anytime soon. As to exactly what he is doing in Florida, it remains sort of an enigma, like him.

"It's on the QT, off the record, and very...hush...hush," he said, winking.

Clayton's mother moved to Florida years ago before he did, to escape "the old man" who was "an abusive jag-off." She fell in love with the idea of year round sun and palm trees. Southern California was too expensive; and in Cape Coral, she could have more room and land than she had ever dreamed of.

"Down here, the sun clings to the earth and there is no darkness..." Reece wrote. "All this beauty, butterflies at the ankles. Birds, birds..."

Then there's Nita Flores. She owns Nita's Sweet Bean Café in South Fort Myers. Flores moved to Fort Myers in 1999, from Chicago, and said she had always planned on leaving town when her son moved out; there was nothing particularly seductive about Fort Myers, and there would be nothing keeping her. Her son is gone now, attending law school in Gainesville.

"But then I fell in love, and here I am," she said. "[Fort Myers] is home, until [my husband and I] decide to retire, or get an RV and travel."

Flores said a fantasy road trip might let her see Oregon.

"And parts of Tennessee," she added. "The Seattle area is beautiful too - Puget Sound. And then there are so many other places. All the little, small towns. I would take the back roads, and explore, and find good folk music."

Then there's artist Mary Richey. Imagine being with Richey in 1991 (when she was a mere 62 years old), aboard her 35- foot Bristol sailboat, which she would sail from Duluth, Minn. to Florida, with her husband.

"By gum, we went sailing and we had a good time," she said

When Richey and I talked, she stood in the empty, bright room at The Art League of Fort Myers, a small gallery in downtown on Monroe Street, where some of her works are displayed.

"You know a lot of times the days go by and nothing happens," she said, looking out the big window where a palm tree swayed lazily and the afternoon sun glinted off parked cars.

Then there's Rina Frederick, owner of Wise Guys Subs and Stuff on First Street downtown, across from the Federal Courthouse. She was born and raised in Be'er Sheva, Israel.

"You know what my dream is?" she asked, her accent thick and distinct, and somehow demanding. "To see this whole country. I don't know if it will happen in my lifetime."

Frederick seemed to find delight in this thought: a smiled began at her mouth, revealing widely spaced teeth, and spread across a smooth, brown, work-worn face and somehow continued on past darkly ringed eyes which teared slightly, and into her hair- tied back, a rough weave of black and grey.

Upon arriving in Fort Myers, Frederick and her husband didn't know where they would open a business or live, just that they would.

She recently took a sabbatical from her life here to revisit her hometown.

"It's like living in two worlds," she said. "My heart is there, my home is here. I wish I could bring [my parents] here, but they want to die there...I feel like more of an American now than an Israeli, and my children do especially."

There are more people and places, of course, almost an endless succession of them: The Liquid Café, for example, a place distinctive enough to make it hard to imagine is gone, even though the space that contained it on First Street and Hendry Street has now sat vacant for years. Or, local driving instructor Paul Brewer (veteran of over 20,000 driving lessons), who is very patient, resembles Kurt Vonnegut, and played in a jazz trio in New York City in the 1970s. And bookbinding master craftsman John Ravenhill, 70, who is thoroughly, charmingly British and works out of an office in downtown Fort Myers.

"If I'm doing a book that's 300 or 400 years old, I get the feeling of the presence of the person who did the original binding," he had told me.

I may or may not ever visit him again, but will probably remember him this way: sitting quietly in an office chair surrounded by leathers, glues, solvents, chemicals, scraps of paper, a 12-color printing machine, books from other centuries and irreplaceable tools collected from all over the world.

Many of us slip by like faces seen through the window of a train; here one minute, and the next - gone.