North Florida was a place where two very different worlds met, with terrible results. The people who made a home there dichotomized this way, for historical and financial reasons:

The first type were those whose families were native to the place, going back generations. I am one of those first types though I was a misfit in every other way. My family had dwelled there so long (with detours to the military and such) that no one could recall any history before.

The second type of folks in my part of North Florida were people like Tia’s family — hippies or ex-hippies who moved to the area relatively recently for the extremely low land prices, the decent weather, and the proximity of a large university. Unknowingly, though, these people tossed their kids (many of whom not yet born when they migrated) into a horrific environment that was fully and completely antagonistic to any chance or hope of prospering, especially for those lower on the socioeconomic scale as the children of hippies tend to be. Tia’s family moved from Hawaii, for example.

Cheap land prices are not worth throwing your children into the meat grinder of North Florida. It’s this environment that ground down my friend Tia and so many others. Where I grew up, at that time, it was 90% redneck desolation and 10% people like she was, sensitive souls who were just traumatized and destroyed by that hellscape. That’s what I meant the other day when I said that the best of us did not make it out.

The land in North Florida is cheap, but you pay with dead and destroyed people. Not fucking worth it. Not at all.