Sunstrokes Up for Grabs By John Rothchild

By R.Z. Sheppard

John McPhee's and Joe McGinniss's books on Alaska appealed to the national myth of God's country and the manly fantasy of Huck Finn's flight from Aunt Sally and her civilizing ways. In the 49th state, one confronted a mystical vastness in which solitude is often confused with freedom. John Rothchild is drawn to a less awe-inspiring part of America: Florida, where the descendants & of the King and the Duke turned swamp into playgrounds and retirement pastures.

Up for Grabs is a story of rapacity and gall told with bemused admiration for the waves of visionaries and scamps who have left their mark on the Sunshine State. "All our lies would turn out to be true," says a veteran developer who bet that dreams of warmth and leisure would prevail over miasmal realities. Florida's first land barons dredged canals and transformed muck into pay dirt. Huge damp swaths of the stuff were then subdivided and merchandised as paradise. Georgia Poet Sidney Lanier was hired to lure frostbitten Northerners with seductive publicity, and William Jennings Bryan was paid $100,000 a year to tout lots in Coral Gables. "Florida," writes Rothchild, "missed that period of American migration when you could get to know a place before you saw a brochure for it."

The author, son of a transplanted Yankee schoolteacher, grew up in St. Petersburg during the 1950s. He left the state as a young man to chase a career in journalism (he is a former editor of the Washington Monthly) and returned in the mid-'70s to live in Everglades City and Miami Beach, his current home. His South is not the storied region of literary tradition. There is a theme-park quality to Florida's past. Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth and apocryphal pirates are turned into roadside attractions. For good- ole-boy authenticity, Rothchild heads past the subdivisions and tourist snares until the signs read BEER, AMMO and WORMS.

Another big seller is "square grouper," sly fisherman talk for the bales of marijuana smuggled ashore. Dope has brought a glitzy prosperity to many sleepy towns: dreamily painted vans have replaced rusted pickup trucks, and stone crabbers undo the top buttons of their work shirts to display gold chains.

The centerpiece of this sun culture is Miami. In the past 25 years, the city has gone from the nation's vacation and retirement capital to an international metropolis with a predominantly Latin beat. In a sense, its modern founder is Fidel Castro, whose Marxist revolution forced tens of thousands of rich and middle-class Cubans to flee to Florida. Like the Nationalist Chinese who retreated to Formosa, Miami's Cubans expected to return home but stayed to capitalize on their skills and energies. Another similarity to their Oriental counterparts is an active anti-Communism that has attracted steady U.S. Government support. According to the author, during the 1960s the CIA maintained its largest station in Miami.

Rothchild spins a tale of the wild, wild South in which motives, loyalties and identities are lost in a tangle of crime and counterinsurgency. The absurdist flavor of his account is best sampled through a procession of shady characters, including "the terrorist pediatrician," a Cuban exile accused of blowing up one of Castro's airliners and firing a bazooka at ships from the causeway linking Miami to Miami Beach.

Rothchild's pithy style allows him to cover a lot of landfill in a hurry. If his roots seem shallow, it is because he finds no place to sink them deeper. "Florida is spiritually unclaimed," he writes. "There is no harmonic abstraction, no stereotype such as the cowboy, the Yankee trader, the trapper, the woodsman, the planter--no hero of history around which the population can rally." Rothchild feels most at home on the highway, caught between a senior citizen driving his Oldsmobile at 10 m.p.h. and a teenager in a Mercedes closing in from behind at 75.