On WNZF’s annual year in review show with local media in January host David Ayres asked me if I liked Palm Coast. I replied with a mix of sarcasm and sourness. It was more of a show-offy attempt to sound clever than an honest reflection of how I felt. After all Cheryl and I had just returned from Arizona days earlier, and we couldn’t have been happier to be back in DeSantistan. When we veered off at the State Road 100 exit to make it back to our P Section, this Yonkers of Palm Coast, it truly felt like we were home in the little house on the prairie sense of the term.
I never thought it would come to this. If you had told me at any point in the 1970s, 80s or 90s that I would end up in this town, I’d have first challenged you to find this town on any map in the universe, then after ITT’s cookie-cut suburbs were incorporated, and before Crumbl and KB Homes gave us a new appreciation for the cookie cut, I’d have laughed in your face.
I did laugh in my Aunt Marianne’s face when I first visited Palm Coast in June 1995 on my way to a job interview in Lakeland. She suggested I didn’t have to go to Polk County. I could settle right there and then. Little did she know that five years after my Polk exile, which I survived unmolested only because Grady Judd was only undersheriff at the time, that’s exactly what we did.
By the way, my Aunt lived at 6 Cooper Court, right by the Palm Harbor golf course. To her it was a pasture of heaven (she is ardently Catholic). To me it seemed like Grand Central. Americans are obsessed with privacy, but they don’t seem to mind when a clump of over-the-hill aliens wielding a stick at an invisible ball mutter and hobble through their backyard every five minutes (as long as they’re white and dress like Doc Severinsen).
So we settled in the Woodlands, a cozy rental house that butted up right against a thin buffer of scrub pines to shield us from what is today known in more romantic circles as Waste Water Treatment Number One. There our son was born and there we shepherded our daughter through her middle school years as I commuted daily to Sodom, where the News-Journal then still existed as an actual newspaper. I-95’s near-death simulator aside, it was a pleasure to drive home to Palm Coast every day, but I didn’t know it just then.
That became more real when, with our Realtor prince Matthew Wilson parting the seas of the housing crash for us, we bought our just-built palatial P Section house in 2008 for a song we sang the underwater seller. We needed the space more for a 3,000-book library than for our children, who were time-limited squatters anyway. I don’t know where else in this country I could get a 3,000 square foot home for less than the monthly price of my Obamacare premiums.
We’ve lost a roof, a ceiling and a floor and just finished having the outside repainted for the second time, because most Florida homeowners don’t know that buying here is like buying in Beirut. But as in Beirut, rebuilding on half-assed insurance is part of the charm.
Incidentally, I doubt we could have secured the labor for, let alone the superb quality of, some of these repairs without the occasionally undocumented laborer our deranger in chief wants to disappear. For a time our quarter-acre was a little sanctuary lot, and thanks to the indulgence of our sheriff, remained so. Another reason to like Palm Coast.
It’s no minor detail that a pair of heretics like Cheryl and me could–occasional death threats, defamations and, in Cheryl’s case, the odd character assassination by the people who teach character to our kids–make a life in this red sea and even run a Bolshevik site like FlaglerLive. That’s to our readers’ credit even as many of you have to reach for nitroglycerin pills when reading some of the material here. But you read. You come back. You contribute financially to keep the site going. Appreciation for essential shoeleather reporting aside, my suspicion is that you do so for the same reason we choose to stay here: differences are more interesting than echo chambers. It is possible to have a conversation even in the most polarized times. Anything less is pointless. That too is why I like it here. Practicing journalism in a blue state would bore me to death.
So it’s been. I’m not going to pretend that Palm Coast has anything on the places I’ve lived before. It lacks a soul, it lacks that city feel we crave whenever suburban despair makes you reach for Oxy, our social services are shittier than Havana’s, our suicide rate is higher than the Nordic countries’, congestion is a daily purgatory without atonement and the clear-cutting of our once-noble and life-giving canopy is a pathological sickness (you can build houses without napalming the surroundings). But at least we have Flagler Beach and Bunnell, and in Palm Coast we have City Repertory Theatre and a stand-up comedy bar which, along with a good Thai restaurant, the Brown Dog and a fairly good internet connection, are really all you need.
Maybe it’s age talking. Maybe it’s yesterday’s 10 percent barrel ale. But I can see Marianne’s pasture now. So yes, David, I like Palm Coast, and if I could crossdress without getting lynched here, I might even love it.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
Jan says
Delightful, Pierre. Thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you – for all you do.
Steve says
I liked it too when there were 35000 people. That’s History now.
Keep up the good work Mr. Tristan.
Kat says
I get this.
Skibum says
As is most likely true for most everyone, I have both good and bad things to say for every place I have ever lived. Palm Coast is not Shangri-La, but if you are going to live in Florida there are quite a few worse places to be as far as I am concerned. But man, I sure do miss the mountains and the snow out west!
Concerned says
Your honesty is admirable and refreshing.
Thank you