Gulf Breeze
Gulf Breeze is a character in its own right — a sleepy, sweat-soaked Florida Panhandle beach town that's equal parts charming and suffocating. It's the kind of place where the humidity hits you before you've made it from your car to the front door, where the asphalt throws heat back at you in visible ripples even after sunset, and where no deodorant on earth stands a chance.
The ocean breeze is the town's only act of mercy, a salty kiss that shows up just often enough to keep people from losing their minds. It's a working-class town dressed up in tourist drag.
Sheryl's Shell Shack sells seashell "art" and t-shirts with dumb slogans behind a wall of glass overlooking actual gorgeous rolling dunes and cerulean water — the real beauty always just across the street from the cheap stuff.
Hotels are painted in peach and seafoam green with seashell motifs embedded in the concrete, sailboat logos off-center, and lobby staff in Hawaiian shirts — corporate America's idea of "beachy" applied with the subtlety of a sunburn. Crab traps get repurposed as side tables. It's tacky and earnest at the same time, like a kid's shoebox diorama of their favorite vacation.
The crematorium has fake brick overlays on the front and bare cinderblocks around back. The apartment complex has oleander bushes at the entrance and a diner table salvaged from a place that went under. This is a town where things get a facelift on the side that faces the street and stay raw everywhere else.
The few young people in town are living a bohemian beach lifestyle — rum runners and fish tacos at the tiki bar on Fridays — while Gideon is working two jobs, paycheck to paycheck, too broke and busy for any of it.
But step off the sidewalk and you're in old Florida: ancient oaks draped in Spanish moss, cypress trees with gnarled arms, palmetto fans, kudzu choking everything, mosquitoes the size of your ambition, and cicadas providing the soundtrack. The forest is beautiful and dense and indifferent — it'll hide a murder scene just as easily as it hides a golf course.
It's the Redneck Riviera, where the more north you go the more southern you get, where heat waves harvest snowbirds and the walk-in fridge at the crematorium doubles as an air-conditioning break. Gulf Breeze is paradise if you're a tourist with a week and a cooler full of beer, and a slow grind if you're a local with a crappy hatchback and a dream that stalled out somewhere around sophomore year.
