Legend has it when Juan Ponce de Leon discovered Florida on another Easter weekend, 497 years ago, he was looking for a magical fountain of youth.

De Leon never found that fountain. In fact, he probably never knew he had found the mainland, thinking this was just another island, bigger than most. He also would have been astonished to discover that he would become merely the first of millions of explorers on horseback, trains, planes and minivans who would come to this fragile peninsula looking for everything from wealth to their own personal fountain of youth.

 

De Leon kept on going, but, of course, that was before air-conditioning, and Florida wasn't the paradise he had hoped it would be.

At one point, de Leon sailed into Tampa Bay. Of course, this was before the Riverwalk and good Cuban restaurants, and instead of gold, the natives seemed more interested in beads, so he kept going.

In more recent times, others have stayed. Today, almost 20 million of us live in the state, pretty much huddled along the coastlines except for that knot of people who live around the Magic Kingdom city-state near Orlando. We've pretty much given up looking for that fountain of youth, although there seem to be plenty of potions, lotions and injections that promise to keep us forever young.

Instead, nearly 500 Easters later, Floridians are more interested just in making a decent living while not destroying the reasons they came here in the first place.

Getting crowded

That's not easy. Speculators and developers sold Florida as a paradise of sandy beaches and low taxes, and a great place to retire.

Now it's getting crowded and taxes are rising. The beaches are blocked off by condo towers and metered parking spaces. Four-lane roads have become six and eight lanes. We're getting ready to spend billions to construct high-speed rails that eventually will connect to feeder commuter systems just to shuffle everyone around.

So far, to salvage a struggling economy, the only solution appears to be casino gambling. At one point, it was promised there never would be casino gambling in Florida. Then it crept down in the swamps with the promise it wouldn't spread. Now it looks as if we'll have casinos going full blast in Tampa in time for the Republican convention in 2012, which will give GOP delegates something to do when they aren't going to bondage clubs.

Drill, baby, drill

Not too many years ago, most Floridians, recognizing that one of our most precious resources was our pristine beaches, opposed the idea of drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico anywhere near the coastline. But that was before SUVS, those six-lane highways and $3-a-gallon gasoline.

Now we can't get the platforms built soon enough. It's going to be OK, we are told. There are safeguards and yada yada.

I don't know; maybe ol' Ponce knew what he as doing when he kept on going. Even with air-conditioning, Florida is getting to be a paradise lost.