Home on the Cape

I live in Cape Coral, and sometimes that takes a certain amount of explanation.

People who don't live here tend to sneer and call it Cape Corral. They say it is a suburb in search of a town, managed by anal-retentive retirees from the Midwest who have nothing better to do than make up ridiculous and annoying regulations about the length of your grass and what you can do with your yard-your own yard!-and that you have to be some kind of marching sheep to live there.

They say there must be something wrong with any place that has a full-time security team to make sure you don't leave a boat trailer in your driveway or leave empty flowerpots in the front yard.

And they are right.

But of course, there is more to it than that. There is always more to it than even the most compelling simplifications have to offer. Because Cape Coral is also a pretty good place to live the way I want to live, the way I grew up living, the way I want to pass down to my children.

I grew up in Miami when it was a sleepy Southern town that was just coincidentally on the shores of the Caribbean. But the Southern part was predominant. People who lived there called it "my-EM-uh" back then, said "Yes, ma'am" and got grits with their breakfast. The trickle of snowbirds from up North had not yet become the cataclysmic flood it is today.

Arthur Godfrey was just a memory, but we had Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra came down a lot.

We had a unique lifestyle that was part Deep South and part Caribbean, with just a dash of New York glitz thrown in. We rarely locked the front door. And for me, the greatest joy of all was to walk outside and be on the water. You could catch a fish for dinner no more than 10 steps away from the door. Or you could step onto a boat and explore the nearby islands, where we would camp out and snorkel and catch rock lobsters to cook in tin foil on the campfire, and then lay back and watch the stars.

I married a woman from Miami, too. And although we moved to Los Angeles, when our first child was born we began to look around us and wonder if this was what we wanted for our daughter. When you have grown up with the clean taste of salt on your lips, the acid brown haze of L.A. is a hard bargain. And when we looked down at the little pink face of our child and saw her eyes water from the smog, we decided we wanted her to grow up the way we did-barefoot, free to roam, half in the water and half on it. I wanted my kids to grow up with a tan and a thick layer of callus on their feet. I wanted them to know how to run a boat, any boat, and throw a cast net and camp out under the stars on an island where you build a driftwood fire to cook a fish you have caught yourself.

But the Miami of our childhood was gone. The city had changed into a self-conscious parody of a Miami Vice set. The middle-class house I grew up in was on the market for just over a million dollars, but you couldn't fish from the back yard anymore because the house had a 12-foot-high fence around it topped with razor wire and motion detectors.

The little islands dotting Biscayne Bay where I used to camp out and fish and snorkel were covered with condos or, in one case, festooned with a goat's-head altar. And if you were foolish enough to take a small sailboat out onto Biscayne Bay on a weekend, you were swarmed and swamped by dozens of huge, high-speed motorboats, apparently intent on sinking you and chopping up the pieces.

So we searched, my wife and I, for a place like the one we used to know, a place where you could still take a small boat out on a weekend and not fear for your life, a place, damn it, where you could still catch fish in the back yard.

And oddly enough, we found that place here in Cape Coral.

Other places nearby were more wild and free, but at the time we were taking care of my wife's mother. We needed to be close to doctors, hospitals and shopping. Cape Coral fit the bill-and those other wild places are still nearby. And even though my mother-in-law is no longer with us, we have grown roots here.

It is true that the water is the wrong color. Instead of the clear, green-tinged water of Biscayne Bay in the late 1960s, our water is brown and not transparent. But the fish are plentiful, and they are still right here in my back yard, in the canal that runs behind nearly every house in the Cape.

It is also true that Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra have never been here, as far as I know, and that faint tang of New York pastrami we had in old Miami is replaced by the scent of biscuits and gravy and other Midwestern provisions.

And it is true, too, that nowadays I do lock the front door, something that would have seemed ridiculous in old Miami.

But that precaution has more to do with our time than this place. Here in Cape Coral I can tell the kids to go outside and play and not worry that they will be killed or eaten. My biggest worry is that one of the many nice old ladies on the street will give them too many cookies. The kids take their boat up and down the Caloosahatchee River and remind me that hatchee is the Calusa name for river, so it actually means, "Caloosa River River."

We go fishing and we camp out on the nearby islands, and when we come home we can park the boat 10 steps from the back door.

Of course, nothing is perfect. Cape Coral is run by developers and retired people from up North and the Midwest. They don't seem to understand that what makes Florida wonderful is limited and running out, and that they are killing what is left for a few quick bucks. They will be able to pass on money to their children, perhaps, but all the money in the world will not bring back the Florida they killed to get it.

Property prices have gone through the roof recently, too. We couldn't afford to live in our house if we were buying it today. And there are too many ridiculous rules here. A few years back, for example, we spent a week building a play fort for our kids. Somebody complained to the city-anonymously of course-and Code Enforcement made us take it down. I wish I could have locked that rat into a room with my kids for half an hour.

But this is my home; all the petty bureaucratic regimentation in the world can't take away what I have here, and I wouldn't trade it for South Beach. I like to finish writing for the day and take a can of beer out onto the dock and not worry about finding a shirt first. I like to see the manatees and porpoises that sometimes go by the dock, and look at Oliver, the big snook that lives around the pilings. I like to think that no matter how good he might taste, we will never catch him. He belongs there. And I belong here now, too.

Life is compromise. I will never again find 1968, but I found the weather and the water I remember, and the unbearable beauty of sunrise and sunset. I found the same birds and snakes and fish and 'gators, and the way the clouds scud over your head, seeming like they're cleaner than in other places and close enough to touch and moving faster than they do anywhere else.

One summer morning a few years ago, I sat with a friend on a screen porch on nearby Pine Island and watched the daily thunderstorm move across the bay straight at us. As it got closer, the unmistakable smell of rain mixed with ozone rose up around us, and suddenly lightning exploded on the water right in front of the porch. We watched as one, two, three great bolts hit nearby before the first huge shattering blast of thunder. And then the massive wall of rain swept over us and hammered the tin roof of the porch so hard and loud that conversation was impossible, but we grinned at each other like schoolboys at a peep show. A few minutes later, just as suddenly, the storm was gone, an improbable shaft of sunlight hit the water and the world was new again.

That part of Florida is timeless, and I have it again, right here in Cape Coral.

Jeff Lindsay's latest novel is Dearly Devoted Dexter (St. Martin's Press).