the beauty/disgust of it all

wastebook [7/10/2024]: a summer roadtrip + reading list

roadtrip selfie

Gray and I drive to Florida at least once a year, but I wouldn’t really call it a vacation. It’s just going home. Getting to know the plants of the Northeast has been interesting, but I still feel like a guest there. In Pennsylvania, I am a dried-out frog that can’t stop sneezing; my mucous membranes long for the slough.

We take I-95 south for nine hours and stop in South Carolina for the night. I keep a list of the welcome signs we pass:

Welcome to Delaware (Endless Discoveries)

Maryland Welcomes You (Leave No One Behind)

Welcome to Virginia (Virginia is For Lovers)

Welcome to North Carolina (Nation’s Most Military Friendly State)

Around here is where the evangelizing starts — every few miles, a sign. SAY THIS: FORGIVE ME JESUS, SAVE MY SOUL. Then, an Adult Superstore billboard, an ad for car accident lawyers, a confederate flag, Seafood and Steaks, This Exit then Right, and a PSA: Any Drug, Any Time, Fentanyl Poisoning. Welcome to South Carolina (Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places).

I-95, south carolina

On the second day we pass through Georgia (We’re Glad Georgia’s On Your Mind) and the landscape begins to shift underneath us. Bridges stretch over wide, flat marshes. Palmettos appear, stabbing at the sky, which opens up as the horizon flattens out. “Welcome To The Free State of Florida.” I roll my eyes.

Florida, a state so free, they ban books and heat protection for outdoor workers and even mandate the color of lighting on public bridges! (Freedom colors only, of course.)

The quality of the light changes down here. Gray calls it ‘oppressive’, a good word for sun so bright you can’t look anyone in the face. We talk about what we will do if someone harrasses us in a bathroom, but our rest stops are uneventful. After Jacksonville, we take state road 301 west, which cuts through the backwoods of central Florida to the Gulf Coast. Navel oranges, peanut stands, churches, and saloons. We hit a sudden wall of rain, fat drops smacking the windshield, and I’m glad to be driving. Gray gets freaked out in these heavy storms, but my shoulders relax. I know that the rain won’t last very long. It never does.

I have complicated feelings about home, a state that doesn’t want us queers, in the queerest land of all, when you think about it. Queer as in: weird, strange, odd. It is odd to have a gator in your pond out back, weird when the limpkins shriek in the dark, strange to sit in a stand of cypress trees jutting up out of still brown water and know that something you cannot see is watching you.

rest stop, north florida

“This has always been a place that scares people. I like that about Florida,” author Kristen Arnett writes. She wrote last summer in Time about planning a gay wedding in Orlando and refusing to leave, ‘clinging and sticking like a sandspur into Florida’s side.’ I respect that, but I’m restless. I always feel like I need to leave a place, turn around and look at it from the outside, if I really want to understand it.

“Former-Floridians write about us like they can’t let go, though of course they already have,” Arnett writes. Maybe she’s right — but it doesn’t feel like I have the option to let go. You don’t get to pick where you come from, or how it makes you.

On the drive, I discover that my camera has a multiple exposure mode. I used to make them manually in a film camera, holding the film release button down with one hand and advancing the shutter with the other, tricking the machine into taking two shots on one frame. I like how the layers play tricks on you. It’s a way of illustrating contradiction, the beautiful and disgusting all at once. Florida is like that, and I am, too.

swamp walking

“The Ever Glades are now suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin or the resort of pestilent reptiles,” read a report to the Secretary of the Treasury in 1848, asking Congress for money to drain the swamp into the sea and create farmland instead. What I hate most about Florida is the way we keep trying to paper over the ‘noxious’ swamp with highway lanes and gated communities and man-made lakes; the artifice of trying to make order out of a ‘pestilent’ place for ancient reptiles and tall, gangly birds. The pestilence is what I love.

They’re still building condos here, big ugly stucco things that the sea will surely swallow. But the spoonbills find somewhere to nest anyway, and wherever there is shallow water, Great Blue Herons apparate, good omens, still.

sandhill cranes on a golf course

Below the paywall is a round-up of Florida fiction, my summer book list, podcasts that got us through a 20-hr drive, and various other random things I’ve been feeding my brain lately, in no particular order: