Grits and Spanish Moss

I went to Florida

When we land, it smells like Florida. We’re still in the airport, it’s cement-gray outside but warm, and it smells like Florida. Florida used to be the five-minute walk to the ocean, past a teal blue fence and sand dimpling against Jeep tires. I used to chase sandpipers, watching their eyelash legs skirt the seafoam and refuse to take off.

I remember being ten at a church reception eating stale cookies and looking through enormous glass windows watching the bay and hoping the old Greek people wouldn’t try and talk to me. God is breakfast, God is a little treat. On the days my mom encouraged me to take communion, I wouldn’t eat until I got a spoonful of warm wine, soaking it against my teeth with dry, unsalted bread. This almost-meal was a relief. Now we could leave.

On the way to Ormond Beach, we pass a swarm of vultures. Swarm fails to capture the magnitude…a city of vultures. They swoop down over a giant garbage mound, about 15 minutes from the airport. It’s a big state, there’s a lot of roadkill. The highway lanes are wide and loud.

In the suburbs, it’s quiet. When I was little, my dad and I would go walking in the almost-wilderness near the house. It was still undeveloped back then, just narrow paths weaving through jungle. On one walk, we found a yellowed bible.

I don’t really like Florida and I don’t really like church. They both feel like a chore, and both are things I mostly fail to understand. My mom says that Yiayia and Papou love Florida because of their church, and because it’s warm all year. All this love I cannot access. Florida is vast, and empty, and belligerent. And discreet.

Florida is a magnet. The Orlando airport is a nest for Disney-goers, out-of-state visitors flocking to and from the park with their merchandise in tow: mouse ear hats, cartoon-printed thermoses, bundles of plastic bags sagging at the handles from their own weight. It’s a near-holy pilgrimage, an indoctrination, a feast of consumption! An expensive box to check off. Florida resident and author Carl Hiasson writes about Disney pilgrims in his anti-Disney manifesto Team Rodent, describing the influx as “an onslaught few places on Earth could withstand.” Withstanding is relative, after all, the state is sinking into the sea. Florida lawmakers were eager for a corporate goliath like Disney, despite any hesitation from the state’s inhabitants. The infrastructure behind Disneyworld was contingent on widespread ecological destruction: marshes were drained, species (and people) were displaced, and acres of foliage were razed to make way for the park.

When my dad was a kid, probably no older than ten, he remembers taking a road trip to Florida with his dad and four siblings. They arrived on a densely humid day, the kind where your lungs struggle to differentiate between the wet air and their own spongy tissue. They pulled up to an outcropping in the middle of the jungle. My grandfather led them into the structure, where there was a small table with a sprawling diorama. He now knows it was a scale model of what would become Disneyworld. They were standing on its grounds.

When I was the same age he had been on this road trip, I too went to Disneyworld. I’d known Disney my whole life from movies and ads, and I knew it was supposed to mean something to me, so I was excited. I remember the lines being long, the bodies standing near us being warm, and that it all smelled a bit like the Albuquerque Zoo, which was my most significant referent for unusual odors. The visit was almost satisfying. At the end of the day, I picked out a stuffed animal in the gift store. Now we could leave.

Everything in Florida is almost. Almost nearby, almost expensive. The trees are deceptive, you start to think it’s wild, and then you walk into the backyard of a bungalow. At one point during the visit, Craig and I go for a walk at a wildlife reserve near my grandparent’s house. One trail flirts with the road, and we feel the trees on our left shuffle as air is displaced by moving cars. We find a web of grass that’s the same color as his hair. He keeps noticing how many new plants there are, the trees are draped in them: Spanish moss, climbing fern, skunk vine. You almost think they are supposed to be there, but most of them are invasive.

The eeriest thing about Florida is how easily it could all disappear. In The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher writes, “we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human.” Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine the place reclaimed by the wilderness it’s always fighting off; six-lane highways swarmed by kudzu, shopping malls draped in Spanish moss, Disneyworld sinking back into the marsh. The bog devours right back. And then there are the vultures, waiting to strip the bones. The state already feels like it’s teetering on a coup. Abandoned buildings are instantly overgrown, the sidewalks are cracked and orange with iron, the roads make a tentative treaty with the forest growing alongside them. Maybe this is something to love about Florida; it is not patient.

Yiayia keeps a shrine in the laundry room. At night, the floor in front of it is bathed in red light. The light stays on all night, I suppose so the icons know she is still devoted in her sleep. She believes in God the way I believe in nothing: fervently, and maybe a little less than I pretend to. The shrine is how she paints.

The morning after Christmas, Yiayia and Papou get back from the farm. Yiayia is crying, saying “the chickens are dead.” And then, when she realizes they’re alive, “the cats are dead. I meant the cats.” I know that placeless panic, the transitive property of worry. My mom keeps half-translating to us, my dad leans close to record the TV; it’s tuned to a Greek Orthodox church service.

At the farm there’s another shrine that blinks awake as the sun warms the marsh. It’s simpler than the one in the laundry room, composed of a single icon, candle bed, and lighter. It might be providing a different kind of protection than the kind you’d bestow on a house. A shrine that keeps the chickens from dying.

On our last morning in Florida, we go to a diner. The parking lot is full of identical white trucks. It’s rainy outside, and almost cold, but the breakfast is good. Yiayia eats all her grits. I haven’t felt hungry since being in Florida, but I also haven’t really stopped eating.

On the drive back to the airport we pass the exit for Disneyworld, thronged with cars. We pass the vultures again, but this time they are less ominous. They mean we are 15 minutes away from the airport. Now we can leave. ☞

References:

1. Hiaasen, Carl. Team Rodent: How Disney devours the world. Ballantine Books, 1998.

2. Fisher, Mark. The weird and the eerie. Watkins Media Limited, 2017.