Wild Ducks Flying Backward Read Online Free PDF

may be right about this ol’ swamp. It’s the most romantic spot on earth.”
     
    Esquire,
1990
    Note: Water with short grass growing in it is a bog. Water with tall grass growing in it is a marsh. Water with trees growing in it is a swamp. Technically, then, the Okavango delta is much more marsh than swamp. For failing to honor that distinction back in 1990, I now voluntarily surrender my poetic license for one year.

The Eight-Story Kiss
    A t a distance—and it can be seen from bridges and causeways more than a mile away—it seems to rise out of the sea, huge and rosy, like Godzilla in a prom dress: pretty in pink. And one can be forgiven for imagining that one is gazing at the single biggest, pinkest Big Pink thing on a planet where, admittedly, not many things manage to be simultaneously massive in scale and vivid of hue. At least, not of that hue normally associated with cotton candy, Pepto-Bismol, and girlie underwear.
    I’ve never spent a night at the Don CeSar Resort Hotel in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, but I’ve been there many times. I go there to lounge in the lobby, drink in the bar, wander the grounds, and partake of a Sunday seafood buffet that, as near as I can judge, is unequaled anywhere for bounty, variety, and flavor. Mostly, however, I go there to experience the pinkness.
    There was a time when pink was the unofficial state color of Florida, a perfect chromatic complement to sunny skies, green palms, and turquoise waters. The luxurious Don CeSar, built in 1928 and periodically remodeled, is a proudly surviving relic of Old Florida, the paradisiacal, magnetic Florida that in the first half of the 20th century sweetened the dreams and warmed the fantasies of generations of snowbound Americans.
    The hotel has its counterparts in Miami, to be sure, but Miami is a
scene,
man; Miami is hip, whereas St. Pete Beach is so untrendy as to be genuinely cool. And the Don CeSar Hotel, along with what’s left of the Everglades and the House of Prayer Bar-B-Cue in Ft. Lauderdale, is one of the most compelling reasons for visiting a tragically overdeveloped state that has far too many concealed weapons, far too few sane drivers, and that by and large has left its pink period behind it.
    The Don CeSar’s bar—embedded in the dim inner recesses of this citadel of tropical nostalgia like a coffee bean in a kilo of aspic—is the sort of place that inspires the consumption of strawberry margaritas. One afternoon there, I was even moved to quaff pink ladies, the favorite libation of pink-haired ladies who coif pink poodles, a breed of beast not entirely absent from the hotel’s premises. In fact, the Don CeSar itself is kind of a pink poodle, although there’s nothing really frou-frou about the resort. It doesn’t sing out, “I’m cute,” but rather, “I’m relaxed. I’m on permanent holiday alongside the Gulf of Mexico, I’m comfortable and happy-go-lucky and festive and affluent and free to be any damn color I choose to be, and I choose to be—PINK!”
    Pink is what red looks like when it kicks off its shoes and lets its hair down. Pink is the boudoir color, the cherubic color, the color of Heaven’s gates. (Not pearly or golden, brothers and sisters:
pink
.) Pink is as laid back as beige, but while beige is dull and bland, pink is laid back with
attitude
. The Don CeSar (275 rooms and all the water sports a bipedal mammal can handle) wears that attitude well. It knows that it looks as if it were carved out of bubblegum, as if it mutated from a radioactive conch patch, as if it leaked from the vat where old flamingos go to dye—but the Don CeSar doesn’t care. It simply winks, lazily flaunts its pigmentation, and like a cartoon panther who’s peddled its last lucrative roll of home insulation, turns its face to the sun.
    Because pink, unique in the spectrum, is essentially paradoxical, the decorator’s paint of choice for Mexican brothel and New England nursery, it’s called upon to signify both