Everything begins with the weather here. In a state known for being too hot and too muggy, talking compulsively about the weather seems to be a way to avoid any discussion of why people have chosen to live in a swamp.

It is two days after the presidential election in Florida’s most baffling city. Miami, and everyone from the car attendant to the 7-Eleven clerk is complaining about how cold it is. It is almost 80. And sticky.

Ever since the pirates, explorers and conquistadors left, the sun seekers have been migrating to Florida’s southern city for the weather. A gateway for the runaway immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, it’s a city of immigrants as polyglot as New York. The tourist pamphlets are filled with commentary about the melting pot of Miami, where people are bound together by their differences. The truth is, many of them detest each other.

Still, Miami is the best jumping off point for all journeys north, and it’s where I find myself at the beginning of my quest to understand Florida and it’s people. Where I head to next, however, has become – overnight – the unlikely focal point of the world: West Palm Beach.

Barely out of Miami, I come across the American Police Hall of Fame and Museum. Inside, the recording, piped in from speakers overhead, says, “Feel free to sit in the gas chamber seat. Have your photo taken. Enjoy yourself.” Tourist after tourist, some with their children, slip into the chair to be strapped down. As the cameras flash, some take their role more seriously than others, grabbing their necks in mock suffocation.

There is an electric chair here, too, displayed behind a glass window, with a flashing red light attached to the top. From the speakers a medley of soft jazz Muzak wafts across the room. An Italian tourist is placing the leather headgear onto his friend’s skull, and their laughter is genuine and contagious. What does he make of the macabre display?

“Oh, it is something, no? I think only in America would you make fun of killing people.”

The first Florida native I meet is Kevin, a 24-year-old aspiring actor working at the Wolf Camera store in Ft. Lauderdale, where he was born and raised.

“Do you know what I do?” I guess he sells film.

“Develop pictures of dead people,” he says, referring to the business the store does with the city’s emergency crews. He has dreadlocks and wrap-around shades, and a slightly pink complexion. He talks about the MTV crowd over in South Beach; says it’s an endless battle between bikinis, jocks and silicone. I tell him I’m traveling through Florida to learn a little more of who Floridians are.

“Dumb bastards,” he says, indicating a black Camaro outside the window with a young Latino behind the wheel. “South Florida is all about teenagers with too much money, fast cars and drugs.

And the rest of Florida? “The east is old people. The north? Racist rednecks.”

Does he plan on living the rest of his life here?

“If the acting doesn’t get going, I may move to Hawaii.”

“Why there?”

“I guess the weather is born into me.”

It is not odd that the first post-election demonstration rallies in West Palm Beach are enjoyed by most people who live here. The crowd, all with signs and some with blow horns, have that Florida look: short-sleeved shirts, sun visors with golf brand names, short pants and fading summer tans. The Cubans hold up Bush signs. The Haitians hold up Gore signs. An elderly Jewish lady cries as she tells me how she had punched a hole near Lieberman, only to later realize that she should have punched the hole alongside Gore’s name.

“We look like absolute idiots,” says one man staring at the protesters. In one hand he holds the leash to his dog, in the other a baggy full of excrement. “How hard is it to punch a hole? Now we are the laughing stock of the country, of the world.”

The dog smells the poop bag and barks.

There is a day-after-a-natural-disaster vibe about the place, that rare time in American life when people in big cities open their doors and offer you a meal or a drink. Or, in my case, their yacht. A couple from Lighthouse Point, just south of West Palm Beach, hold up signs saying GORE GOT MORE. He says he was ready for the fight. He says, “This smells like a rat.” They invite me to stay on their yacht moored near the house. The bar, they say, is stocked. We don’t even have to talk. In the excitement of the moment the woman blurts out, “You can have our daughter.”

Beyond the rally-staging area, toward the back of the courthouse, groups of men and women sit across from each other at tables counting ballots in front of a long window. On our side of the glass, the press and the curious gather to stare through the glass like cats watching a fishbowl. One man, who had not taken his eyes off the action for hours, suddenly blurts out, “Did you see that?” Asked what he saw he mutters, “ I don’t know, but it didn’t look right.”

The partisans are never far away. One man in a JC Penney blue suit with striped shirt and cheap red tie whispers to me that he thinks he saw a man eat a chad.

At night I retreat to the hotel and watch the spin doctors standing where I had stood all day and make up every story. A couple of times, awash in television brainwash, I get up and race over to the courthouse, hoping to find a scandal in the making. But there they sit, like soldiers of Xian, still counting ballots.

Needing a break from the rallies, I cross over the drawbridge, just outside West Palm Beach, to Palm Beach, known as the playground to Florida’s wealthy. This is where Prince Charles plays polo, and is home to the compound where William Kennedy hid out after being accused of rape. It was time to see how the other side of Florida lives.

It had been a strange day. Lots of rumors. I had heard snippets of conversation: “It’s a coup… maybe the winner will be the loser…”

At the rally, a red-haired man with big teeth draws his fist back when I ask him if he is from Florida. I’d followed him and a couple other white guys wearing Mervyns sportscoats. They seemed to be coaching a group of black men holding signs that say GO HOME JESSE.

“Do you think those guys were paid to be here?” I ask another onlooker. “Oh yes,” he replies. “From Miami. We know who they are, an we’ll take care of them later.”

Needing a drink, I position myself at the end of a bar named Taboo, a fashionable Palm Beach watering hole. The piano player wears a tux and the crowd is dressed in sportcoats and ties. For the most part the conversation revolves around a cable television special that had touched on the fact that some of the island’s country clubs still did not allow members or guests who are blacks or Jews.

“What is the best part of living here?” I ask a couple, who made their millions in a junk-mail empire.

“There is a real sense of community here,” she says. She is wearing a casual Donna Karan outfit. He has a starched white shirt and greased back hair. They are young.

“Would you live anywhere else in Florida?”

“Where else in Florida?” she chuckles.

I order an $8 whiskey and turn the conversation to politics for, after all, there are near riots across the moat in West Palm Beach over the election, and this county is being accused of voting “mischief.”

“We must look like fools to the rest of the country. To the world,” says the woman.

“I don’t think anyone on this island had trouble punching the ballot,” says the bartender.

“The rest of the world, excuse my French, can screw themselves. This is our system, and it’s working,” says a short balding man with a slightly feminine voice.

“The market is dropping. Time to stop,” says a local developer and a snowbird shuttlecock, in from Pennsylvania. He spreads green jelly on the evening’s special – lamb chops and steamed asparagus. He has the voice of a parent talking to his child.

The glasses squeak as the bartender wipes them for the second time.

It takes a day and a half of driving north from Miami to find what could be construed as a hill. Shaped like a gun, and as flat as a road kill, the terrain only gets more swampy, and the further away from South Florida I get, the more Floridians hate where they live.

A few miles south of Orlando, Highway 192 winds 20 miles from the 19th century cowboy town of Kissimmee across the swampy flats of central Florida to Disney World. Like most roadsides in central and southern Florida, the highway is lined with enormous absurdities. Buildings shaped like shoes, hot dogs, windmills, haunted houses and jails. Plastic giants tower above the traffic – a pirate, an alligator, a dog, a cowboy and a few giant bugs. Off the road are the trailer parks and cement block apartment buildings of the mostly foreign labor market that work at the continuous chain of Pizza Huts, Burger Kings, electronic stores and tourist information booths.

At the last exit before Disney World, which resembles a long airport runway where signs keep getting bolder, brighter and bigger, I take a left turn down Celebration Avenue. Up ahead, through a grove of pine trees, is a newly built Victorian house with a swing on the porch and a Santa Claus on top of the mailbox. From the other direction comes an electric car with a family of four. I wave and they wave back. This is Celebration, a town built by Disney in 1996, to create a place “where the spirit of neighborliness comes from the people who live next door and down the street.”

Downtown, a café sign reads “since 1904.” Muzak is piped in from hidden speakers, camouflaged at the foot of palm trees. On Main Street, two men work on a crane placing large square boxes on top of the streetlights. “Snow makers,” they say. Beginning the day after thanksgiving until January first, snow will fall on Main Street. This in a subtropical swamp with a climate that rarely drops below 60.

Entering the model homes is like visiting a crime scene in American suburbia. They are filled with set pieces to suggest that a family lives there, but has just stepped out for lunch. A handwritten note in the boy’s bedroom reads, “Dave, Clean your room, Love Mom.”

In the parents’ room are 1920’s-style black-and-white photographs of Monte Carlo and Paris. I pick up a real estate newsletter on the way out. “There’s so much to do in town,” it reads. “The sky’s the limit. I play football and basketball, walk to the movies, order a pizza and take it to a friend’s house where we’ll watch a movie or hang out.”

At the edge of town, the cement of the last driveway meets the swamp. Finally, an exact end of human civilization. Beyond are alligators. Nearby carpenters and laborers build frames while bulldozers plow down the jungle terrain to make room for more Celebration homes. In the distance, just beyond a thin curtain of pine trees, I hear the low hum of cars streaming into Disney World.

The panhandle resembles the political and geographical landscape of Georgia and Alabama more than Florida. Couched in rolling hills and pine forests, the Old South is well settled here. Blacks and whites rarely mix, except at the dog tracks where they pass each other in the betting line. The cities of Tallahassee and Pensecola act as the urban bookends, and in between I pass through towns with names far more creative than the towns themselves: Two Egg, Glass and Prosperity. Economically depressed, the towns become nothing more than a Baptist church, a cemetery and a pizza parlor.

As you’d expect, religion plays a heavy role around here. It’s the southern edge of the Bible Belt, after all. “The election’s a sign,” says the owner of a café outside Sticky Gum Head. “Revelations tells us that the government will fall into chaos, and the end of the world is near.”

One evening I wake up across the border in Alabama after drinking a few too many in the rowdy Flora-Bama lounge with Ben, an excon who just got out of prison for shooting the man he found in his wife’s bed. Like most people in Florida, “Panhandlers are accommodating to travelers, but it’s rare to meet someone who has been west of Mississippi. There’s a general mistrust of all things west of Lake City and south of Ocala. And more than once I hear that “Miami is run by beaners;” “Jacksonville is a nigger town,” and California, well that was another country altogether.

To understand Florida’s bipolar nature: rich and poor, rural and urban, Republican and Democrat, you have to understand Florida’s greatest paradox. The great duality, and ultimately the greatest thrill of traveling to Florida, is the proximity of it’s urban centers to the extreme wilderness. From almost any golf course in Florida, a person is never more than an hour away from nature. Not the kind of nature that caters to a motor-home crowd, but the kind of wilderness where a person can get lost, forever.

Take the Tamiami Trail, one of only two roads that cuts across the Everglades of southern Florida. I drove down Eighth Avenue in Miami’s Little Havana, crowded with fast food and vending stores, and 45 minutes later, there were signs that read “Alligators: Beware” and “Panther Crossing.”

Don Mason makes $300 a week wrestling alligators but is able to supplement his wages from tips. “On a good week I take in another $300,” he says He invites me into his trailer for a meal of stone crabs and jumbo shrimp that one of his customers had brought by as a gift. His smile is kind and his voice hoarse, like he has a throat full of sand. A true swamp rat, he was born on an Everglade hamlet, a swamp island, with a father who poached game for a living. After serving time in jail, his father returned to the swamp where he was shot and killed. “He was mixed up in some pretty rough stuff.”

He leans into the light and shows me his thumb. “I got lazy for a second, and the bastard bit my thumb clean off.” A large scar encircles the thumb halfway down the digit where it was sewn back together. He shows me pictures of the cast and a couple with his head inside the mouth of a 12-foot gator.

“When does an alligator wrestler retire?”

“I’ll know,” he says. “I mean, it doesn’t pay much, but, hey, I’m not laying concrete everyday for a check.”

We walk over to a campfire and meet some tourists down from the Panhandle. A few feet away alligators slop around in the dark bog, and I feel a joy, almost childlike, that comes from being so close to a city yet so far away. In an hour I could be eating Cuban-prepared kingfish at Puerto Sagua in the Art Deco district. In two hours I could be in West Palm Beach watching the ballots being counted.

It feels like such a contradiction, the world changing by the minute in parts of Florida, but in other parts it seems things never change.

“You know what would be funny,” says one of the tourists in a thick southern drawl. “A nigger and a gator together in the same itty bitty pit. Funny, eh?”

Sarasota is the final stop. I wanted to visit the estate of John Ringling, founder of the Ringling Brothers Circus. I walk the grounds, passing under the banyan trees planted by his poker partner, Thomas Edison. Edison and another snowbird neighbor, Henry Ford, used to drive up from Fort Myers in a Model T to play cards.

I walk to the beach and sip a drink. It’s perfect weather. The sand is white and chalky. From here, Florida – part circus, part residential, part invention – seems almost like an accidental daydream of Ringling and his poker buddies. To be fair, Florida must be seen in totality. The golf-course millionaires of South Florida have to be seen against the cowboys of Central Florida. The Cubans by the Jews. The Haitians by the WASPS. Tampa is white and Jacksonville is black. And in the middle are the Seminole and Muccosukee Indians who quietly act as the guardians of the Everglades.

Maybe that’s how the election got so mangled here. The only thing Floridians have in common is they’re all from somewhere else.

And they like the weather.