On Friday, after my reading at USF, as I was having dinner with Ira Sukrungruang and Katie Riegel and two of their grad students, we got to talking about Florida, more specifically about the Florida of armadillos and alligators and wood storks and pygmy rattlers and any of the creatures or plants that remind the people who live here that they're not just anywhere. It occurred to me that this was the Florida that had riveted my imagination so many years back, and it was the Florida I'd forgotten after spending so much time in sculpted, manmade Broward, where my family has settled, and where I've probably been the recipient of no more than a single mosquito bite in thirteen years. So on Saturday, I spent an hour in a wildlife sanctuary on the south side of Charlotte Harbor, in Punta Gorda, and as soon as I stepped onto the boardwalk through the mangroves, tears started burning where the nose meets the throat. I realized I could have stayed there for hours, all day in fact, the sun heating up my forehead, the wind pushing the leaves around. What was it I'd left behind? The question seemed unanswerable, but I wanted it back, whatever it was. And deep in cold water, where I couldn't possibly see her, a manatee scoured the channel for plants.
Top of Sunshine Skyway I
Top of Sunshine Skyway II
Mangroves along Charlotte Harbor I
Channel through Ponce de Leon Park
Mangroves along Charlotte Harbor II
Creek through Ponce de Leon Park
Walkway through Ponce de Leon Park
Mangroves along Charlotte Harbor III
Along Alligator Alley
From the Window of My Hotel Room I
From the Window of My Hotel Room II (Apartment building to remain nameless)
5 comments:
I've heard of the Everglades. I've always imagined them as dark and foreboding and full of crocodiles. These ones look positively inviting. Thanks, Paul.
Hi Elisabeth, Thanks! To be honest, the only photo taken in the actual Everglades is the third from the bottom, in which the two men are fishing. The top two are on the Sunshine Skyway, at the mouth of Tampa Bay, the ones that follow are from Ponce de Leon Park on Charlotte Harbor in Punta Gorda. The final two are from the window of my hotel room.
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Hi Paul - I emigrated from Africa to New Zealand fifteen and a half years ago; two countries with vastly different psyches! Sometimes I find myself asking what it was I left behind... sometimes, like you, I 'want it back, whatever is was'. Tears well every time I step back onto my childhood soil and arrive for many reasons, I think. Recognition, relief, rage, loss, recovery, tenderness, acknowledgment...
And then I think of all the places in myself and 'out there' that I would not have encountered and come to know had I not boarded that plane, climbed those mountains, crossed that river... Rather than thinking in terms of what I've left behind, I try to think about what I've brought with me into this new place, understanding now that all our past places are written into our bodies; they inhabit us as much as we once inhabited them.
I find the idea of an accumulative landscape comfortIng.
Thank you for the prompt you've given me to reflect a while on these questions.
And, Paul, you say you sensed the presence of a manatee while you were in the mangroves... what perfect, gentle company.
Claire, what lovely words. "An accumulative landscape." Yes. I never saw the manatee, but there were signs warning boaters about manatees everywhere. I knew it was a perfect spot and was so taken with this fact that I imagined myself a manatee until I got a hold of myself.
Anyway, I hope you write more about the Africa you left behind. Obviously, there's lots of energy in that subject for you, and I'd love to read such a thing.
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