Ah, a relative blessed quiet has descended on Skinny Island in our brief absence; the motorcycles are gone, poof, vanished, but coming back into the town and crossing the bridge the automobile traffic was like a holiday weekend, not a Monday.  The beach parking lots are full.  We have just one more smallish invasion to endure, the Spring Breakers, but when they go, and with them the last of the Snow Birds, we’ll have the place to ourselves through the best time– the heat none of them can endure– until October, when another highly marketed event occurs, Biketoberfest.

To be honest though, we don’t get many spring breakers up this way on the island, and the ones we do see are usually attempting to escape some of the madness farther south.  But even Daytona isn’t the drunken destination it long was, partly due to the fickle nature of what’s currently the hot place, and partly because of a kind of cultural schizophrenia with which Daytona is afflicted.  They just can’t seem to clearly decide what tribe they want down there, the Breakers, the Bikers, the NASCAR types, the young families.  There is, certainly, a more or less designated time of year set aside for each– we’re coming into Family Time after the Breakers clear– but not all businesses (and it’s all about business) can successfully cater across the board, leading to a lot of infighting and name-calling as each group pushes for dominance.  The result is a lot of empty hotel rooms and decaying businesses, a funky, blighted beach side, appealing most consistently to folks on the lam.  We can’t accurately quote statistics, but it seems to us that, if they aren’t actually pinched here, more bad apples pass through here than anywhere else in the country.  A dubious distinction.

I guess I reserve the most ambivalence for the Snow Bird tribe, being in most ways the least offensive, yet perpetrating an air of superiority, kind of like a benign occupation force. This is essentially their playground, a rented paradise in which to wait out the spring thaw up north, but they in no way view themselves as visitors.  They exude dominance on the roads and in the grocery stores, holding to the view that, while this might be a nice place to hang for a few months, it in no way can compare to New York or Montreal.  They have better water, better stores, better roads, better infrastructure, whatever that is, and certainly better food.  You can’t get a good pizza here, you know.  I had one tell me once that if it weren’t for them coming to Florida we’d all still be living in houses with dirt floors. Whatever, I can think of worse things than dirt floors.  Still, with the proper distance, they are amusing.  It’s like watching a group of puffed-up wintering birds, taking over for a time, pooping on the beach, as it were, then flying back north.  And I just love watching old guys driving shirtless in big Cadillacs in the dead of winter.  Please don’t do that.

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