🎧 391: Punta Cachazuda ...

PUNTA CACHAZUDA lies on the west coast of Florida, the Gulf Coast, where the beach sand is as white and fine as confectioner’s sugar, and the sunsets make a person pause and muse. There would have been no Punta Cachazuda at all had it not been for the effect of one of those thought-provoking sunsets on Humboldt Bagnell. One evening, years before Herb and Lorna arrived, Humboldt and his wife Bitsy, nearing the end of their trailer-tour of the United States, had found themselves between towns at the hour when they were accustomed to drink a couple of Manhattans and chat, and so they decided to stop, pull off the road, have their Manhattans, and spend the evening where they were. They carried their second Manhattans to the water’s edge and watched the sun redden and slip into the Gulf.
     Humboldt found that the sunset inspired him to muse. He looked around him and mused on what was left of his future. He contemplated the prospect of living the rest of his life right where he was, and he found that he liked it. He bought a tract of land and built a modest house. Subsequently, in the evenings, when he sat on his patio and watched the sun go down, he began imagining a town around him, dreamed of wandering streets that didn’t exist, pictured himself greeting people who hadn’t even seen the place yet. He began buying more land, and he began tinkering with it, improving it, sharpening the distinction between land and water by eliminating the ambiguous marshes, filling here and dredging there, until every bit of Punta Cachazuda was a well-formed island, peninsula, or waterway. Then, house by house, Humboldt and Bitsy began building the town, extending the roads and sidewalks as they went along, all according to a plan pinned to the wall of their garage.
     The streets of Punta Cachazuda wandered through the town as if they’d been laid out whimsically, but in fact there was a purpose behind their intriguing sinuosity: they divagated to skirt boredom. The canals and creeks and artificial peninsulas and islands, the twisting streets, the bridges, and the tiny parks made Punta Cachazuda look, especially from the air, like the sort of omnium-gatherum landscape that model railroaders build from papier-mâché. Indeed, the town had the ragged edge of an unfinished work in papier-mâché: at the limit of development the road and sidewalk petered out, and the wind blew miniature dunes of sugary sand onto the lawn of the last-built house.
     Humboldt relied on word of mouth to sell his town to potential residents, and so he and Bitsy died before they saw much of it populated, but his children, who embraced his vision religiously, eventually saw Punta Cachazuda become what Humboldt and Bitsy had hoped it would be, a small town filled entirely with old people with time on their hands. The houses were similar but not identical. They were small cement-block houses, each with a tiny cement patio on its western side, where at sunset Punta Cachazudans sat and watched the maraschino sunsets. Each house also had something that most Punta Cachazudans had never heard of before they arrived there — a “Florida room,” an incursion of the outdoors into the envelope of the house. (Imagine that you were to sneak up behind a house with a conventional screened porch and yell, “Boo!” Startled, the house would draw a sudden breath and inhale its porch. Now the porch would be inside the house. It would be a Florida room.)

In Topical Guide 391, Mark Dorset considers Communities (Towns or Cities): Imagining, Planning; Paradise; Shangri-La  from this episode.

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