We
head up through Florida, passing housing tracts, shopping centers, vast
properties in pseudo ‘hacienda’style, the ‘ideal world’ of those
water-guzzling golf courses kept green by vast quantities of herbicides and
pesticides (sometimes four to seven times the average amount used in
agriculture), and neighborhoods where runoff and airborne drift from those
courses cause nausea, asthma, dizziness, headaches, rashes, birth defects,
learning disabilities, infertility, leukemia, brain
cancer, breast cancer, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
People
are more raucous on the buses in Florida, and the squawks and rustles of bad
headphones are very audible — something bus drivers are quick to condemn
elsewhere. The drivers, too, are generally unfriendly, as if acknowledging we
are all the bottom of the barrel, as far as society goes: “In Florida,
everyone’s all obsessed with cars. Only transients take buses.”
This
attitude isn’t restricted to Florida, and it certainly won’t help the
environment. Single occupant cars produce 80% more carbon monoxide per
passenger mile than buses. Buses also produce fewer hydrocarbons, nitrogen
oxides, and other pollutants. Bus and train travel is one of the best ways to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, road congestion, and eliminate the great number of animals injured or killed while
crossing roads. The need to swallow up even more countryside with new roads
would also decrease. However, such a change in the mentality is unlikely:
federal investment has always boosted the road system; suburbs and cities are
built around the car; people equate car ownership with personal freedom. In
Europe, things are slightly different because strong restrictions on land use
as well as attractive urban life keep people in cities; and urban growth tends
to follow lines of mass transit.
The
last time I traveled this way, was back in the 1950s, when, with my parents, we
took U.S. Highway Number 1 from Canada to Florida for the annual holiday. I
remember seeing dense vegetation along the highway, also rows of cardboard
boxes in which people — largely African Americans — lived. By the end of the
50s, one-fifth of the US population lived below the poverty line, and it was a
strange sight for Canadian eyes — although, as a child, I thought living in a
cardboard box looked like much more fun than living in a normal, banal house.
Also
strange to Canadian eyes were the separate drinking fountains and toilets:
better ones for whites, smaller, dirtier ones for blacks. But, despite the
widespread belief that my country was very different from the USA, it was not
uncommon for Canadian restaurants to refuse service to people of color. In
Windsor, in the early 1950s, the United Auto Workers-Congress of Industrial
Organizations filed a complaint against a café that refused to serve a black
member of the Canadian armed forces. Race and religion could also prevent Jews,
racial minorities, and people of ‘questionable’ nationality from buying and
holding land; and in the summer holiday cottage country as well as on beaches
in Toronto and Winnipeg, it was common to see signs restricting use by
Christians only. My three uncles after studying medicine were forced to do
their internships in the
USA because of restrictions against Jews; my father
who wanted to start an advertising agency with three Jewish friends in the
1940s could only open one as a branch of a Christian agency. Even as late as
1962, when my non-Jewish friends easily found summer jobs in banks, I failed to
do so. My father then told me to state that I was Christian on job application
forms: I did, and within a week I was working as a bank teller.
I
intend to stop for the night in Brunswick, Georgia, but Martin tells me that
any reasonably priced motels are around five miles from the bus station. How
will I drag my bags that far? “Savannah is better,” he says. So I climb back
onto the bus, find myself seated in the vicinity a loudmouth know-it-all who,
after a short visit to the British Isles is intent on giving us the ‘facts’ —
all of them incorrect. Seated around her is a gaggle of women, all of them
fascinated, oohing and awing, taking her word for gospel.
“In
England, nobody speaks English. Below London, everyone speaks Cockney; above
London, they all speak Geordie. There’s this island in Scotland where, when the
tide pulls out, it leaves it stranded. The castle there was built by Muslims,
but then it was conquered by the Vikings.”
“Wow.”
“Imagine
that.”
What
she is referring to, is the monastery (not castle) of Lindisfarne. Dating from
the 6th century, this was an important center of Celtic
Christianity — whereas Islam only originated
in Mecca and Medina at the start of the
7th century. In 793 and 875 Norse raiders (not Vikings) did indeed sack the
monastery, and monks abandoned the site. Yes, there is a castle on Lindisfarne,
but it was built in 1550 using stones from the ruined priory.
The
loquacious lady is ready with even more fake news: “The British medical system
is way behind the American system. They don’t have important drugs or pain
killers, so people just have to suffer.”
She’s
obviously never heard of Britain’s National Health Service, implemented in
1948. Nor does she seem to know that health care facilities in the United States
are largely owned and operated by private sector businesses;
that the prohibitively high cost of medical care results in Americans delaying,
avoiding, or stopping medical treatment altogether. In 2018, 27.8 million
Americans went without any health insurance.
On
and on she goes, misinforming, deforming, spilling out the falsehoods with all the
confidence of a snake oil saleswoman. I think — only very briefly — about
intervening, correcting her, but decide this is not the hill I want to die on.
Instead, I begin chatting with the rather ancient African American woman by my
side — she can’t be bothered listening to big mouth.
“What
were you doing down in Florida?”
“My
son ‘passed’ there a year ago.”
Is
this an explanation? If so, it’s a confusing one. But seemingly untroubled, she
goes on to name at least six other children living all over the USA. “I also
once worked for the social services removing children from their families —
potentially a violent job. You gonna take kids away, parents gonna get angry.
But those children I saw… malnourished… abused. Yes, I sure saw some ugly
things. What can you do? Laws is laws, and they’re made for everyone so’s you
can keep order.”
Across
the aisle is a curly-haired blond wearing huge eyeglasses. Thick black lines of
makeup surround her eyes; her purple lipstick bleeds around a mouth with
far too many teeth; purple polish adorns the tips of beautiful long
fingers. Hers is a tiny Lolita figure, dressed in giddy preteen fluffy
pink net ornamented by sparkles — strange clothes on a bus headed for cold climes — yet,
she is hardly young, as the grey roots of her hair testify. She is wonderfully
strange-looking, fascinatingly ugly, and definitely quite beautiful — what one
would call, in French, a jolie laide or a beautiful ugly.
She is deeply absorbed in
a romance, and I wonder what her life is like. Does she dream of true love and
passion on tropical islands? Is all that window dressing an effort to find true
love? Is she lonely, or does she have an ardent lover who appreciates her
efforts?
In
the end, I discover she is chatty and open. She’s on her way to wintry
Cleveland, she informs me in her thick inner-city accent. Tom, her sweetheart,
will be waiting for her at the bus station, and he’ll have warm clothes with
him — she didn’t want to walk around Miami lugging a suitcase with
heavy winter things. Anyway, she wasn’t in Florida for very long: she flew down
on Thursday. Now, Saturday night, she’s on her way back by bus, a fifty-hour
trip.
I
must be staring at her in astonishment, but she only smiles.
“I
had a great time. I never been to Florida before, and I wanted to see what it
was like. Everybody’s always talking about how wonderful it is, and I was dreaming
about it for years.”
“Why
not stay for longer?”
“Can’t.
I work part-time cleaning, and you don’t get no holiday time if you only work
part-time. The lady I work for told me if I take off longer, I won’t have a job
waiting for me when I get back.” She also has another full-time day job, and
she gets a week’s holiday every year — unpaid, of course.
I
am appalled. Living on a continent where everyone has the right to four or five
weeks paid vacation every year, I had forgotten about this aspect of American
life. Yet, she’s a delightfully cheery woman, accepting all with good nature.
Life is just like that.
She
is so charming she has me wishing I were a fairy godmother with a magic wand to
sweep her into Wonderland. But I’m not. So, silently, I wish her many
delightful romance books with happy ends, and I keep her in mind every time I write
one.
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
