I slept outside every night during the holidays in hurricane-ravaged Florida
It wasn't the first time. It won't be the last.
“I know this is going to sound crazy, but I’m dead serious. Can I sleep outside, underneath your house?”
I was on the phone, planning a trip to Florida for the Christmas holidays, talking to my sister-in-law Kristine, who would be opening her home to the entire family. I had a wild notion to sleep outdoors for my week-long visit. She took a deep breath and drew a long pause, which made me wonder if our phone conversation had been interrupted.
“Ummm... Okay?”
My inquiry definitely took my host by surprise. Even though the rest of the family might think I was loony to sleep outdoors, how could they say no? It was going to be a full house, with family coming from faraway places. Sleeping space was valuable. If there was no room at the inn at Christmas, who would complain if I wanted to sleep in the manger?
Almost every house in Florida has a porch, usually with an outdoor wicker couch and cushions that are hopefully not old and mildewed from the perpetually humid, salty air. While the locals might think it’s too cold, a December night in Florida isn’t all that different from a summer’s eve in Amsterdam, when I regularly live with all of my windows and the doors to my balcony flung wide open.
“Are you sure you don’t want to sleep inside?”, she continued, clearly trying to talk me out of it. “You won’t have any privacy out there.”
As it turned out, I had all the privacy I could want during the three nights I stayed in St. Petersburg underneath my sister-in-law’s house on stilts, which is located in Redington Shores, on a barrier island next to the Gulf of Mexico. There was no one to peek in on me because both houses on either side were abandoned, victims of the most recent hurricane that had swept through a few months prior, one of three major hurricanes to assault Florida in the last year. On these barrier islands of the Gulf of Mexico, if your house wasn’t on stilts, chances are it was completely flooded.
This was quickly confirmed on my first walk around the neighbourhood after building my nest of blankets on a wicker couch. At least 3/4 of the houses seemed to be either sporting For Sale signs, boarded up, or completely abandoned. There were lots of dried-out husks of single-story wooden cottages that were probably built in the 70s for very little money – a step up from a mobile home, but not a very big step. Nearly all were laid to waste, both the high and the low of Florida beachfront society. But not the highest of the high – those with the foresight to buy or build a home on stilts. My sister-in-law is smart like that. Before anybody in the family makes any kind of important decision, much less a life-altering one, everyone has the same advice: “You should ask Kristine.”
The complete losses were often missing all of their windows, waiting to be bulldozed. You can peer inside at the remains of abandoned tables, chairs, appliances – whatever hasn’t already been salvaged or plundered. Nobody’s going to tell you not to. There’s nobody out here except for a few lonely elderly ladies walking their dogs. It’s a ghost town.
On this first of my many walks, I became familiar with one particular bombed-out single-story yellow shack nearly stripped to the bone, protective siding removed, with only a few window frames remaining. Somewhere inside, a dying smoke alarm emitted a sharp electronic chirp every minute, a reminder that it’s time to check the batteries. It was still chirping on the day that I left.
Stilt life with refrigerator
After my walk, I investigated my open-air bedroom for the next few nights. I had an entire outdoor living area with multiple couches to choose from. Everything else in the neighbourhood was wrecked, but my sister-in-law and her boyfriend, a detective and vice-mayor of a neighbouring town, must have worked tirelessly to rebuild after the most recent hurricane. Everything under the house was neat and clean. Americans have a lot of stuff, so if I happened to need anything, they probably had it, including a full-sized refrigerator. I opened it up and spotted a six pack of Rolling Rock tall boys. My favourite. They know me.
I’ve seen plenty of outdoor refrigerators in my life, but after many years of living in Europe, this is one thing I can’t get over. How American it suddenly seemed to have an extra refrigerator that lives outdoors that might even be taller than you. In Amsterdam, my fridge doesn’t even come up to my chest.
Behind the house I found a dock with a boat. I climbed over the low fence of the nearest backyard to investigate the details of the disaster next door. The neighbour’s waterside wooden deck was so broken, warped, and splintered that I was afraid I might fall through. I quickly turned back. All along the coast of these barrier islands, you can see the results of the force of water during the hurricane, particularly underneath wooden decks that were built to the edge of the concrete barriers. The wood has been pushed up from underneath with massive force, leaving a splintered, broken wasteland of debris, as if hand grenades had exploded underwater.
Since I left America, I’ve cycled in every single city that I’ve visited, and I was eager to explore the abandoned architecture of Redington Shores. I was surprised to see my sister-in-law’s bicycle parked and waiting for me behind a couch. They even pumped up the tires. Almost six years ago, I spent my last summer before moving to Amsterdam on this same bike, wandering around every corner of Portland for one last time before decamping to Europe. When Kristine migrated back home to Florida from Oregon, she shipped the bike, too. It probably hasn’t been ridden since, but it’s a solid, simple omafiets that would fit right in here in the Netherlands. It even has basket, a light, and a bell.
Een heel vrolijk kerstfeest
The festivities in St. Petersburg started as soon as I arrived and never stopped. This family on my son’s side has many traditions, including unveiling a new set of flashy pajamas every year for every attendee. The atmosphere is one of a days-long sleepover, with movies playing in the background, snacks galore, and lots of little presents and surprises to keep things jovial.
At these events, I go hard on cooking and cleaning because those are my strengths. For Christmas Eve dinner, I was enlisted to cook three giant steaks, London broil style. This is not an easy task when provided with a half-remembered recipe and an unfamiliar oven, but it came out great thanks to help from my son and nephew, who toiled and bickered with me all throughout dinner service. On Christmas Day, I received gift after gift, including some extremely luscious pens. My son smartly gave me a large collection of thick socks of a deeply saturated hue. Everybody knows I put a premium on premium socks.
When my son opened up his present from me, he was surprised to discover a new blue iPad, with an engraving in Dutch on the back: Mijn geliefde zoon. “My beloved son”. I treated myself to a new pink iPad as well, opening it up as a gift (from me to me) just so my son could see that I bought us both the same iPad. How could I resist a new one, especially considering my current iPad was nearly a decade old and fading fast. Besides, in the land of America, you can get two-day shipping with engraving included from Apple, so I didn’t even have to bring it on the plane. It’s also cheaper than paying the VAT in Europe.
I took advantage of all of this American convenience by choosing an engraving for my iPad, a favourite Dutch saying of mine and all-around personal motto when I need to psych myself up for a ride on a cold, dark, windy, rainy night: Ik ben niet van suiker gemaakt. I’m not made of sugar.
The folly of climate control
The benefits of sleeping outside are manifold.
First and foremost, you can pee outside in the middle of the night. This is very handy when you’ve drunk too many Rolling Rocks and don’t want to wake everyone up on your journey through a dark, unknown house for the third time in one night. Just shuffle over to the edge of the Gulf of Mexico and take a leak while looking up, up, up at the stars. On one trip to the waterside, I saw a shooting star. It’s a wonder I didn’t fall in.
Further, when you sleep outside, the air is almost always better than inside your home. We are creatures of nature, but sadly most of us in the modern world have voluntarily partitioned ourselves away from nature. It wasn’t this way when I was a child, and it’s getting worse. The practice of shutting yourself off from the outside world is speeding up, particularly in America, the land of air conditioning and climate control. To Americans, open windows are an invitation to bugs and noise, but to me closed up spaces with no fresh air feels like an invitation to a stuffed-up nose. I open the windows and doors to my apartment and blow the entire place out at least once per day, regardless of how cold it is outside. This is very normal in the Netherlands, even more so in Germany.
When I lived in the US, I only rarely had air conditioning, even when I lived in more extreme climates. When I was a youngling at university in Athens, Georgia, my roommates and I slept in an old, run-down, shotgun shack on the wrong side of the tracks. I endured long, hot, humid summer nights with a fan pointed directly at my bed. But I felt in tune with the season. It felt more natural than air conditioning, although at the time I also couldn’t actually afford a window air conditioning unit, much less the electricity to power one. Somehow, back then I convinced myself that living with the windows open was the right way to live, and that’s been my approach ever since. Then again, right after university, I moved as far away from Georgia as I could. One of the many reasons I left was that it was just too damn hot.
Since then, my belief in the importance of fresh air has only intensified. I’ve slept with a fan going in my bedroom for the last few decades, even in the winter, with at least one door or window cracked. I don’t begrudge Americans their air conditioning because I know how good it can feel on the worst days, but (like Bartleby the Scrivener) I would prefer not to.
Tender isn’t always the night
The downside to sleeping outside is uncertainty about noise, though it rarely comes from nature. It’s almost always noise from automobiles, even when you’re camping far out in nature. There’s nothing more depressing than bedding down inside your tent and realising that you somehow chose a campsite that’s less than a dozen miles away from a freeway, perhaps one with a long straightaway where Harley Davidson dickheads like to put the pedal to the metal in the middle of the night. This is why you bring earplugs, which I always do. I bring extras whenever I travel, in the hope that I can hand them out to other travellers and make their experience a little more bearable. A Johnny Appleseed of sleep.
The Tampa Bay area has a dizzying array of freeways, causeways, and bridges, so even though I was staying on a thin strip of barrier islands, I did hear a few annoying down-shifting semi-trucks and motorcycles on the first night. But not on Christmas Eve or Christmas night. On those nights, all I heard was the wind blowing through the palm trees and the chirping of crickets, even in December. That’s better than a fan pointed at your bed.
I’m not here to advocate for sleeping outside (even though you don’t have to) as some kind of life hack that will help you sleep better or more deeply because of the moon or the tides or natural rhythms or what have you. In fact, you might not sleep well, at first. But I can promise you that it will get you more in tune with nature, which I think is worth at least two weeks of everyone’s year, if not more.
What I like most about sleeping outside is that I feel completely fine about resting quietly after waking instead of feeling pressure to jump up and seize the day. You don’t have to rush to get ready and go out. You’re already out. Why not assess the weather for awhile and think about what you want to accomplish on this day? Pay attention to the birds. They’ll tell you what you should do next.
Stretching on the dock of the bay
One morning, after a pleasantly chilly night, I was awakened by a warm breeze. I sat up and looked out past the dock to see a flock of white gulls flying low on the water. I decided to do some yoga.
After my initial standing stretches, a strange black bird with a long curved beak swooped in and landed at the end of the dock, about 15 meters in front of me. He cocked his head and looked up. I’ve learned that some birds don’t like it when you look at them, but he stuck around for a long time, holding my gaze even when I changed poses.
I shuffled through the poses, struggling to find my way into standing bow-pulling pose – the really tough one where you have to balance your entire body on the ball of one foot, grab your back leg with one hand and reach forward with your other hand, Heil Hitler-ing into infinity.
Just then, I caught a glimpse of an old, mangy-looking brown pelican to my left, gliding slowly and bumpily along the coastline, presumably on the lookout for something tasty to eat. He looked me dead in the eye and adjusted one wing to veer in my direction. What was he thinking of my strange pose as he flew 20 meters above me, still staring at me with a beady black eye from the end of his long, prehistoric, baggy beak? He didn’t shit on me, so I like to think he approved.
After yoga, I found a pair of binoculars and scanned the horizon to see what I could see. I wasn’t disappointed. I peeked in on passing boats, especially the clearly expensive, extremely masculine police boats. It was on these boats that I saw men with binoculars staring straight back at me. Across the water in the distance I spied the edge of a giant wetland and a small solitary island. To my amazement, a dolphin splashed up and back down in the water, circling the island.
Old friends are the best family
After St. Petersburg, I spent my remaining three nights in nearby Tampa sleeping on a wicker couch on the back porch of the house of my good friend Charles, a tall, friendly southern gentleman with big teeth, a wide smile, and long white hair. He plays banjo and dresses up as Colonel Sanders for Halloween. We both grew up in Georgia and worked together while attending college, throwing pizzas in Athens at Depalma’s Italian Cafe. We were also roommates in San Francisco for awhile. I hadn’t seen him or his wife Bliss, a dance professor at a local college, or their two kids, Charlie and Maisie, in almost nine years.
I’m sometimes embarrassed to reveal that I own five bicycles. All but one of my bikes live outside year-round, and I barely lock them up because they’re hardly worth stealing. Charles is much worse. He owns nine bicycles, although in fairness they are used by his entire family. But nine??
I was pleased to see that I had my pick of bicycles, although nearly all of them turned out to be mountain bikes, none of which seemed to have a basket, a light, or a bell. This is the exact opposite of what you’ll find in the Netherlands, where lights and bells are mandatory, but fancy bicycles and helmets are not – unless you’re one of the small minority of sportfietsers, sport cyclists. My hosts, like all Americans, encouraged me to wear a helmet, but of course, I didn’t. I’ve fully adopted the Dutch position with regard to helmets. I would prefer not to. Ik ben niet van suiker gemaakt.
Americans know how dangerous their roads are for cyclists, so they understandably insist on helmets, but it saddens me that most of them will never experience the feeling of confidence and safety that comes from riding on protected cycling paths that can take you nearly everywhere you want to go. You will undoubtedly be surprised to learn that the Netherlands has the lowest cycling death rate in the world, but they also wear helmets less than anyone else in the world, with only 0.5% of cyclists choosing to wear a helmet. They don’t need helmets because they’ve done the hard work of building dedicated infrastructure and slowing down cars.
While I know that it’s safer to wear a helmet in a state like Florida, which has seven of the top ten deadliest cities for cycling in the US, I still can’t bring myself to wear a helmet unless I’m mountain biking. I wore one sometimes when I lived in the US, and I did bring mine to Europe, but I eventually got rid of it, dropping it off at my favourite kringloopwinkel so someone else could get some use out of it. (I cleaned it first.)
Op de fietspad in Tampa
That said, I’m not a total fool. While visiting Tampa, I took the liberty of riding on sidewalks whenever I didn’t feel safe. This is the true answer to the problem of cities that refuse to install bike lanes. If your city only cares about cars, it’s safer for you to ride on the sidewalk in dangerous areas, albeit as politely and conscientiously as possible if there are pedestrians. In Florida, there really aren’t any pedestrians because everyone drives everywhere. Isn’t that what you would tell your kid to do – to ride on the sidewalk if you don’t feel safe? Why should it be any different for adults? Do it in protest, if necessary.
If you ever visit a new city and have the opportunity to ride around, the best way to begin is to find whatever river runs through the city and follow it, which is exactly what we did, stopping to drink a cold pilsner in the hot sun at a riverside plaza.
At one point on our ride, we stopped at a large, very car-centric, five-way intersection to wait for the light to change. This kind of large intersection, with wide lanes and very few street markings that might encourage cars to slow down, really encourages autos to take turns very quickly. Combine that with the ability to turn right on red, which is not allowed anywhere in Europe, and it’s a deathtrap, particularly for pedestrians. But I was gobsmacked to look down and see white shark’s teeth painted on the pavement, pointing directly at me. You’ll see these yield lines everywhere in the Netherlands, and in some places around Europe, but I’ve never seen a single one in the US.
My puzzlement turned to amazement when the light changed and we crossed over the intersection and entered a 100% Dutch two-way bicycle lane. It even had a raised cement car barrier inlaid with brick. The path only lasted for a few blocks, at which point we were dumped right back onto the regular road with cars, but it was great while it lasted. Somebody somehow convinced a Florida government official to install a proper Dutch bike lane, complete with shark’s teeth. Goed zo Tampa! It’s a start, I guess.
Remembrance of sleeps past
Those nights outdoors in Florida weren’t the only times I slept outside in the past year. In the middle of last summer, I visited another former roommate of mine, Alissa, in Milwaukee. She and her husband Mike have an apartment downtown. We went on some lovely rides. Milwaukee is actually a good place to cycle!
I bedded down on the couch in their living room on the first night, but on the second night, I woke up and spied a reclinable chair out on the balcony. I decided to give it a whirl. It’s hot out there in the middle of summer, and maybe the air isn’t quite as clean as indoors, but if you have some noise-cancelling headphones and a sleep mask, you can absolutely sleep outside on a balcony in a metropolitan city for a few nights.
After Milwaukee, I flew to Seattle and then hopped on a small prop plane bound for Orcas Island to attend a family reunion. I had the most pure and luxurious outdoor sleep experience of the year on that trip. My cousin-in-law Noddy, a Kiwi, has a house on a partially forested hill that overlooks the waters of the San Juan Islands. He has plenty of porch space and a big plot of land with a smartly built garden, two goats, a pottery studio, and a seriously bitchin’ fire pit. Everyone calls this homestead Nod’s End. There’s even a mobile pizza oven, which his two sons built by hand and which I sometimes labor in front of at family reunions, seeing as how I used to throw pizzas way back when in Athens. These family reunions are epic. We catch and eat crab every day.
Noddy is, like most of my West Coast family, a bit of a super athlete. He climbs mountains in the most remote places on the planet and cycles ridiculously long distances. I assume he has kayaked to the nearby Canadian islands just for fun. He’s also an unbelievably talented craftsman who has built numerous sleeping structures around pockets of his land, which also has a pond with a zipline and a (handmade!) wooden sauna sitting dockside. You could host a family destination wedding here, which is exactly what Noddy plans to do for one of his sons, who will be married here next year. What a dad. What a guy. What a family.
Cycling on hilly Orcas Island actually isn’t that great, but I still do it every time I visit. There are no cycling lanes whatsoever, so you’re at the mercy of cars and trucks, and there are too many private roads to impede exploration. But the views are spectacular, particularly from the top of Mount Constitution, a mountain surrounded by a forest on an island. These San Juan Islands are unique, one of the few places in America where I would live, even without any cycling lanes.
If I lived on this island, I would probably want to sleep outside even more. You won’t find any fresher air. The wind rustles through the trees, delivering crisp, cool, Pacific breezes, even on a midsummer night. There’s no light pollution, so you can see the full, breathtaking spectrum of the stars.
No cars. No trucks. No sound except the wind rustling through the trees.
Even the goats are asleep.
Every few hours, you might hear a man (who drank too many Rolling Rocks) yawning loudly, stumbling and shuffling through the moonlight, out to where the woods begin, tinkling on a tree.
Furthermore
I made it back home from Florida to Amsterdam, where it is not as easy to sleep outside on my balcony that overlooks a community garden, especially when it snows, which it did after I arrived.
I returned earlier than I would have liked because I had to attend my appointment with the gemeente to begin the process of naturalisation as a Dutch citizen. I waited four months for the appointment, so there was no missing it. I’m now on the official path towards becoming een echt Nederlander. It could take up to a year. After that, I got terribly sick for an entire week, which I expected after travelling but did not enjoy. (It was worth it.) It gave me plenty of time to make a playlist for another one of the good friends I used to work with – another guy I used to throw pizza pies with in Athens, Georgia – thirty years ago: my buddy Demian. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and two kids, and he’s “Still the coolest guy I know.” (Apple | Spotify) It’s in heavy rotation on my bike rides as I build myself back up after illness.
I’ve noticed there are far fewer bugs in the Netherlands, but I’m amazed you could sleep in Florida without the mosquitoes eating you alive!