Daniel Uhlfelder, an attorney in Santa Rosa Beach, in Florida’s panhandle, was supposed to be on vacation in Spain, with his wife and children, in March. But after the pandemic forced him to cancel his trip he went, on March 5th, to a local Sherwin-Williams store to buy masks. Seeing that the store also sold coveralls for painting in—“They look like hazmat suits,” Uhlfelder said—he grabbed one of those as well. “I bought it out of precaution. I didn’t know how bad the pandemic would get.”
Shortly thereafter, Uhlfelder, who is forty-seven, was distressed to discover that caution wasn’t universal. “There were wall-to-wall spring breakers on the beach,” he said. “I thought, What am I going to do about it?” His schedule was open. First, he put on the paint suit and tried to scare people off the beach. Then he wore the suit and stood in front of Governor Ron DeSantis’s mansion, in Tallahassee, to protest Florida beaches being open; two days later he sought an injunction against DeSantis.
Many state beaches have been closed by counties, but some have begun to reopen this month—too soon, in Uhlfelder’s view. He wanted to step up his game as an activist (in recent years, he has tussled with a neighbor, Mike Huckabee, over Huckabee’s attempt to privatize beach access), so he bought a Grim Reaper costume from Walmart.com. “But it didn’t look like the real Grim Reaper,” he said. He asked a friend to make him a bespoke Reaper getup in black linen. He added a mask, Ray-Bans, and a plastic scythe. Underneath the cloak, he wears a bathing suit and Old Navy flip-flops. “My wife thought it was too much at first,” he said. “She thought it’d be offensive because people are dying.” Florida is, after all, known as God’s Waiting Room. “But, once she heard my message, she was fine with it.”
Angry at DeSantis’s refusal to close Florida’s beaches statewide, and also at his obfuscatory tactics (when Uhlfelder put in a public-records request for “any and all” documents related to the coronavirus, he got a bill for fifty-one thousand dollars), Uhlfelder has spent three days walking along beaches in the panhandle in his Grim Reaper gear. He takes a low-key approach; instead of yelling at crowds sprawling on the sand, he engages in thoughtful conversation with anyone who approaches him. To hecklers, he politely says, “See you soon.”
“I’m not a liberal,” Uhlfelder said, over the phone from his office. (He used to be a Republican. ) “I’m middle of the road; I’m logical.” The most challenging part of his crusade is talking to local businesspeople who are worried about how to feed their children with everything closed. Recently, he asked one such proprietor, “What if the government guaranteed your pay for two or three months if you’d stay home?” The man said that sounded great. “But the government isn’t doing that,” Uhlfelder said. “We’re not subsidizing.” The county he lives in, Walton, draws about four million visitors a year, but doesn’t have the health-care facilities to match. Still, Uhlfelder estimates that fewer than ten per cent of people in the county are wearing masks. “If even one person in New Orleans sees me dressed up and postpones his trip, that’s a win,” he said.
Uhlfelder’s stunt has made him both a publicity magnet and an object of vitriol. “I’m getting mean and nasty calls,” he said. “People are e-mailing me, calling my work number, Facebook-messaging me, tweeting at me.” Some of the messages are anti-Semitic. “Being Jewish in the South isn’t easy,” he said. The responses on Twitter range from “Loved you in ‘Scream’ ” and “Welcome to being Black in public” to “looks like Joe Biden’s campaign,” “The only Corona on that beach has a lime in it,” and “Karen has spoken.”
Uhlfelder recently announced that his Grim Reaper Tour will take him to Jacksonville, Clearwater, and other beaches across Florida that have reopened, where he will surely be a target. “My grandfather escaped Nazi Germany as a teen-ager. His whole family was incinerated in gas chambers,” he said. “It was always ingrained in my head: ‘You can sit around and bitch and whine, but what are you going to do about it?’ ” He added, “Nobody fights back. That’s why we lose.”
Does he worry that his shtick might frighten children? “I’m not wearing the costume at night,” he pointed out. “And I’m not in Michigan with a gun and a tactical weapon. Those people are scary.” ♦
