- November 23, 2024
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You will see a new face driving around Palm Coast these days. And when he gets out of his car, don’t be surprised to hear Wael Kfoury or another Lebanese pop singer’s voice from his speakers.
Meet Jonathan Simmons. Before earning his journalism degree at Florida International University and interning at the Miami Herald, he studied Arabic at Florida State and then lived in the suburbs of Beirut. He joins the Palm Coast Observer this week to replace Megan Hoye, who is leaving us after one year as a staff writer to travel and chase her dreams. She is a strong writer and will be missed.
Simmons has his own adventurous spirit. He loves the feeling of independence to set off on a hiking trail, knowing that everything he will need to survive is packed carefully on his back.
That sense of independence also led to an interesting solution to the problem of where to live in Miami while he was at FIU.
In the city, he said, “you end up in a bug-infested place unless you can really plunk down some cash. So I went through a couple of places that were not great.”
Thanks to unresponsive landlords, he also ended up fixing things in his apartments, and he decided something had to change.
“So I thought I would like to have something that was mine, and if I had to fix it, at least I could keep it,” he said. He thought about an RV, but they were costly to store and complicated to fix.
Then he thought about his old high school teacher from West Palm Beach, John Griffin, who lived a life that Simmons began to seriously consider: on a boat.
“I wanted a way to live inexpensively where I could be close to the city with all the benefits of a major urban area, but also have a space that was quiet and really my own,” Simmons said, “where I could get up in the morning and not hear traffic noise.”
So, he did it. Despite not knowing a thing about docking or sailing a boat, for $2,300 he bought a 22-footer. For $160 per month, he anchored in a mooring field past the docks and paddled a canoe back to shore every day for his classes. After school, he had five or six hours to himself, alone on the boat, to do his homework. He had just enough power to charge his laptop and his cell phone, and he had limited Internet. His living quarters were tight, to say the least.
“I learned I could live on a space that was about half the size of your average jail cell,” he said. “You can’t even stand up in it unless you put up the pop top.”
He had no refrigerator, so he ate a lot of Ramen noodles, crackers and peanut butter. He fished. He became acquainted with the hermit crabs that sometimes showed up on his hull. He showered and used the bathroom at the marina. He read nonfiction stories about journeys through rainforests and across deserts. At night, the boat gently rocked him to sleep — when the weather was peaceful.
“I had a canoe and a dinghy tied up next to the boat, and when there was a tropical storm or a big thunderstorm, they would smack into the boat like a baseball bat,” he said.
He said he would live on a boat again someday if the opportunity presented itself, but he would look into something a bit larger or rent a storage unit. In any case, he feels confident he is now in the right place.
“I’m an avid Floridian,” he said. “I like to read about the state. I feel attached to it — more so since I spent some time abroad. I like the idea of being able to do that kind of community reporting where you’re covering things that are important to ordinary people.”
Well, Jonathan, we have a great community to live in and to write about. Welcome to Palm Coast.
