Stranded in the Everglades

In case you were wondering, the Florida Everglades a terrible place to find yourself stranded. 

That notion might seem obvious, but I had to learn it the hard way. Here's what happened:

When I was in college, my dad, who you might remember from the story of time he put catfish in our swimming pool in a failed attempt to save money on chlorine, invested a small fortune in a multi-level marketing scheme, selling vitamins.

My dad is the most natural and brilliant salesman I've witnessed, but in the vitamin endeavor, he found a pill larger than he could swallow.  Suffice to say that when you are a type-2 diabetic without a large social network living in a rural area of the South, selling expensive vitamin products, or the idea of joining in a sales network to do the same, isn't exactly a license to print money.

Having exhausted his contacts in the Mobile area without coming close to breaking even from his initial buy-in (and with a giant pile of unsold vitamins in his office), my dad decided to take his show on the road. He picked a health and fitness expo in Miami, and being a bored college kid on summer break, I asked to go with him, if only for the free trip to South Beach.

Little did I know what I had signed myself up for.  The trip was a complete disaster, and by that description, I'm underselling it by half.

The expo was filled with multi-million dollar companies selling the latest and greatest through the best tanned, professional salespeople that South Beach had to offer. Against that backdrop, you might imagine what kind of success awaited an untrained, skinny 19-year-old college kid and his 56-year-old diabetic dad selling vitamins out of a box.

But it was even worse than that.

In addition to selling almost nothing, much our liquid vitamin supply was stolen out of our bin overnight, which to be fair, might have been the only way we would have ever gotten rid of those bottles anyway. 

We signed up a grand total of 3 people for our multi-level network, and none of them made any sales to carry on the chain. Factoring in the costs for hotel, gas, food, the hourly wage my dad paid me for helping, and the repair bills (more on that in a second), he made an 22-hour roundtrip drive and worked 24 hours for the privilege of losing a couple thousand dollars.

But that wasn't the worst thing that happened.  The worst, was when our car broke down in the Everglades on the way home to Alabama.

About midway through the stretch of I-75 aptly known as "Alligator Alley," our minivan lost power.  It was low on gas, but not terribly so, so that wasn't the problem.  But the van wouldn't restart, and just as importantly, the air conditioning wouldn't blow and we were trapped in oppressive South Florida summer heat.

I started walking toward the emergency call box down the road, thankful at every step of the way for the short, wire fence separating me from the visible alligators lingering lazily on the other side.

After spotting my second alligator, I decided that walking was not my most sensible mode of transportation.  I started sprinting, reasoning that I could recover from whatever heat stroke might befall me, but there would be no recovery should that fence prove as insubstantial as it appeared.

When I breathlessly hit the button at the call box, the operator told me they could have someone there in about an hour. 

And then I had to get back to our car.

I ran the mile back to our stranded van, only to notice that I had stepped in a bed of fire ants somewhere along the way.  I frantically shed my socks and shoes, but not before my legs had been turned into a crimson relief map of the Himalayas. 

When I finally got rid of the ants, it started raining. Soon, it was a downpour, which meant we had to shut the doors and close ourselves in our miserably hot car, the inside of which soon became hotter than the 98 degree temperature outside.

About an hour later, a guy who happened to be a mechanic pulled up behind us.  He kindly offered to help, and he even got our car started. But he told us it wouldn't make it home to Alabama, and he directed us to follow him off the next (only) exit to a town called Immokolee, where we could get it fixed.  We accepted his offer, waiving off the highway patrol car that conveniently arrived right as our van cranked. 

We drove the long winding road through the swamplands toward Immokolee and began to notice as the swamps turned to jungles that the car was getting dangerously low on gas. We had calculated that we would have enough gas to drive straight through the Everglades until we hit civilization on the Tampa side, but we had not accounted for this little detour to the remote place where our mechanic friend had connections, which proved further than we had ever imagined. 

As we passed a yellow sign warning: "Panther Crossing," we ran out of gas and the van began to sputter.  Miraculously, as we coasted around the next corner, we saw the first building since we had entered the Everglades hours before. 

It was a gas station.

A fill-up and another jump start later, and we were soon in Immokolee.  God help us.

 The mechanics at the shop looked skeptically at our car.  The one mechanic there who spoke English told us that our 9-year old van was newer than what they were used to working on, so they weren't sure they'd have the parts we needed.  He needed advice, so he picked up a phone to call the local Autozone to ask for advice.  (Amazingly, they had one. A phone, I mean.)  Instead of dialing, the mechanic literally picked up the phone, dialed "0" and asked "Sarah" to connect him. 

I'm not kidding.

During the interminable wait, I asked the receptionist if there was a Dairy Queen in town.  She had never heard of it. 

When I told her I wanted ice cream, she directed me to the convenience store three blocks down, advising, reassuringly, that it was "pretty safe."

When I got there, there was a wino passed out by its front steps, which was bad, but they did in fact have ice cream (in the old school individual plastic cups), which was good. But the place, which was for all appearances the only thing in town resembling a grocery store, also had no spoons, neither available with the ice cream nor for public sale. That was bad.

I was forced to use the plastic lid of the container, and with every bite I vowed that if I ever got out of Immokolee alive, I would never sell things venture into the world of trade show salesmanship again.   

The mechanic told us that they would only stay and work on our car until 6, at which point the shop closed.  We had no way of driving to a hotel, and there didn't appear to be one anyway, so we did a lot of praying that afternoon.  They finally got us running at about 5:45. 

We drove through the night, alternating drivers while the other slept, terrified that if we ever stopped we might not ever get moving again. 

We finally got home somewhere around dawn the next morning.  I had never been so happy to see my parents' condo.

My dad finally gave up on the multi-level-marketing vitamin idea not long after the trip.  I never asked him why. 

But I think it's safe to assume that he made the same vow as I did.