American Pie: The Ten Thousand Folks Next Door
Each time John Merchant and his wife moved house they checked out a priority list of features they wanted to find in the new area in which they might live. These included an airport within reasonable driving distance that had flights that actually went to somewhere they might wish to go, good medical facilities, an active and robust cultural enviroment, the proximity of a large body of water and, perhaps most importantly, a significant university.
But even in an area which seems to tick all the boxes there are warts, as John reveals.
Each time my wife and I have moved house, we have referred to a priority list of features that we wanted to have in the new area we were moving to. The list came into being because we spent the first years of our married life in a place so devoid of the basics of what we consider to be life-enriching characteristics that we vowed never to repeat the mistake.
Included in our list is an airport within reasonable driving distance that has flights that actually go to somewhere we might want to travel. The local joke about the airport in the town where we first lived was that you could fly anywhere in the world from there as long as you first flew to Philadelphia. Some of our other requirements include good medical facilities, an active and robust cultural environment, the proximity of a large body of water, and perhaps most importantly, a significant university.
Our rationale for desiring the latter is that we figure a large population of educated people will favorably impact the community in ways both intellectual and material. In other words, there will be bookstores, a good library, lecture offerings from both faculty and invited speakers, a social milieu that isn’t overwhelmingly right wing, and a supermarket that has actually heard of some of the things we like to eat, and hopefully has them on their shelves.
In our first move, we hit quite a few of the items on the list. The house we purchased was located on the Hudson River, and Long Island Sound was forty-five minutes drive away. Check off “large body of water.” There were several major educational institutions in the area – Marist, Vassar and the American Culinary Institute among them. Unfortunately, three of the best were over the other side of the river, so the fall-out on our side was diluted quite a bit.
The medical facilities fell somewhat short, as did the cultural life, but what the heck, New York City was but a two-hour train ride, or an hour-and-a-half drive away, so it wasn’t as though we were living on the moon. The travel prospects initially looked about as good as we could hope for. The airport was an easy, twenty-minute drive, with economical parking just walking distance from the terminal building, and offered flights to major cities.
There were plans to develop the airport into New York City’s fourth international hub, but over the time we lived in the area those plans fizzled, and some airlines pulled out for reasons known only to themselves. Overall though, we felt that we had remedied some of the important deficiencies we had experienced in our previous location, and promised ourselves to do better next time. It was important to get it right the next time because it was likely, and hopefully, going to be where we spend our last years.
So, now we are in our ultimate home, how did we do? Well, not too badly. We have an international airport fifteen minutes drive up the road; just far enough away that we can’t hear the planes. Flights include many destinations in the USA and Europe; not that we’ll be going there while the dollar is close to worthless against the Pound and the Euro.
We have an excellent library equidistant from the airport, a supermarket with more than just standard fare, a live theater, two symphony orchestras to choose from and some pretty good restaurants. And what of the seats of learning? There are two in the area, and the largest one, Florida Gulf State is literally next door! If we climbed over the wall that surrounds the development we live in we would land right on the campus.
Sounds great doesn’t it? Well mostly it is, but like any beautiful thing it has its warts. Unlike many universities, the campus is all in one place, not scattered all over town. At its founding in 1991, it was endowed with 760 acres, donated by several local land developers, so there’s plenty of room to expand. This concentration means that the majority of the students and faculty are also located in one place. According to the University’s web page, there are 9000 students and 900 faculty and staff.
If you add to that total, maintenance people, campus police and any number of construction workers at one time, it comes out to 10,000 or more folks. This is equivalent to a good-sized factory. Fortunately for us they don’t all arrive at eight in the morning and leave at five, but a significant number do, clogging the one highway serving the locality. On the occasions when the university has hosted a notable speaker, as in the case of Mikhail Gorbachev, the fifteen minute drive from the airport to our house can take almost two hours!
Also tempering the pleasure of being cheek-by-jowl with a fount of knowledge is the fact that the majority of the students are young. Yes, we knew that, but we had overlooked the fact that lots of young people have an inventory of antisocial behavior that is best isolated from the rest of us. They like to modify cars so they can be driven very fast and very LOUD. This being Florida, they also like to drive Yamaha and Kawasaki motorcycles with exhaust noises that would give any banshee an inferiority complex.
Students also like to collect trophies to embellish their dorm room décor, so, short of breaking and entering, anything that isn’t bolted in place is likely to be appropriated in the name of “found art.” The up-side is that those students who are working their way through college provide a plentiful supply of waiters and waitresses, store clerks and bar tenders. Overall though, I think a Chinese proverb best describes our situation vis-à-vis our neighbor, “Be careful what you wish for.”
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