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REAL FLORIDA

Skink and Bob: Florida's guardian alter egos

They have different tailors, to be sure, but the two political mavericks share a passion for defending the state's natural glories against the spoilers.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published May 8, 2005

	Bob Graham retired from politics after two terms as Florida’s governor and three terms as a U.S. senator.
	[AP 2003]
	[Times illustration: Rossie Newson]
	In those lurid Carl Hiaasen novels, Skink is the former environmentalist governor of Florida, Clinton Tyree, who went mad after years of dealing with mendacious politicians and pond-scum developers.

MIAMI LAKES - Where is Skink when you need him? Where is Skink when the road kill on the Palmetto Expressway is piled as high as an alligator's eye with pancaked raccoons, armadillos, rat snakes, doggies and kitties, ad nauseam? You hungry, Skink?

Actually, Skink - could he be Skink? - is not hungry. He had orange juice and raisin bran for breakfast. Now he is behind the wheel of a shiny Acura with leather seats and headed for an appointment. Does Skink have appointments? In those lurid Carl Hiaasen novels, Skink is a spontaneous guy.

In the novels, Skink is the former environmentalist governor of Florida, Clinton Tyree, who went mad after years of dealing with mendacious politicians and pond-scum developers. Known only as Skink, he escapes to the Everglades and subsists mostly on road kill, emerging only to discipline a disgusting villain or slip steel into the backbone of a pusillanimous hero.

"I remember the first time I ever heard about Skink," says the man gripping the steering wheel. "I was in the airport and a friend walked up with a Carl Hiaasen novel called Double Whammy and said, "You are in this novel'. I held my ego in check and did not run over right away and buy the book to see if I was mentioned. But I read it eventually and discovered Skink."

South Florida does strange things to a man, even one as centered as two-time governor and three-time U.S senator Bob Graham.

"I do not think I am Skink," he says finally. "But every once in a while I will see a dead possum on the side of the road and wonder if I should pull over."

***

". . . The big man leapt from the cab and dashed back into the road. . . . Decker saw him snatch something off the center line and toss it onto the shoulder. . . . Decker saw it was a dead opossum. Skink ran a hand across its furry belly. "Still warm," he reported. Decker said nothing. "Road kill," Skink said, by way of explanation. He took a knife out of his belt. "You hungry, Miami?" - From Double Whammy

The return of the native

It may sound strange, but possibly the two most popular politicians in Florida's modern history are Bob Graham and Skink. It is even stranger that the very proper Bob Graham, who was born in Miami in 1936, and the magnificently misanthropic Skink, born in a writer's imagination in 1987, share commonalities that have nothing to do with flattened possums or skinning knives.

Both are passionate protectors of the Everglades, value Florida's culture, love its history, have eccentric senses of humor and lean to the populist side. Skink shows up on the bestseller list and Graham never lost a political race. Both Democrats have legions of fans in a state that votes Republican.

To walk around Miami Lakes with Graham, even months after his retirement from politics, is to accompany the Bishop of Rome through St. Peter's Square. Nobody kisses his ring, but they would if they could. There are no hands he fails to shake nor cheeks he forgets to kiss.

"We wish you were still in Washington," says a former constituent outside the country club.

"If you'd been on the ticket, John Kerry would have been elected president," declares a diner at a local restaurant.

As for Skink, well, just type his name and the name Carl Hiaasen into your Web browser and watch the references pop up. Lots of folks, it turns out, wish Skink were real. They think Florida needs somebody like Skink to keep the jerks in line.

"We've all been mad enough at politicians to imagine some form of vengeance that Skink would approve of," writes Erik Ness in the Internet magazine Grist.

Skink, after all, never hesitates to shoot the tires out of dirt bikes that terrorize wildlife in otherwise peaceful forests. To Skink, a bad hurricane is a growth-management tool. "An eviction notice from God," he roars, lashed to a bridge as a catastrophic hurricane bears down at the beginning of Stormy Weather.

On second glance, Skink and Graham hardly look like seeds from the same guava. Graham not only avoids supping on road kill, he works to avoid fainting at the sight of blood. Skink's everyday wardrobe includes a shower cap on his bald pate, a necklace constructed with human teeth and a kilt held together with safety pins; some people wonder if the always formal Graham wears a blue suit, with a matching Florida-motif tie, of course, even to bed.

Graham fights his weight and has a moon-shaped, baby face. Skink is as lean as a panther, lost an eye in a fight and clamps the twin tendrils of his crazed beard in place with vulture beaks. Skink lives on the edge of lunacy among crocodiles and mosquitoes; Graham is famous for writing the minutiae of his day into color-coded notebooks. He can probably recite what he had for breakfast on Mother's Day, 1978.

Skink is comfortable with guns and can build a fire without matches. Graham is clumsy with his cell phone, can't figure out the garage door opener and may ask a luncheon guest to help him remove the troublesome lid from a jar of yellow mustard.

"I seem to have erroneous directions," Graham says into his cell phone as he drives in the general direction of a TV station for an interview. Erroneous? If Skink ever needed to communicate the incompleteness of an idea he probably would avoid the word "inchoate," though it pops up in the senator's conversation.

But no matter. After four decades in politics he has returned to the South Florida of his birth, where crocodiles traipse in golf course sandtraps and dealers employ man-eating pythons to guard their stashes of illegal narcotics.

Bob Graham has retired.

Although Carl Hiaasen says he didn't have Bob Graham in mind when he created Skink, Graham may surprise him.

He may discover his inner Skink any day now.

Homesteader from the Wild West

"I am glad to be out of Washington," Graham says. "I have not had one day of buyer regrets. I am very glad to be home."

When he was a boy, home was literally the Everglades. His dad, Ernest Graham, arrived in Florida in 1920 to manage a farm for the Pennsylvania Sugar Co. Ernest Graham's nickname was "Cap." One time a University of Florida historian asked Bob Graham the origin of his father's nickname. "I do not know what the basis of carrying that nickname was," Graham said, "but it was the most prevalent way by which he was addressed."

Talk about Skink: Cap Graham, before moving to Florida, was an amateur boxer, mined gold in Montana and managed a gold mine in, of all places, Deadwood, S.D., the rip-roaring western town where Wild Bill Hickock got shot in the head by the coward Jack McCall. Wild Bill never got to play what seemed like a decent poker hand, two black eights, two black aces and the jack of diamonds.

Good luck, however, followed Cap Graham. When the sugar company failed, he was able to buy 7,000 acres at fire-sale prices on the edge of the sawgrass. He raised dairy cows, potatoes and a family. Bob's two older brothers lived in a houseboat for a spell. One of them, Bill, now fighting cancer, remembers picking up water moccasins and gathering alligator eggs.

Cap Graham's wife, Florence, died in 1934. He married Hilda Simmons the next year. Then came Bob. He was so much younger than his siblings that he felt like an only child. He acted like one, too. His Skink-like habits included expectorating on unsuspecting house guests.

By some accounts he was the terror any number of day care centers.

Skink would no doubt approve.

Cows, alligators - and vultures

In 1962, two years before Graham entered politics, his family turned their land into houses. A diamond in the middle of an otherwise industrial area, Miami Lakes today is spiffy with million-dollar homes, curving streets, bass-infested lakes and thick canopies of oaks and mahoganies.

"We did not know much about development, but we knew how to plant things," Graham says. He enjoys showing off those trees. Shade - real shade, provided by tall, native trees - is less common than Skink would like in today's South Florida.

Outside the Miami Lakes city limits visitors are more likely to encounter spindly trees and toothy animals from alien lands. Alligator dine on 12-foot pythons from Burma, now reproducing in the wild, and armored catfish from the Amazon. Modern Miami is a far piece from Graham's quieter Miami, the place where he caught native garfish and learned how to milk cows.

He hasn't milked a cow in a coon's age, but his family still maintains 300 acres in the middle of Miami Lakes. Although the Graham Dairy closed eons ago, Holstein cows come with the landscape. In his townhouse, art sculptures include wood cutouts of classic black-and-white cows.

When he needed surgery in 2004, Graham was pleased that his doctor used a bovine valve to repair his heart. Later, he was thrilled to learn that the lifesaving bovine was a Holstein.

From his home, Graham can easily amble over and see his cows. He and Adele, his still glamorous wife of 47 years, wake at 7 each morning. Bob walks to a convenience store for the newspaper, shaking his head as he reads headlines about what those wild and crazy Republicans are up to in Washington and in Tallahassee.

Skink would have fun with them.

Many readers maintain that Hiaasen's Sick Puppy contains the most satisfying moment in all of modern literature, the moment when Skink seizes the new crooked, development-loving Republican governor, pulls down his pants and etches the word "Shame" onto the shocked pol's butt with a turkey vulture's beak.

Jeb Bush need not worry. Graham has a real fondness for vultures - they are the sentinels of the Everglades, after all - and he is too smart to actually want to handle one, even to acquire a beak. Among other things, vultures discourage theft of their beaks and further invasion of their private space by projectile vomiting, a talent Skink has yet to cultivate.

After breakfast - cereal, muffin or heart healthy fruit - Graham saunters three blocks to the family company's office. Although he is promoting his most recent book, Intelligence Matters, his account of America's failure to deal with terrorism in time, he has started a new volume he plans to call What Every Citizen Needs To Know To Make Democracy Work For Them. As he types, he listens to Jimmy Buffett on the stereo.

In the novels, Skink prefers the psychedelic Moody Blues, though readers suspect he must certainly find inspiration in Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy, perhaps, or even Rottweiler Blues, a song about modern Miami life that Zevon wrote with the help of Carl Hiaasen.

Halogen lights in the driveway

Goodbye, Governor Jello

Folks with delicate sensibilities seem to move out of Miami sooner or later these days, troubled by crime and traffic and suburban sprawl. Graham, a Southern-Gentleman-of-the-Old-School variety, who still calls Miami "Miam-ma" and hurricanes "hurra-cans," has no plans to rent a moving van. Perhaps it is his inner Skink that gives him the bark to want to stay in the tough city.

Once he was known as Governor Jello. But in the Senate, at least toward the end of his career, when he ran as a Democratic candidate for president, he became as scrappy as a snapping turtle. Known for the temperance of his remarks, Graham suddenly enjoyed shooting out dirt-bike tires, at least symbolically. He complained about the sitting president's oil-drilling energy policy and tax cuts. He was among the very few senators who publicly opposed the war in Iraq.

Still, you can almost hear Carl Hiaasen, who finally escaped Miami for the Keys, chuckling as he taps out an e-mail comparing his beloved Skink with Bob Graham.

"Bob Graham's dapper grooming and chipper loquaciousness automatically disqualify him as the inspiration for Skink," he writes, "though I'm delighted to know that he occasionally fantasizes about warm road kill stew.

"Although Bob and Skink share the same passion for the state," writes the author, who grew up fishing and snaking in the Everglades, "I can't picture the senator taking target practice on tourists' rental cars, as Skink sometimes does. Nor can I picture Skink on Capitol Hill, except perhaps in a straitjacket."

The next best thing to Huck Finn

Bob Graham drives the Acura through Miami Lakes, finds the expressway, heads west, leaves the expressway, gets lost in a crummy neighborhood, returns to the expressway, then abandons the expressway at the proper exit. The road is lined by industrial buildings whose windows are guarded by bars or razor wire. The road is lined with cement factories and high-tension wires, pines from Australia and pepper trees from Brazil. Empty beer cans and cups skid across the road like tumbleweeds in Cap Graham's Deadwood.

Once this was the Everglades. Republicans occasionally like to point out that the Graham family helped author the destruction of the Glades with their sugar farming, a dairy operation and development. While such accusations are unfair - environmentalists were somewhat rare seven decades ago - there is truth to the charge.

Graham stops in front of a lonely field and a lonely house built from coral.

"My bedroom was on the other side," he says. "We had no air conditioning, and it was always so humid at night. I remember looking out the window at the Everglades. You could see the fires burning."

The Everglades inevitably burned during dry season when he was boy. Because of inadequate flood-control measures, the Everglades years ago was dry when it should have been wet and wet when it was supposed to be dry. As governor, Graham made fixing the Everglades a priority. As a senator, he helped make the Everglades an international cause. Even his toughest critic, the author of Everglades: River of Grass, appreciated him. The Grande Dame of the Glades, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, called him "my Everglades boy."

He was an Everglades boy as much as anybody, even Skink.

"Over on the other side of the trees was the canal we swam in," he says. "I do not remember catching bass, but I do recall catching garfish. Over there was a dairy barn. I had my own horse, Tony, a fine Arabian who never once bit me. I learned to drive when we lived here. I drove a milk truck to Miami High School before I finally got a 1949 black Ford coupe. Near our back door was a swing. We had citrus trees. In the winter, their blossoms had a most pleasant fragrance. It is funny how one can remember those details."

His mood darkens.

"You know, I do not drive out here often. I have wonderful childhood memories. It is sad to see the changes that have occurred."

He steps away from the car, leans against the fence, gazes long and hard at the old house. Someone he has never met owns it now. A coral house will last forever. Skink could tie himself to it in the next big blow. Or blow it up for that matter and declare the explosion a victory for the lost Everglades.

Chickens cluck across the yard. In the distance, hound dogs lie in the shade. Graham is downwind, and they fail to smell him. Otherwise their ears would stand up, and they would give chase with a howl. The senator, so far away from Washington and his youth, would have to outrun the dogs to his car.

"In the summer, it rained so much our property was an island. There were so many frogs. The frogs were very loud. We boys would go out with our Red Ryder BB guns and shoot frogs. You know, you cannot just shoot a frog with a BB gun because the pellet will bounce off the head. You have to wait for them to croak. When they croak, they look up and expose the soft flesh on their throats."

Back behind the wheel, air conditioning on, modern Florida only inches away, he says, "It was not exactly Huckleberry Finn. But it was close."

Skink might have rebuked the boys for shooting at frogs for no good reason. On the other hand he might have told them, "Hey, boys, you're in for a treat. Want to try some of this roasted possum?"

-- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com

Further reading:

Quiet Passion: A Biography of Senator Bob Graham, by S.V. Date, Tarcher Penguin Books.

On the Internet:

Carl Hiaasen's Official Website is www.carlhiaasen.com

[Last modified May 5, 2005, 14:15:03]