Florida, briefly

I am not a hot weather person, nor a beach person, but the ocean compels me. We were in Jacksonville, Florida last weekend to attend a memorial service for J's Uncle Anwar, who died a few months ago at 99. It was a family reunion as well, with cousins gathering from Texas, Toronto, D.C., Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, other parts of Florida, and, of course, Montreal.

The place where Anwar and MaryAnne have always lived is the opposite of the dazzling brightness of the white beaches that stretch along Florida's Atlantic coast. Just a few miles away, their property forms a long rectangle stretching away from its frontage on the St. John's River. When you turn into the driveway from Atlantic Boulevard, which, as its name implies, runs straight from Jacksonville to the ocean, you enter a perpendicular world: palms and palmettos, small cabins in overgrown wilderness, enormous live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, the deep green punctuated only by the occasional bright gold of a kumquat or orange hanging on a low tree. We get out of the car to a deafening buzz of insects, tiny lizards scatter into the underbrush, feral cats slink behind boxes, their eyes glinting from the shadows.

For me, Florida is never its highways, cities, and endless suburbs, but rather the blinding, bright limitlessness of the ocean, and the dark Gothic of the old deep south: frighteningly unfamiliar, fascinating, bewitching; temperamental and changeable; enigmatic and slow. I am never there long enough to understand anything, and always leave with the echoing, dismissive words of one tenant, to whom we were introduced over a papaya plant, as thirty cats sat at a distance waiting for their evening handout: "Oh: Northerners."

Comments

[Peter]

We Yankees havee our prejudices, too. But I liked your description.

[Natalie]

Beth, is that tall apartment building in the same area where J's relatives live? It looks very different from your description so I'm guessing it's probably somewhere else. Lovely shot of you and the waves.
A long time ago Reg and I drove from Vancouver to Florida in a Volkkswagen Beetle, camping out all the way, and found the most wonderful deserted beach in Florida, orange grove lining the coast and fresh fish practically insisting to be cooked on open fire for supper.

[Beth]

Of course we do, Peter :-)

Natalie, that apartment block was only a few miles away, but a world apart. That's the weird thing: the built-up, modern, endless mall-and-golf course that is urban Florida coexists with a sort of hidden, much older place you could probably miss if you didn't have access. I'm going to try to write more about our aunt and uncle's place. You drop into it from the boulevard and it's another world, in slow-motion. I'm sure you and Reg saw much more of that when you did that trip. My maternal grandparents, who lived in the same house with us, went to Florida every winter when I was a child, and what they told me about and showed in postcards and pictures was this other, older place. So much of it has been lost now, paved-over, but the vegetation, at least, refuses to be stopped: you feel as if an apocalypse happened and things became deserted, the plants and insects would take over in a very short time.

[Rachel Barenblat]

Oh, beautiful, Beth.

[Hattie]

Beth: Have you seen the Netflix drama series, Bloodline? It's set in the Florida Keys.

[Duchesse]

The Old Florida, so hard to find now, is part of my family history, too. When we glimpse it, we suddenly know its grasp on the Northerners who found promise and respite there. My parents spent years further south, nearly in the everglades- if ever there was a fetid frontier that clung past civilization and refrigeration, that was it.