The Book Tour Episode Nineteen: Traveler’s Blues

 

The Book Tour Episode Nineteen: Traveler’s Blues

by J. Arlene Culiner 

 

Helped by the driver (she can hardly walk on her own) a huge woman boards the bus, her flap of blubber hanging skirt-like over what are probably thighs. Because she would never be able to move further, she gets to sit in the “forbidden” first seat of the bus, right across from the driver . Worse than her physical condition is her voice, nasal, loud, and complaining. Needing to be noticed, she uses size and noise to define her position: “Look, you can’t miss me. Now listen!”

 

She’s on her way to Fort Lauderdale to see her husband. “Visiting hours at the jail are from three, but if you’re late they make you wait, and then I can’t get to see him no more ‘cause I’ll miss the bus, you can’t trust no taxi driver down there, they charge you eight dollars when everyone knows it’s only four.” She repeats this five times.

“Husband’s in jail for drunk driving, hit a woman, just cut her two inches and now she’s suing, and the police let her keep all the money and it’s from prostitution too. Only two inches and don’t she know the longer they keep my husband in jail the longer she’s gonna wait for her money ‘cause if he ain’t allowed out to drive his truck, how’s he gonna make money to pay her back? I tried to call her and tell her that. Sure, my husband’s got a drink problem but these eleven months he’s been in jail will dry him out all right. It’s discrimination because he’s Mexican. I called the civil liberties but they said they only handle group cases. It’s unfair. Last time they took his license away for drunk driving he earned it back so he’s not no criminal. He earned it back, you hear? And you know what? Now they’re threatening him with five years.” She pops open a cola. “Weighed myself this morning, so it’s low enough today.”

To escape her, I flee to the back of the bus.

 

Along the road, we pass older wooden houses tucked into trees, but more often used car lots, fast food chains, DIY centers, All-U-Can-Eat buffets, malls, office supply emporiums, and endless concrete ditches. Hard to imagine that not very long ago — before 1900 — this was a land of pine forests, dunes, and mangroves, where bear, deer, wildcats, coons, opossums, alligators, crocodiles even a few panthers thrived. Isolated groups of the indigenous Calusa and Tequesta people still lived here, too, those whose ancestors had survived war and disease, who had avoided being transported to Havana when the Spanish colonists left. Joined by incoming Creek, free blacks, and escaped slaves, they lived in houses with palmetto roofs and built out of scavenged lumber. Traveling through the heart of the Everglades but rarely living within it, they grew pumpkins and sweet potatoes, ate turtles and turtle eggs.

 

But in 1900, Florida was already a land speculator’s paradise. Using convict labor, ironwood trees, considered too hard to be cut down, were blown to pieces with dynamite; Machineel and Jamaican Dogwood, were burned out and replaced with coconut palms, orange and lime trees, as well as banana palms. Ancient Tequesta Indian burial mounds were dug up, the remains and artifacts either buried in pits or given away. The Miami River was dynamited to provide water for the Royal Palm Hotel; and wildlife was exterminated. Finally, in the 1920s Florida, was a luxury holiday venue: the native people now worked on local farms, ranches, and at souvenir stands. Yet, dream vacation destination or no, this state had the highest rate of lynchings per capita, and the violence continued well into the 1950s.

 

The state’s population has grown from 529,000 in 1900, to 21,993,000 today, and Florida now has one of the most endangered ecosystems in the USA. Introduced species such as Australian pines and Melaleuca have destroyed indigenous plants and native pine forests (a mere two percent of the original pineland remain) turtle nesting grounds, and Indian mounds. Ecologically priceless marshes and wetlands, so necessary for replenishing and filtering groundwater, have been drained and transformed into beaches, golf courses, manicured lawns, or have become mere waste receptacles. No lake, river, or bay is free from polluting phosphates, radioactive gypsum, fertilizers, sugar plantation and orange juice processing waste; and Lakes Griffin, Apopka and Okeechobee are near death.

 

Snakes are killed indiscriminately, the water bird population has fallen disastrously, and there is little respect for wildlife outside of park areas: From 1966 to 1970, after particularly heavy rainfall created man-made floods, deer that sought refuge on dry land found themselves at the mercy of frenzied hunters who turned their dogs loose on them, or shot them from airboats when they attempted escape.

 

In 2014, the Everglades National Park welcomed over a million visitors who spent $104,476,500 in nearby communities. However, this area is now less than half of its original size, and is threatened by encroaching development, pollution, and invasive species. Continued political manipulation and the glitter of financial gain continues to push this fragile ecosystem into entropy and potential collapse, and although a plan to help save the area was passed by Congress in 2000, progress has stalled.

***

 

I give my book talk to a wealthy crowd in the events center of a luxury apartment complex by the beach in Boca Raton. The audience is attentive, and I am asked what my next project will be. I mention Hungary and investigating a pogrom that took place in 1946.

“What for?” asks a well-lifted blond woman. “Why are you bothering to do something like that? Who cares?”

She’s right, of course. And, suddenly assailed by doubts, I am naked in the crowd.

A man comes up to me, a German Jew who managed to escape in ’39: everyone else in his family perished. He has never returned to Germany although he knows the country has changed. “You are able to live in those countries,” he says to me. “You can travel in them and investigate. I was born over there. It’s different for me.” He even admires what I am doing, but probably imagines I have some official capacity as a journalist, or that I’m with the Wiesenthal Center.

 

Sharing the space for the book talk is a local “art” exhibit — a hearty collection of dreadful schnick schnack: Vogue magazine covers with 3D effects, awkward Japanese calligraphy art, a few senseless abstracts, and many doubtful sewn button paintings.

“Myra has only been doing art for three years and she’s sold everything she’s made,” says the enthusiastic presenter. “She turns to the glowing Myra. “That means you’re a great artist.”

There are also some surprisingly good watercolors, and one is a delicate depiction of a red fox. The artist comes up to me. “He lives in the bushes around this building,” she says. “I feed it dog food so it won’t starve.”

I stare at her. She is elegant, well-dressed, and obviously wealthy, and I am surprised she cares for such a creature. “A fox lives here, in this world of concrete and tamed vegetation?”

“The other residents are afraid of it, but I do my best to convince them not to have it exterminated. I hope I succeed. They’re all so afraid of nature, but we can get over our fears if we try. I once touched a snake in a nature zoo experience.”

We chat for quite a while because we like each other. Perhaps could even become good friends, but too many things divide us: my itinerant life, her big house in the north and this Florida condo; her wealth, and my lack of money; my failure to find, like she did, a kindly millionaire husband with intelligence, and a fine European education.

 

The people around me are polite, smiling, talking enthusiastically, and I’m assailed by faint depression and doubt — that’s part of the lone traveller’s baggage. Such moments pass, of course, but I wonder if I’ve made a terrible mistake in life. Perhaps there’s still time to sell out, give up on idealism, learn to live happily in such a disaster area and ignore the devastation we cause. How easy life could be.

 

I sit at the table, pen in hand, ready to sign books, when a handsome stranger approaches. He is a man who has just stepped out of the pages of a romance novel, and I stare at him, entranced. He bends down, smiles.

“You have beautiful handwriting.”

“Well, thank you.” But I’m at a loss for further repartee. I wonder if he might also think I’m beautiful, but know he probably only considers me an oddity with my wild gestures, my exaggerations.

Then just like that, like Yahweh in the Zohar, the stranger vanishes, taking with him his smile, the warmth in his eyes. Leaving the crowd and the cocktails behind; leaving me with my piles of books and my bus ticket on to other places.

 

More about my books and passionate life can be found at http://www.j-arleneculiner.com

and http://www.jill-culiner.com

and on my story podcast at https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner