Florida Man... and Woman.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: PARTING THOUGHTS

ADMIT IT: When you are scrolling through the headlines of your favorite news website, your finger hovers, quivering, over any headline that begins: "Florida Man..." or, less frequently, "Florida Woman. ..." Like a crash on the highway or a screaming toddler at Walmart, you are compelled to look.

Florida Man arrested for animal abuse after trying to teach an alligator a lesson; Florida county issues no-trespass order against Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel as a hurricane bears down on the Gulf Coast; Florida Woman goes to ATM and discovers a bank balance of nearly $1,000,000,000 (all actual events).

We have lived in Florida for more than 30 years. We were a boy from rural, western Illinois and a girl from central New Jersey (the latter another source of endless hilarity for the media, but I digress). Florida sinks into your skin like sand in your shoes, the car, and the kitchen floor.

Florida is inconceivably large and diverse. You want urban and urbane environments, with New York and Boston accents? We've got that. We've got The Mouse and NASA, too. Horses and cattle graze on rolling hills. Goats maintain the fields under solar panels; chickens wander city streets. A flock of wild turkeys blocks traffic. Alligators walk down sidewalks and take a dip in backyard pools. An armadillo lives under your shed. The bees have gotten in under the upstairs floors again; you hear the buzzing when you're trying to sleep. A coyote walks down a suburban street in broad daylight, glancing your way with cool indifference. We have incomprehensible poverty and mansions larger than many hotels, and the kids may go to the same school. We have no less than two time zones and eight USDA agricultural zones for planting.

Then there is... Florida Man and Woman, the Everyman and Every-woman of the Sunshine State--the collective force behind all sorts of madness, such as the frustrating lack of panic when weather experts begin wringing their hands about approaching storms. Perhaps people who work in northern newsrooms are unaware that a typical summer thunderstorm in Florida easily drops three or four inches of rain in short order, floods streets so that kayaking is a front-yard sport, and brings wind gusts well over 50 mph. Threatening us with a storm that will do all of this doesn't make us do anything except sigh and bring in the lawn furniture--maybe. Sometimes people with pools just toss it all in the pool so it doesn't blow around. (Yes, Florida Men do that.)

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