Cattle and Condominiums

In the southern reaches of Osceola County, the landscape is still dominated by the blue sky and the tough, wiry scrub of the Florida cattle country. Here, Red Gentry runs four hundred head of Brahman-cross cattle on a tract of land his great-grandfather acquired after the Civil War. It is a world of palmetto hammocks, barbed wire, and the sweet, heavy smell of molasses used to supplement the winter feed. But the modern world is closing in fast; from the top wire of Gentry's eastern fence line, one can see the brightly colored roofs of a new master-planned development rising like plastic mushrooms from the flat pine flatwoods.

The developers have made Gentry several offers, each one more astronomical than the last, sums that would allow him to retire to a comfortable condo in Cocoa Beach. Yet he remains on the land, spending his evenings repairing a fifty-year-old tractor or tending to a calf with a stubborn leg injury. Gentry represents a vanishing breed of cracker cowboys who remember when Florida was a frontier of open range, before the advent of air-conditioning and theme parks. His boots are caked with the dark, sandy soil of the Kissimmee basin, and his hands are scarred from decades of working with lariats and branding irons in the relentless summer heat.

As twilight falls, Gentry sits on the porch of the cypress-board ranch house, listening to the distant drone of traffic on Interstate 4. The sky is a pale, dusty pink, and the cattle are gathering under the shade of a massive live oak, their ears twitching to ward off the first evening mosquitoes. He knows that his children, who have moved to Orlando and Tallahassee for office jobs, have little interest in inheriting a life of muddy fences and fluctuating beef prices. For now, however, the fence line holds, and the cattle graze in the quiet pasture, stubborn survivors in a landscape that is being sold by the square foot.