Another Dispatch from the “American South”

Florida Will Sink

We spent some time in the Tampa Bay Florida area last week on ‘spring breakdown.’  As the cranky Yankee, I still enjoy southern nature, musicians and writers.  But something is wrong on this peninsula.  And it is not just shoddy construction and missed phone calls regarding pedestrian bridges or bloody school shootings by NRA-trained marks-boys. (Most school shootings in 2018 have occurred in the south by the way.)  “Thoughts and Prayers!©” will not help this place.   Florida is a low-lying sandy spit which will sink into the ocean some day.  It is doomed.  As time advances, houses will suddenly become unsellable except as short-term rentals or termite lairs. A quiet exodus has already begun, according to Rolling Stone.

Life's a Beach...Until You Are Underwater

Only two 3-lane freeways extend the length of the peninsula, and those lanes were packed with cars as we drove down, even in the middle of Florida’s scrubby nowheres.  The evacuees of the recent hurricanes must have felt quite cramped as they drove north or east or west across this narrow land trying to escape the storms.  We saw 2 car fires around Tampa/Bradenton, which backed up traffic for 10-15 miles because there are so few road alternatives.  No roaming lions blocked the highways, but that has happened too.  The cramped barrier islands are just one big traffic jam in key periods.  Riding a bicycle, using the terrible public transport or walking are seen as something for poor or homeless people, or ‘stupid’ hippies.  Florida is the capital of auto accidents, with the highest rates in the U.S.  Their traffic is a combination of overly slow rural drivers and weaving maniacs, with too many not knowing what ‘flow’ means.  This is the most car-dependent place I have seen in awhile. 

Mega-churches line some rural highways just outside the suburbs, so you can pray for a break in the traffic.  You can get a Florida ‘In God We Trust” license plate motto too, to let everyone know if you can be trusted.  Having one of these says the opposite, I think.

It seems everybody in Florida is from somewhere else.  Many young northerners moved south after the widespread introduction of air-conditioning in the 1970s.  So ‘southern accents’ are not omnipresent.  Prior to that, many young Floridians packed up and moved north to get away from the lack of jobs and the heat and humidity.  Then there is the high proportion of old people shuffling back and forth from their cars to chain restaurants in ubiquitous strip malls, dozing in their recliners in front of Fox News or visiting chintzy gift shops.  Where have the drunken spring-breakers gone?  I miss them.

THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD IS THE WEIGHT OF GOLD®

A drive up the Clearwater coast along “Gulf Drive” over skinny barrier islands is revelatory.  These former islands contain narrow white sand beaches lined with miles of cheek-by-jowl hotels, motels, businesses and houses.  All built yesterday or the day before that. These islands are about 3 blocks wide.  Houses, commercial buildings and marinas sit on landfills so that boats and yachts can dock next to their house along the intra-coastal waterways.  Most of these buildings sit a few feet above ocean level.  The literal weight of the construction – 30 story towers, electrical and sewage lines, asphalt and concrete everywhere - will make the landmass sink.  This is a separate effect even from the over-removal of groundwater, which is also leading to ground settling.  This is not that different from the endless line of towns on the eastern coast of Florida above Miami, where the landmass is sinking due to geologic settling of the continent’s edges. With rising sea levels and a hotter Gulf, it is only a matter of time before these barrier islands are no longer barriers to anything.  

But the buildings will certainly form a splendid base for a barrier reef when they collapse and become inhabited by fish, sea urchins and coral.  When you see ‘development’ like this you know terms like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘fragile ecosystems’ mean nothing to capital.  The proof is in on every overdeveloped island in the state.

Last year’s Hurricanes Irma and Maria inundated fresh water and sewage systems in Florida, while the hurricane’s flooding damaged infrastructure and homes across the state.  What you see everywhere below the ‘grass’ or planted tall palms is bleached white sand. That is what Florida is actually built upon.  Sand.  As Hendrix once pointed out, “Castles made of sand fall into the sea, eventually…”

Leave Me Alone Dude

There is still wildlife, principally birds and waterfowl, so if you are a birder, get there soon.   The manatees, which are now a protected species, used to be regularly killed by zealots driving propeller speedboats.  The gentle walrus-like beasts now hunker down next to a gas-fired power plant on Tampa Bay because of its warm-water discharge, but some of their backs are still scarred.  You see, Florida Power uses the manatees as their community outreach.  Large and small alligators sink into the water or sun on the edge of rivers and ditches.  On the upper Manatee River we saw frantic young people paddling away from a pack of sunning alligators like they were going to be attacked.  Too many movies, as the old hippie Floridian pointed out. The alligators are far more afraid of the biggest predator on the peninsula– humans.  But not otters!  Television news reported that one angry river otter attacked an elderly woman in a kayak, ripping her flesh in a number of places.  After all, it is their river and they might be getting sick of the tourists.

AFTERNOON DRIVE TO JOEJAH

We returned to Georgia past many interstate billboards Jesus had rented to advertise his wares.  I can only conclude that there are a lot of sinners in this part of the south, as ‘he’ seems to be needed.  We stopped in Gray, just east of Macon, Georgia. In Gray is a musical memorial to Otis Redding, who was born nearby in Dawson, in Jones County.  Before Otis died he bought a large ranch in northeast Jones County, where the Redding family still resides.  Redding, Little Richard, James Brown and Ray Charles all hail from Georgia. Richard was born in Macon, Charles was born south of Macon in Albany while Brown grew up near South Carolina in Augusta, Georgia.  Augusta is the setting for left-wing writer Erskine Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road.”  Caldwell himself was born in White Oak, Georgia, northwest of Macon.  The Allman Brothers, the originators of a jam-band version of ‘southern rock,’ also hail from the Macon area. The Georgia Music Hall of Fame is in Macon.  So there is something in the water here.

We drove through Eatonton, Georgia northeast of Macon, on the outskirts of which Alice Walker was born and lived in and where she set The Color Purple.  It is also the town where a white journalist, Joe Harris, was born.  Harris created the Uncle Remus stories based on his collection of the oral folklore of the local African-Americans.  ‘Brother Rabbit’ became ‘Br’er Rabbit,” as Harris was not afraid to write the way people talked. Mark Twain was one of the first U.S. writers to use dialect, and Harris may have been inspired by him.  East of Eatonton near Milledgeville, the former Georgia capital, is the country home of the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor.  She specialized in moralistic southern gothic stories like Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Her farmhouse, ‘Andalusia Farm,’ reminds one of Faulkner’s pillared rural house in Oxford, Mississippi, ‘Rowan Oak.’  If you can give a formal name to your house, you evidently are no longer invisible.

Defeated peoples specialize in music, poetry and literature.  It is there that the best of the south comes out.

The Cranky Yankee

March 21, 2018