Migrant Nation

It’s a melting pot, right, America?  People came here from all over, people are coming still, and within two generations the Mexican-Americans are speaking Spanglish and the Korean-Americans are eating cheeseburgers with their kimchi and the Hungarian-Americans are marrying Ethiopian-Americans.  This nation is supposed to be one of risk-takers, pioneers, people comfortable with change.  Assimilation is a way of embracing change.  Travel is a way of embracing change, too, and one of the elements that makes assimilation happen.  One thing that struck me over and over as I traveled was how few of the people I met had held still much.

It wasn’t just the Alaskan massage therapist who’d done her training in Honolulu.  Even the cucumber technician in rural Georgia had detoured through semi-cosmopolitan Athens, GA, and near-New York North Jersey before coming home.  There was a man on the plane from Anchorage who’d grown up in Alaska – and he looked like many, many generations of his ancestors had done so, too – and joined the State Department.  They posted him all over the world in a 30-plus year career, and now he was headed to Vietnam again to see how it had changed since the 1980s.  The diner where I stopped on Route 66 in Seligman, Arizona, is owned and run and much of the food cooked by a German woman, over 70 and on her feet in this and other restaurants for much of the last 50 years.

There’s a Mid-westerner who lived most of her adult live in the mid-Atlantic and is now in the Southwest who’s involved with an effort to persuade landowners to remove long-disused fences.  The fences, put up when the Southwest still had water enough to support ranching, are no longer necessary for livestock.  (With extreme measures, there’s plenty of water for people and golf courses, but it’s too expensive for beef.)  They linger nonetheless, disrupting wildlife migration patterns.  The roads we use to travel everywhere we want to be, or away from where we don’t want to be, disrupt those patterns, too.  When I posted a photo of pronghorns on this blog, two friends – one in Virginia, one in Texas – wrote with concerns about how severely curtailed migration has affected those animals particularly.

There’s a West Texan who hated Utah but is happy in the middle of Pennsylvania.  She’s white; attends a majority-black church; sometimes forgets there’s a difference.  There’s a mixed-race Pittsburgher who loves New Orleans, likes urban California, couldn’t stand suburban Kansas but is okay in downtown Kansas City.  There’s a couple of Canadians who found themselves in K.C., loving it.  There’s a native New Englander who spends part of the year in New England, part in Florida, and a little-bitty part in Hawai’i, plus trips abroad.  There’s an English couple who created a tea house in St. Louis, a quintessentially American city whose city hall is designed to look like the Maison de Ville in Paris, France.  There’s a Chinese-Vietnamese-American from California who loved the east coast but is enjoying the Midwest.

We should not fence each other in.  Emily Dickinson notwithstanding, we should be able to move around, geographically and metaphorically.  It helps keep us strong.

Day 36: Savannah, Georgia, to Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina

Forsyth Park fountain - that's at least baroque, right?

Monday 28 October – The Forsyth Park Inn is, in fact, right on the western edge of Forsyth Park, a decent-sized chunk of real estate with some baroque fountains that would fit seamlessly into Vienna (the Austrian one) and several rules about where and how fast and in which direction one may bicycle, walk, run and rollerskate.  I started my penultimate road-trip day by circumnavigating the park a couple of times.  Lots of others were out with me, and we smiled politely as we passed each other the second and third times.  No one seemed especially eccentric, à la Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  The air felt clean and the whole scene rather small-town, or at least exclusive-neighborhood-in-a-small-city.

The Forsyth Park Inn, as seen from Forsyth Park

The hotel offered an excellent hot breakfast; a single entrée that they described the night before, so guests could make minor amendments (“No sausage, thanks.”).  There were also the usual cold buffet options, but I was quite content with my quiche-in-a-biscuit-y thing.  The waitresses were quiet and friendly, black Southern women, and I thought the second-swankiest hotel of the trip was well worth the credit-card points.  Most of what I knew of Savannah, before visiting, came from the movie cited above, and I felt like an Econolodge would be the wrong choice for this city.  So I got a lush courtyard and a big tub with whirlpool jets and a plethora of antiques (or at least second-hand furniture) in a basement – excuse me, garden-level – room.  The Inn also offered evening hors d’oeuvres, afternoon tea and all-day cookies or something, all available for imbibing on their very ante-bellum open porch overlooking the park.

I took another big walk through the downtown area, mostly to look at the architecture and landscape.  I’ve read a lot about the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD to its graphic-designer friends), and the forward-thinking and flair it provides the city, but didn’t see the typical signs of art-school influence.  There was a lot more evidence of Juliette Low’s and John Wesley’s contributions to the world, in fact, than facial piercings and sculpture apps.  For me, this was a very beautiful place I’m delighted to have seen, but not one I’m eager to visit again soon.  The energy level was low (this may reflect my feelings about coming to the end of my journey), and the place was just a bit precious.  They issue Certificates of Appropriateness, for heaven’s sake.  Maybe they mean it as a joke, but what if they don’t?

Beautiful Savannah - the pretty part, with a
mildly eccentric vine.

Away I went.  The deep blue sky of morning had turned the palest blue it could be and not be off-white as I drove away.  Back through the less-desirable part of town, and onto the interstate, and there’s someone transporting a fair-sized plywood structure, about one-and-a-half highway lanes wide, on a long, low flatbed truck.  It was decked with red flags, amber lights, and police blues, and accompanied by two Georgia State Patrol cars (“The Georgia patrol/was makin’ the rounds”) with their lights flashing, pluse three ‘certified safety vehicles.’  Those last were small pick-up trucks loaded with lights and unidentifiable but very important-looking cargo.  Two of them had long poles rising vertically from just behind their cabs – much longer than the old whip antennas that used to give away unmarked police cars.  They looked like they might be useful for fishing keys out of storm drains, but that seems unlikely to be their primary purpose.

I left them behind me in Georgia, though, and crossed into South Carolina past a welcome sign with flowing script, bordered by the kind of brick walls one sees at high-end horse farms, with flowing lines, that ought to be flanking ornate gates.  Glancing back, I saw the same flowing script thanking south-bound motorists for having visited.  I suppose a gated interstate, no matter how architecturally-appropriate the actual gates, would be impractical.

There are shotgun shacks by this highway, right up close to three- and four-lane Route 95.  They have no noise-reducing walls; first-world problems, sure, but not one with which the residents of the high-income suburbs of Washington, DC, grapple.  You want to live near the capital beltway, you get a massive noise-reducing wall.  I bet around here, the shacks came first, and didn’t get a lot of consideration in the transportation infrastructure-planning process.  But, you know, I could be absolutely wrong.

Fifty miles into South Carolina it was starting to get chilly, and a very light rain started to fall.  How light was it?  So light, I drove about fifteen miles before I needed to close the sunroof.  And not long after that, I needed a nap.  Too much fresh air and exercise in Savannah, plus staying up late to read in the whirlpool-be-jetted bathtub.  So I pulled into a rest area, dropped my seat back, and fell asleep.

I awoke to the sound of the beeping noise my car makes when the headlights, turned on for the rain and forgotten, have successfully drained the battery.  Rude awakening indeed.  AAA sympathized, and their partner service provider was by my side in less than 15 minutes.  His name was Jonny, and he joked several times that he was “sorry it took me so long.”  He’d been right nearby, at something called Santee Plantation, which he characterized as a rich-people’s resort.  When I thanked him with a chocolate bar, which he said he wouldn’t share with anyone except maybe his woman at home, he showed me the mini flashlight his Plantation customer had given him.  Then he offered it to me, as he has a real flashlight.  He got it out and showed it off to me; it’s very large and magnetized, so he can stick it to things and work hands-free.

Back on the road, I kept thinking I heard distant, low rumbles of thunder.  Eventually I realized it was noise from the Walter Harris CD I bought the night before.  Someone just recorded him, live, playing outdoors by the Savannah River.  So there are all kinds of background noises on the songs, including the sounds of his hands on the guitar and the strings hitting against the wood.  Musical people I knew in my 20s used to wrestle with those problems.  Now everyone I know just wrestles with 401(k) choices and vacation plans.

The burial mound, turned into a fort by the Brits
and captured by the Americans.

By the time I’d figured out that there wasn’t a storm brewing, the roadside signs were offering to show me the Santee Wildlife Refuge, which offer I decided to accept.  I’ve put all the photos in an album, so you may look at those if you like.  SWR is by a constructed lake, Lake Marion.  The human-made part surprised me, as the area seems extremely wet.  Why build a lake in a swamp?  There was also a burial mound used by the Santee Indians for burials, and by British and American forces as a fort in the Revolution.  We won that battle, by the way.

Spooky/beautiful

Staircase to, after all, somewhere.

I took a short circular trail through the reserve, and looked at spooky swamp trees.  I did not see any snakes or gators, praise be.   I have no desire to see snakes or gators (though a few weeks later I did see a black mamba, in Namibia, and oh my were the interns jealous).  I did not see anything especially exciting, actually, though at one point I rounded a corner and saw a staircase, in the middle of the woods, leading up toward the sky.  It rather prosaically supported a viewing platform, but the first sight of it was surreal enough to be memorable.  The platform actually had stairs on each side, but one set was blocked by an enormous spider’s web, so I went back down the way I’d come up.

I got back to the ranger station and welcome center thinking a bathroom would be nice to see, but the place closed at 4:00, and it was now 4:15.    I poked around outdoors a bit – no port-a-potty, but a collection of shells and skulls curiously displayed on utility cases.  When a ranger drove up, I asked about them, and she told me staff had found them and they were the remains of animals killed in the refuge, probably by poachers.  We bemoaned poachers (me thinking, “though if they’re killing alligators...”  Joke.  Alligators, important part of biosphere or something.  Got it.) and she let me use the bathroom though after hours.  Love the lovely ranger.  I paper-towelled off as well as I could; this SWR provided the kind of humidity that makes a person glad she didn’t figure out how to route herself through Louisiana, where the serious swamps are.
closed at 4:00, and it was now 4:15.

I powered through the gloaming, and on into the night.  The highway was, for some miles, bordered by cotton fields, looking mostly harvested.  Were they that much farther along than Lubbock’s cotton, or were Texans busy harvesting now, too, eight days after I left there?  Cotton fields, shacks, and yet I feel like I’m in a very different place than I was a week ago.  I think that’s telling.  There are certainly many fewer cultivated fields in this part of South Carolina than there were in the parts of Texas, Iowa, Illinois that I traveled.  I suppose, too, that I was actually looking around me with different eyes.

Those eyes seemed useless and absurd as the signs for South of the Border began their assault.  I’m not certain what South of the Border is, even now, but I can tell you a few things about it.  It owns or rents a ridiculous number of billboards.  It offers:  36 holes of miniature golf, a reptile lagoon, RV hookups, ice cream, fireworks, pools, WiFi, Virginia sturgeon, super suites, around-the-world imports, burgers, gas and more, more, more.  And it tells travelers all of this in about a 70-mile stretch of highway.  Even with all the attractions to highlight on these signs, many of them simply show silly, colorful cartoons with the announcement that SotB is coming in 43 miles, 34 miles, 27 miles...  One of the billboards had a car – an actual car, a dented sedan – affixed to it, with the legend, “Smash Hit.”

In between SotB signs there were small clusters of homes and gas stations, getting smaller and farther apart as I moved north.  There was a white church on the western edge of a big cornfield, with three ornate steeples rising from a red-shingled roof, and it was beautiful and interesting and distinctive and probably, for someone who knows the key, meaningful.  And in the rearview mirror I could see layered shades of rose and gentle, pastel orange stacking around the fireball of the setting sun.  My attention drawn again to the sky, I noted that it really is not as big here as it is in the west.  Montana has plenty of trees, like the Carolinas, so it’s not the trees that bind the horizons tighter.

I haven’t seen a deer-warning sign for ages.

Country; it seems to me there are much worse things
to sound like.

I was close, by the close of this day 36 on the road, to something like home turf.  In Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina – never been before – there was a Quality Inn.  The desk clerk sounded beautiful, and I complimented her on her voice.  “Does it sound country?” she asked, sounding worried.  I told her no; I didn’t tell her it sounds welcoming and comforting, like a warm kitchen on a rainy night, with something good, something with honey in it, baking.  Maybe that’s what ‘country’ means.

Shift

I like to shift gears when driving, and insist on a manual transmission for my car.  It keeps the drive interesting, it requires some (not a lot, but some) skill, and it helps me pay attention to what I’m doing, which is such a useful attribute in a driver.  As a general rule, I am not good at shifting – myself out of bed in the morning, for example.  Or, sometimes, back up to fifth gear when I’ve dropped from 70 to 35 in four or five stages, and then moved gradually back to 70 again.  Whoops.  Shifting piles of junque off my to-do pile and into the trash is an issue, too.

An awareness of the need to shift mentally has never been my strongest suit, either.  (What is my strongest suit, you ask?  I think it may be paying the check before anyone else at the table knows what I’m up to.  I only know one person who’s ever beaten me at this.)  When I was a girl, maybe 40 years ago, I read a book in which an English boy tries to imitate the accent of his new, American neighbors.  I was thunderstruck by the idea – it’s English people who have accents, I thought.  Americans (except Southerners) talk normally.  Or do they?  Shift.

When I started taking photos of wildflowers, I didn't take
one of white clover.  It's just a thing you walk on, not,
to me, a flower.  But it is a flower, however common.  Shift.

Big deal, though.  Nine-year old kid has never thought about accents in a global context.  So flash forward 15 years; I’m reading Calvin Trillin.  In one of his food essays, he discusses his wife’s inability to believe he doesn’t particularly like asparagus.  To her, asparagus is so delicious no one could fail to love it.  My thought?  “Is he saying he doesn’t love asparagus?  How could he not love asparagus?!  Asparagus is delicious.”  I totally, entirely understand that some people don’t like fettucine alfredo, though I do, or dislike Joni Mitchell, whom I love, or hate Boston, one of my all-time favorite cities.  But I just could not absorb this asparagus idea into my conscious brain.  I have kept trying since then, and I’ve largely succeeded – but I suspect my subconscious still doesn’t buy the whole asparagus thing.  Also the song ‘Walkin’ on Sunshine.’  How could anyone not like this song?  It is so happy.

Hopping along another ten years or so.  My brother-in-law’s best friend from college, Stephen, is an Englishman, an artist and godfather to my goddaughter.  Stephen’s art is primarily collages made from found objects, some manufactured and some natural, and mostly tiny.  He notices tiny things, like seeds and the differences between two apple blossoms.  Never mind forest and trees; while I am ooh’ing over a distant vista of lakeside hill with sunset, Stephen is awestruck by a particular twig, or three leaves here and two just under those.  Incidentally, he seems to shift easily from small picture to big.  I’ve gotten better at shifting from big to small after a few nature walks with him (“Hold out your hand; I need to collect some of these pods.”), but I still have to think about it.

My instinct is to look up and out.

 

And this is the 'trees' perspective.

But sometimes I'll focus in closer

and see curling bits of leaf-peel, or whatever this is.
Thanks, Stephen.

I have loved the moments of shift on this journey.  A lake big enough to have waves that matter?  An unending view of grass enrapturing me?  Seeing the world, behind me, narrowed to a small mirror, and noticing how different it looks.  Remembering pears in the desert are different than pears in the small farms of New England.  Sleeping on a couch, in a car, in a king-size bed high above Chicago, under a future-heirloom quilt in the guest room by the indoor pool, in dodgy sheets at a crap motel, in a four-poster in an elegant city.  Eating a dried-up crust in an ‘Alaska-luxury’ hotel bed, overpriced mushrooms in Pia Zadora’s Las Vegas restaurant, roasted-squash soup in a friend’s kitchen in Kansas City.  Driving farther than I thought I would ever want to in a day, giving myself permission to stop before I planned.  A main point of a trip, for me, is seeing something new.  Seeing something new should create some sort of shift.

Becoming a career woman, twenty or so years ago, required a shift in thinking, or perspective, or world view.  I stumbled into investment management through a temporary assignment as a receptionist, when I was earning the money for graduate school.  After I got my Master’s in literature, I went back to the gleaming skyscraper where the rich people worked, and gradually, and not without angst, made my way to vice president over the course of ten years.  My field was financial services, and I had always thought of myself as a word person.  That shift – to the belief I could be both – was gradual.  I didn’t really notice it happening, but when, occasionally, I would smile with joy and satisfaction at having successfully analyzed a financial, I could recognize that it had.

I was really, really good at my work.  And yet... my career stalled.  I wasn’t working for the caliber of company I wanted.  I was in it for the money, but wasn’t making the big bucks some of my colleagues were, and I surely to goodness wasn’t getting rich on stock options.  My peers respected and liked me, but I got much more liking than respect from my bosses.  I was out of work for almost two years in the recession.  My compensation and titles were moving sideways or down.  One colleague, who has done very well in our profession, tells me it’s largely the luck of the draw, but when the company that needed me desperately, for which I’d done excellent work, decided it could do without me – for budget reasons – I was convinced there had to be more than luck in play.

For several years, the moments of frustration, irritation and boredom had usually outweighed those of joy and satisfaction.  That, and the depth of the too-frequent frustration, often had me yearning to quit.  Without another job to go to (and it’s hard to find a new job when you’re working 50 hours a week, especially when the universe has other plans for you), I didn’t dare quit.  When that last company terminated my contract, I was flabbergasted, liberated, frightened and elated.  I worked my last four months, and when I was done, I quit my career.  It felt great.  It felt like achieving an ambition.

Big shift.

The one with the ex is harder to describe, and out of respect for his privacy I think I’ll refrain from doing so in detail.  In fact, I’ve been trying for an hour now, and I just wiped out everything I’d written for the fourth time and decided it’s too nuanced, too intricate and too subjective to record.  And it would take a long time, probably bore you, and inevitably misrepresent something.  So.  It was good a lot, and lousy sometimes, and there was lots of laughing and shouting and crying and sitting together on the couch, my feet on his lap or his head on my shoulder, newspapers spread about or a movie on the laptop.  He was too often mean to me, and I thought about leaving, but there was so much good, and I was really comfortable, and we both loved to throw parties.  I stayed.

He did not.  When he terminated our relationship, I was flabbergasted, liberated, devastated and – just a little bit – pleased.  I had been with him for ten years; I’d been defined as someone’s girlfriend; I’d considered his needs and preferences and desires before making decisions; I’d had someone to talk to whenever I wanted and a hand with moving furniture if needed.  When we actually ended, I sobbed and begged, but he was unmoved so I tried to sleep.  By morning I was resigned.

Huge shift.

That I quit my career and lost my primary love relationship, and in consequence of those two events had to leave my warm, elegant little home, and everything determined in less than two weeks, was more than a shift.  It was a cataclysm.  ‘Cataclysm’ usually connotes something disastrous, but my dictionary says I can also define it as “a violent upheaval that... brings about a fundamental change.”  I thought it might have the same root as ‘catalyst, but it doesn’t.  (‘Cataclysm’ is from the Greek for ‘inundate;’ ‘catalyst’ is also from Greek, but for ‘dissolve.’)  Nonetheless, my cataclysm was also a catalyst.  I am changed.

I know people often like to say that people don’t change.  It is obviously not true.  The alcoholic who stops drinking (and hundreds do every day) changes profoundly.  People who have been alienated from their families reunite; people in abusive relationships find the courage to walk away; well-paid computer programmers move to Namibia and become unpaid rhinoceros guardians.  I have changed.  I may change back, or change in some other direction, sometime in the future, but for now I am trusting my instincts, believing in my gifts, and trying to live my authentic life, in right relationship with myself, my family, my friends.

Marvelous, wonderful, joyful shift.

Finding joy in unexpected places.

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.