Day 35: Sarasota, Florida to Savannah, Georgia

Sunday 27 October 2013 – I got bad news last night about the death of a member of my running club.  I didn’t know Bea well, but anyone could see her vitality and warmth from a fair distance.  She got sick a few weeks before I left Virginia, and I had visited her in the hospital.  Her prognosis at that point seemed optimistic, but she looked and sounded debilitated.  I hadn’t known she’d turned for the worse, so the news was a terrible surprise.  Talking to one of her daughters, who is about my age when my mother died, was disconcerting.  She sounded very slightly robotic, and I remembered that deep, shocking sorrow that left me numb and easily distracted for months 15 years ago.  Ignorant armies, the griefs we suffer and survive.  Disloyal lovers, disrespectful CEOs, ridiculous work are minor distractions when you remember that sudden plunge into the incomprehensible horror of mental freefall, and the cracking drop into a dark and frozen depth of mourning someone you love who is gone forever.

It held its wings out like that the whole time I watched it.
I  don't know why.  I hope it was for the pleasure of
feeling sun on feathers.

Sleep was slow to arrive on Saturday night, but the view from my bed Sunday morning had me up early, just to look.  The world was emerald and azure and golden, and the nieces born after my mother’s death were just a few days’ drive away.  I wanted to be up and doing, and drinking kale-based power shakes for breakfast.  With the shake glass washed, and many thanks and hugs and good wishes, I left A.K. and J. and pointed the Honda into a beautiful, breezy morning.

An hour and a half later, I pulled over in a parking lot and fell asleep in the driver’s seat, the first nap of the trip.

We get it, thanks.  South.  Moss.

The first leg of this drive was north and east across Florida, on a secondary road.  I saw horse farms and lots of them, and fields growing what looked like blueberries – but don’t they like a colder climate? – and probably landscaping plants; flowering bushes, short trees, hardy shrubs.  I think there are orange groves around here, but I didn’t see anything that looked like the pictures in juice commercials.  The Spanish moss continued everywhere, and in fact got more abundant.  And in fact got excessive, hanging from every branch like those fat tassels on the curtains in Victorian-style bordellos (as I have seen them in movies, that is); swinging from utility wires like ZZ Top beards.

In the early afternoon I pulled into a big public park, ready to picnic.  Turns out it was not a big public park.  There was a moon-bounce set up, but instead of a lunar landscape it was decorated as a sports arena, with all kinds of balls illustrated on its bouncy walls.  I moseyed about, looking at the playing fields and the not-especially-gracious garden design, and took a seat at a picnic table with the hummus A.K. and J. had sent with me.  A group of young men came into the park and started a game of catch with a football; oddly urban-looking adolescents for the environment.  They were all skinny, almost all wearing sleeveless t-shirts and below-the-knee shorts, and mostly wore their hair very short, like Eminem.

Not-especially-gracious, but nothing along this stretch
of highway seemed to be.

Another, smaller group crossed the grass and settled at a table near mine, and one of them came over to me.  He was heavier than the others, older and somehow calmer looking, with a soft, gentle face.  He asked whether I was okay, and what I was doing there, and I explained about the public park where I could picnic.  He explained that this wasn’t a park, but said it was all right for me to stay, and recommended that if ‘anyone’ asked what I was doing I should say I was waiting for ‘a visit.’  He closed by saying, “Just be careful,” as he walked back to his table.  After I finished my hummus, I stepped over to his table, thanked him for his help, and asked if he could tell me what the facility was.  It’s a rehabilitation center, he told me, but I thought it more tactful not to ask what kind of rehab.  As I drove away, I noticed the next building on the highway was called “Florida Youth Ranch.”

There were all these mournful notes in this day – A.K.’s family ploughing through leukemia, Bea’s daughters discovering mourning, boys needing to change their lives at 17, and this light, quiet note of letting go of ten years of love and grief that was with me, mindfully and not unhappily, throughout the journey.  This day, though, was as fundamentally happy, as thoroughly right, as the whole trip had been.  The universe and I were in sync, and I felt I was living as I ought, not according to anyone else’s needs or expectations or values.  That is the happiest feeling I have ever had, I think.  Certainly the most contented feeling.

More motorcycles with multiple riders and no helmets.  Where did I notice this before?  Montana?  I just looked back in this log, and it was Iowa.  That was three weeks and something like 16 friends ago.

I was really mystified at not seeing obvious orange groves.  The towns, post-Youth Ranch, were called things like Citra and Orange Heights, but I saw nothing that looked like my idea of citrus trees.  Maybe I just didn’t recognize them; the first time I saw a grape vineyard I was surprised by how short the vines were.  Maybe the orange trees were screened by the mossy oaks.  The median strip and highway sides were speckled with little white flowers I liked.  I wonder if they have a scent, and if they help pollinate the theoretical orange trees.

Outside Jacksonville, I was struck by a particular landscape:  a flat river winding through wetlands edged with pine.  The track of the river, its reflection of the trees and sky, the graceful stolidity of the marsh edging it, reminded me of a river view from the highway near my childhood hometown.  Once, driving across that river in a van full of high school debaters, one of my classmates called out, “Hands up whose mother thinks this is the most beautiful view in the world,” and most of the hands went up, accompanied by girls’ laughter.  I don’t know about the others, but for me it was a ridiculous revelation that my mother wasn’t a solo weirdo in her affection for that simple scene.  In Florida, a clump of palm trees by the river broke my reminiscence.  We did not have those in suburban Boston.

I mean this seriously tongue in cheek:  as I crossed into Georgia, another small note of sorrow emerged into the day.  The welcome sign noted that the state is the home of the 1995 World Series champions.  Like, in 2013, that’s what the sign says.

There are a lot of wetlands in this northeast Florida/southeast Georgia area.  Lots and lots.  The marsh grasses remind me of the prairie grasses of South Dakota, without the deranged wind.  They’re different colors, too, which may be the grass or the season or both.  They’ve got less green, more yellows, and lots of purples.  The lack of wind emphasizes their rootedness in mud and ooze; their stolidity.  The prairie grasses certainly didn’t seem ethereal or ephemeral, but they had more of those qualities of the wind element.  Marsh grass is a little water and a whole lot of earth.  I suppose both of them sometimes catch fire.

The Inn had hosted a wedding the day I arrived; smokers
got the courtyard.  It still smelled.  But so beautiful to see!

Driving into Savannah, a city renowned for its grace and eccentricity, I got to tour the every-small-city, dingy-townhouse and garbage-strewn alley section, reminiscent of the outskirts of Chattanooga, Camden, Richmond.  It’s a useful grounding in reality.  I appreciate the romance of the road, but I revel in the sanctity of truth.  If I had to choose just one, no contest.

After checking into the upscale B&B that my credit-card points got me, right on Forsyth Park, I walked through the lovely historical city, through parks and past gingerbread houses and by statues celebrating a lot of very martial people.  We tourists clustered along the Savannah River, where we could gaze northwest and see a modern seaport with a lacily industrial bridge, and look southwest and see candy and postcard shops, and sit down and listen to Walter Harris play guitar and sing.  He was in ‘Forest Gump,’ apparently, and his voice is surprisingly quiet.  Walking the mile or so back to the hotel, I thought the city surprisingly quiet overall.  I expected more parties and music.  Maybe not on Sundays...

Seaport and elegant bridge.

Walter Harris by the river.

Day 34: Sarasota, Florida

Sand cranes have right-of-way

Saturday 27 October –  A.K. and J. have had a winter place in Sarasota for a decade or so, and there’s a lot she wanted to show me in the town, as well as errands she needed to do.  So after power smoothies for breakfast, we watched the sand cranes stalk past on the sidewalk and then drove away toward the ocean.  Our first stop was the Circus Park playground.  A.K. has grandchildren and used to work for a toy company, which was a perfect fit for her very playful spirit.  Of course she loves the Circus Park!

The Ringling family has long and deep ties to Sarasota, first making it their home, and then their circus’s winter home, and then funding at least one art museum, a college and college programs and playgrounds.  Circus Park looks like a great place to play.  Well into my twenties, I used to find time most weekends to play on some local swings, and then slide down an escalator banister (the escalator served an office building, and so was stilled on weekends).  I am not nostalgic for my twenties; I know I was still testing my life, stepping gingerly into places that were wrong for me.  But I wonder whether I ought to seek out playgrounds more often as I saunter into my fifties.

This playground is part of the city's Payne Park.

On this day we didn’t have time to stop, as the green-tea woman sometimes runs out, and A.K. needs her macha powder.  I’m not sure I would have wanted to, anyway.  Circus Park is really brightly colored with the kinds of deep primary colors of children’s crayons – and in the last few weeks, I’ve been much more focused desert, field and cave colors, which tend toward the muted.

The Sarasota Farmers’ Market is unmuted.  On this Saturday morning, months before the start of tourist/snowbird season, the sidewalks started to get crowded about a block before we reached the downtown area cordoned off for a wide variety of stalls.  There were charities, hand-crafted miscellania, baked goods, produce and coconuts, drilled to order and furnished with a straw.  There was also Izumi Haraki, who sells green tea produced by her family back in Japan.  I wish I could have taken her photo without seeming rude.  She was wearing a headband with cat ears pointing up, a frilly, lacy, shiny mini-dress with a crinoline holding the skirt out stiffly, and shiny, high-heeled, platform Mary Janes.  She was also offering a bulk discount on macha powder, so A.K., whose generosity is close to boundless, bought enough for herself, a daughter or two, a friend or three, and me.  If it does everything it claims it can do, I shall be Superwoman by June.

After exploring a couple of boutiques on the outskirts of the market area, we met J. for lunch at a bakery and bistro called C’Est La Vie.  The name was not memorable, but the meal was very good and the brand-new waitress friendly and competent.  The small dining area was crowded, but not as badly as it will be in tourist season!  We didn’t linger – people were waiting for seats, and we intended visiting the beach, and had pedicure appointments for 5:00 or thereabouts, and a dinner reservation at Veg.  Before all that, A.K. providentially remembered that she wanted to pick up a couple of things at a clothing shop she especially likes, so we got back in the car and drove there, passing the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens on the way.  Aha!  It had been a while since A.K. had been them, and she didn’t feel she’d explored them fully (some fundraiser the last time, I think).  So there we go.

Banyans and me.  I don't believe I wore any pink
while in Fairbanks.

Lizards, plus best plant name of all time.

The gardens are renowned for both orchids and epiphytes.  I loved exploring them, and was struck by how unsettling the idea of life in a tropical zone felt to me.  I do not want to live surrounded by banyans and floating parasite plants.  Interesting.  The gardens are beautiful, the Spanish-moss draped oaks are beautiful, the magenta and amethyst and popping pink flowers are beautiful, and I want to see them and marvel at them and then I want to go home.  I've made a portfolio, though, of the gorgeous orchids (mostly), which you can view here if you'd like.

I have lived in Boston, suburban Boston, the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Dublin and suburban Washington, DC.  I loved Boston and quite liked all the others, with various reservations.  On this trip, I’ve felt a strongest pull to Detroit, the South Dakota plains, Sedona, suburban Albuquerque and maybe Kansas City.  I do not see any great commonality amongst those places.  To clarify, I have loved visiting every place I’ve been, even Las Vegas.  Feeling excited, welcome, happy to be here, though, is very different from feeling home.

Green means "Low Hazard."  Red with
stripe means "Water Closed to Public."
Purple is in-between, I guess.

Although our next stop was the beach.  Stop me if I’ve mentioned this before, but I love the water.  Even when it comes with a purple flag that means “Dangerous Marine Life.”  I mean, it’s good of them to mention it, right?  Nearer the shoreline, there were signs reading, “CAUTION.  Watch For Sting Rays.  Shuffle your feet.”

One thing about northern places:  they tend to go easy on the venomous critters.  Yes, we had jellyfish growing up outside Boston, but they weren’t frequent.  Yes, Jaws was set on Martha’s Vineyard (or a fictionalized Martha’s Vineyard?), but it was fiction.  I never heard of anyone sighting a shark at Humarock or Rexham or Green Harbor beaches, bar the occasional sand shark, who are more scared of you etc. which would mean I’d render them pretty much catatonic, since I would have been at least hysterical if I’d ever seen one myself.  Anyway, I had deep concerns about these Gulf sting rays, and inquired of A.K. what she knew about them.  Not much, she told me, and recommended asking the life guard.

The life guard was pretty sanguine about the stingray situation.  It was late in the year for them, and the sea was choppier than they like, so they shouldn’t be any around, but there’d been three stings yesterday, so they had the signs up today.  He seemed to think the foot shuffling really would protect me; he did it, he reported.  And he wasn’t afraid to go in the water.  So I gave him a mostly-sincere thank you and headed on my skeptical way.

The water was glorious.  Saturated teal-blue color, with happy white foam topping gentle waves, warm – if you didn’t grow up swimming in a northern ocean, you have no idea what warm sea water means – and gently salty.  I swam for real, mostly parallel to the beach, for twenty or thirty minutes, and was blissfully happy with just an edge of terror that a sting ray would jump up from the bottom and chew my leg off.  I believe this is what Edmund Burke meant when he distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime.

White sand, blue water, bluer sky.  Sarasota in October.

Rinsed off under the public shower, toweled a bit, and decidedly untidy as to hair, I allowed A.K. to steer me to her favorite day spa for a long-overdue toenail sheering.  Still feeling the rapture of the deep, I chose blue polish that came close to the color of the gulf waters under a cloudless sky.  A.K. encouraged me to share the story of Mr. John the Pickle Man with the pedicurists, and a client across the room asked that I speak up a bit.  My nail tech, surprisingly, was a native Floridian.  I should have made notes on the day; writing this five months (five months?!  Yikes!  My appalling lack of discipline alarms me.) later, I can remember that she was going to school part-time, or maybe full-time, and I think to learn other spa-type skills, but I do not remember.  She was very nice and did a fine job with my feet.

By the time she finished, I was mostly dry and able to dress, and even smack my hair around with the brush a bit, so as not to alarm the other diners at Veg.  We met J. there, and I thanked him for my pedicure.  “Oh, did I give that to you?” he asked, with a comical glance at A.K.  “Yes, you did,” she said.  “You were happy to.”  I really like seeing how well these two get on with each other.  They’ve been through a lot together – kids (from previous marriages) growing up; high-powered, stressful careers; at least one scary health emergency; retirements; one tiny granddaughter in the painful process of overcoming leukemia – and they’ve taken good care of each other and their relationship.  They seem to be very much in synch on their goals for retirement, including the part where you do some things just because that’s what the other person really wants.

Beautiful orchids show up in
surprising places, too.

One thing they do is refrain from bossing each other around about diet and exercise.  However, they have both been open to exploring ways to nourish themselves better – hence A.K.’s power-kale smoothies – and part of that was discovering Veg.  This is a vegan, vegetarian and pescatarian restaurant run by a South African chef.  Large parts of South Africa do not naturally lend themselves to vegetarianism, but he’s obviously open to new things, too.  And the spice blends that come out of that region are excellent.  Which spice blends aren’t?  But the South African ones are new to me, and excite my attention in ways that I don’t always allow, say, oregano and rosemary to do.  Also, South Africa produces some excellent wines.  So I had pinotage, and shared the opening latkes, and took a chance on South African-style seitan, and everything was excellent.

There’s some kind of lesson in this place, which is really unprepossessing from the outside.  It’s tiny; it’s in a strip mall; its website is ugly.  But very good things come from it.

For such a busy day, it was really relaxing, and fun.  Part of that was not driving, part not having a goal 300 miles away, but the most important part was A.K. and J.’s company.  There are a lot of ways in which we are not alike, but that never seems to matter at all.  I just like them – their characters, or something – and they either like me or are unusually willing to fake it.

Day 33: Adel, Georgia, to Sarasota, Florida

beautiful weather in south-central Georgia

Friday 26 October –  These Days and Rodeway Inns are not as generic as they might be.  The one in Adel, for instance, has something of a migrant-farm-worker vibe, with a small charcoal grill sitting outside one room, and a whole lot of laundry happening somewhere.  The maids are black, with southern accents – in California they’re brown and speak Spanish; in the west they’re white and sound like me; in Alaska – I never saw a maid in Alaska.  Seriously, three nights in that hot springs resort and I never saw a maid.  Hmmm.

Anyway, generic or not entirely, the Days Inn did not seem a big enough slice of Adel that I could just hit the interstate and claim I’d been in Georgia.  So I drove down the secondary road, which quickly turned into something more like a side street.  It showed me a cotton field, some trailer parks, tall pines and red dirt roads spidering away from the paved street.  I tried a dirt road, and found squash fields, maybe some beans, and what I’m guessing were South or Central Americans sitting by the at the edge of the cultivated area.  I took a few photographs, thinking about the stillness and deep quiet of the scene, and the century or so that there’ve been fields and migrants to work them in this part of the world.  And then Mr. John arrived, to toss a few handfuls of pebbles into all that quiet.

This picture I think barely worth a business card from Eduardo's

He arrived in a white pick-up truck, wearing a heavy white beard, almost Santa-style, and a University of Georgia ball cap with an eight-dollar price sticker on the brim.  He had somewhat fewer teeth than is standard amongst my acquaintance, and he demanded a photography fee.  At first I wondered if I had, perhaps, violated local rules by taking pictures of workers – you know – but I figured I could take him if I had to.  So I fished around in my pocket and came up with some receipts and other detritus.  I offered him a business card for Eduardo’s in San Rafael, California, assuring him they offer a great breakfast.  Ice broken, off we go.

He mocked my origins, drawling, “Baaaw-ston Massa-two-shits,” after he’d asked where I’m from.  Apparently equating New Jersey with New England, he told me he’d lived there in the very early sixties, with two women who worked in health care.  When the three of them finished their physical therapy in the morning, one would roll over and say, “Taaalk to me.”  “She loved my accent, you see.”

I asked how he’d gotten to New Jersey, but first he wanted to know how I’d gotten to Georgia, so I told him a few of the places I’d stopped on this trip.  He asked whether there was any particular reason or rhyme to my itinerary.  “I’m going places where I know someone who’ll put me up for a night,” I answered, and he told me he’d offer a place but he had to head home to shave and bathe and then drive up to north Georgia for an annual reunion with fifty or sixty of his family members.  So I mentioned I was heading south anyway, but how had he gotten to New Jersey?

He attended U. Georgia and majored in agricultural science.  When he was headed home to farm, out of nowhere he got a job offer from Seacrest, a frozen vegetable company in Macon.  He declined, enthusiastic in his belief that vegetables would grow well in south Georgia, where until the mid-20^th century farmers had focused on what Mr. John called, “melons, black-eyed peas and other staples.”  Then he went off on a tangent, and how he wound up in New Jersey working for Birdseye I cannot tell you.

Cucumber fields, without the workers

Nor how he got back to Georgia, but I do know that as of fall 2013, south Georgia farmers are growing all kinds of vegetables, including pickle cucumbers.  Mr. John now works for Klausen, overseeing fields of cucumbers.  The ones in the fields around us, grown for pickling, are what he considers “sweet, but not as sexy” as salad cucumbers.  He waited a long time to make sure I got it, and then, just in case, said, “they’re small and ugly – not sexy.”  I am not the kind of person who usually finds heavy-handed and obvious double entendres amusing, unless glossed over very lightly, but I was in a mood to be seduced a bit, I guess.  All that pop country music...

He then pounded the joke firmly into the ground by asking whether I knew what the original one-size-fits-all was.  I took a step away from his truck, made what I hope was a dubious-looking face, and queried the entire concept of southern charm.  He made it up to me by inviting me to pick myself some cucumbers from the fields, so I looked dubious again and asked whether he had the authority to make that offer.  He suggested that I go ahead and try, and “when they’re getting ready to arrest you, you say Mr. John the Pickle Man said it was okay.”  He waved and drove away, and I checked with a guy in the field before picking a couple of cukes.

As I headed back to my car with my small gleaning, a few puffs of red dust announced Mr. John’s return.  He wanted to assure me, having noticed my ‘crack’ about southern charm, that he has it in plenty.  I agreed, sincerely, but he plowed right through my interruption.  The thing is, he explained, when he hears someone say she’s staying wherever someone offers her a place to sleep, he likes to explore the possibilities.

We parted with grins on both sides, and I turned south.  The freeway entrance was half-blocked by six police cars, including a canine unit, surrounding a sedan with its trunk open.

This much Spanish moss seems, to my northern eyes,
more a caricature than an actual characteristic of the South.

There were cotton balls blowing across the freeway, which suggests that the crops where farther along than they were in Lubbock.  And there are offers of pecan roll, with free samples.  What is a pecan roll, and why would I want a free sample?  When I crossed into Florida, the signs started offering free orange juice.  I don’t particularly care for orange juice, but when your host state offers it free, is it churlish to refuse?  On grounds that it’s more churlish to cause a massive pile-up by swerving into the welcome center at something past the last second, I declined the juice.  But I gloried in the swirling cotton balls to make up for it.

The Florida I’ve met before is convention-center territory, and the keys.  This was northern Florida, rural and not very touristy.  (I don’t hear banjos.)  It’s got fields of cotton, something bright spring green and just sprouting, pines and the big old trees – oaks, probably – that host the Spanish moss.  There were black cows, red cows, vari-colored horses.  More Spanish moss, the Museum of Drag Racing and more, more, more Spanish moss.  And A.K. and J. have a dinner date, so I need to keep moving, but here’s another bit of the world I’d like to explore more, and probably never will.

There are sand cranes in A.K.’s driveway and a small swimming pool more or less in her living room.  She is an old boss of mine, and one of my favorite people, and I am so glad I headed south instead of east from St. Louis.  She offered me a salad and I offered her cucumbers, and the story that went with them.  They were indeed sweet, and I suppose small, but I don’t get the ugly part.

This is how I met A.K., sometime in the late nineties:  I was working at a conservative, centuries-old, Fortune 500 financial services firm headquartered in Boston.  My boss was a wonderful woman who’d been there almost forty years, probably wearing gray flannel suits the entire time, and one of the first computer specialists in the organization.  When my mother died, she hugged me and drove me to my parents’ home 30 miles from the office, but in everyday circumstances her reserve was considerable.  She was retiring, and her replacement would be one of the leading lights of our professional association – A.K., whom I hadn’t met.  I headed out one evening to an association meeting, knowing my future boss would be there, and stood at the edge of the social hour scanning the participants.  From the dead center of the party, a tiny dervish came whirling out, clutched my arm, stood way too close, looked up at me and said, “You’re Elizabeth!  I’m A.K., and I’m a relationship person!”  I practically had a panic attack as all my brain gears shifted up, down and around five or six notches.  Eventually she taught me to network, and now I hang out in her mini-pool, eating her favorite salad (with extra cucumber) from her favorite restaurant, and I could not be more content.

A.K., thanks in part to my invaluable support for two years
of her career, has done okay for herself.  The guest room in which
I stayed opens on to this handsome pool/porch/sunroom.