The Man Who Invented Florida
Authors: Randy Wayne WhiteNarrator: Dick Hill
Duration: 12h 32m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Tags: adventure - detective
Another great narration by Dick Hill.
Like Atlas Shrugged, I was not really sure up until first few hours what is going on and where are they going with this book.
I’ve started my Doc Ford acquaintance from a third book, probably there was some context which would help me with the book.
Great personalities and performances. Interesting plot twists.
Compared to first two books it has different pacing and style of narration, I would say it’s more comedy than detective or adventure, more description of personalities than events.
It feels like a evolution of writing for Mr. White, with parallel storytelling and main acting person is not Doc Ford here but his uncle.
Quotes:
Newspapers were great blotters of idle time, an effective antidote to introspection.
Not that Marion hung out with those shitheel politicians, but at least he was a scientist—or so Tucker had heard—and them dim bulbs who always got themselves elected might pay attention to a scientist. Give him a little time, at least. Which was something they wouldn’t do for an old person who had no money to speak of. When politicians looked at old people, all they saw was saggy skin wrapped around a voting finger.
Not a single accomplishment. He’d spent his entire life casting around like a pointer dog in search of anything that smelled even faintly of adventure. And what had it gotten him? Broad shoulders and bowed legs. Scars. Open real estate where his front teeth should have been. The stub of a right ear—the rest of which had been bitten off by a Nicaraguan lady in a moment of high spirit. A case of jungle epidermosis that lighted gasoline might cure, but nothing else would.
Mostly, the two men drifted apart. All friendships begin on a chance first meeting and usually end on an equally unexpected last encounter. Friendship is more closely related to alchemy than to chemistry, so it is always a little bit of a surprise that the laws of mortality still apply.
What’s happened is, you’ve created a fictional personality for a woman. You want to meet that woman because you hope she might be just a little bit like you want her to be. But you’re afraid, too, because she may be a disappointment, plus you might make an ass of yourself, going out there uninvited.
He learned that most people, no matter what color, stopped fighting long before their last heartbeat. Finally, he came to understand that the land called Florida would be inherited by those who cared least about it: the concrete merchants and tourists and out-of-state rich people. His loss of faith had long been an emptiness in him, but Joseph was also well grounded in the vagaries of existence: Life was scary enough to make a sled dog shiver, and a man had to get along as best he could.
In the parking lot, she let her eyes linger on her new car, finding that some of the delight in it had already faded. She’d had it only two weeks, and the payments were going to be a strain. A Japanese car, at that—they were notorious racists—but it was such a beautiful car, machined like a fine watch, sleek and solid, and she’d fallen in love with the damn thing. She trailed a long brown finger over the fender, noting the patina of dust. From now on, maybe she’d drive one of the pool cars. Save washings, and this salt air couldn’t be good for the finish.
His first night in the pit, he’d broken down so totally that his hysteria had become contagious, a kind of emotional electrical current that had zapped them both and pushed them close to panic.
As the fishing guides often said, they lived on repeat business and partied on walk-ins. The biological supply business wasn’t much different.
And Tomlinson had changed. Gotten fatherly, which wasn’t so surprising, since he had fathered a child. Tomlinson and a woman from his commune days, Dr. Musashi Rinmon. They had had a daughter, and Tomlinson was spending a lot of time in the air, flying back and forth to Boston to see his little girl. Now Tomlinson, who for years hadn’t driven anything faster than a sailboat or more traffic-worthy then a beach bike, seemed to havfe embraced a faster world. He borrowed Ford’s truck—a lot. He was always running errands, going places. He had even bought a pair of slacks. Slacks.
Into Ford’s mind popped a memory of sitting in the Triton Hotel, downtown Havana, watching a rerun of the old television series “Flipper” dubbed in Spanish but with Russian subtitles. That’s what the noise the dolphin was making sounded like: Flipper trying to warn Bud and Sandy about something. But along with the squeals and squeaks, there was a sound Ford had never heard a dolphin make before, a moist whoop-whoop-whoop.
All those stars, the moon. The lens can’t handle it. Maybe our eyes can’t, either. It takes our minds to amplify the light and give it depth of field. It’s the only thing—the only reality?—that has to be interpreted. No . . . there are probably others. . . .”
She was beginning to look different, too. Not her body, but her face. It was a curious phenomenon Ford had noticed before in his life. See a friend unexpectedly in a crowd and, in the seconds before recognition, the friend’s features would be as foreign as those of a stranger. The friend would appear older, taller, fatter, skinnier, younger, smaller, larger, always less important. But then recognition would modify the features, factor in personality, and the physical form would be transformed in the mind’s eye. The mind amplified the retinal impression and made additions. Like Sally had said: It saw things the camera did not.
This tragic knowledge might have driven lesser men into deadly or debilitating extremes: strong drink, religious fanaticism, depraved excesses. But fortunately for Ervin, his early lifestyle had hardened him. He had always liked strong drink, and his early years with the flimflam preacher left him cold on organized religion. There were no interesting alternatives left, so he contented himself with living alone in the Glades, hunting and fishing, and sometimes flying around stone lonely in his wife’s beat-up old plane.
I’m saying that now I see clearly enough to know that the world does not tolerate clarity. That, in those days, maybe we had a lot more anger in us than understanding. Simple answers require the simplicity of youth. We despised complexities—don’t you remember? So we took all the hated unknowns and cloaked them with our certainty.
If he no longer had the power to still his own thoughts, perhaps he could divert them.
The chance to build something: to take form, color, and space, then transform it into something big and modern and solid. It’s what she had always wanted to do. Well, to play a part in it. To put a little piece of herself into something that would last. Plus, there was the money. More money in a few months than she had made in the last two years.
All these knee-jerk environmentalists with their impassioned pleas to save the earth, going on and on while they struck the noble pose of martyrs. They were all of a type. But they were useful, always just a phone call away. He had sat with them and their kindred through hundreds of similar meetings (though always indoors), so he knew the precise tilt of head, the exact squint of eye required to project the impression of rapt attention. Which allowed him to ruminate about his boss, how hard it was to impress her.