Actually I’m not. I’m going to West Palm Beach in 23 days, where the Astros will play the Nationals in the first spring training game of the season. Maybe somewhere between Mickey Mouse and 331 lynchings of African Americans, between Where the Boys Are and Scarface, there may be some there there in the Sunshine State.
I like to travel, and I’m old enough to know that at best when you travel you get some passing notion of a place, and you get some interesting tales with which to bore your friends. There’s not much method in how I choose where I go: I go places for business, or family, or to watch the Astros play. Sometimes I go to fish. But how I approach the place is usually similar. I try to get ready for travel by reading some books about the place I’m going. If nothing else I at least read a mystery novel or two. I try to put together a music soundtrack of the place. I try to stay at a hotel with some history. I find it easiest to visit cities: there are civic buildings, there are museums, there are restaurants and baseball stadiums and public transportation. Recently I’ve made it a point to go fishing because it gets me into the landscape.
We’ve booked a guide in Florida, found a place to stay, and bought our baseball tickets. It’s a quick trip in and out to a place I went once, many years ago. I didn’t fish then. I saw no museums. I drove around, went to the beach once, and saw nick-knack shops.
Getting ready to go to Florida I’ve been listening to Finding Florida by T.D. Allman. In many ways it’s a good book. Did you know that Florida has no metals and no igneous rock? That makes it hard to advance to the paleolithic if you’re not already there, but apparently the aboriginal Foridians did quite well with what was to hand. I gather they ate a lot of oysters and made arrowheads out of fish bones. The pre-Columbians did not do so well with disease or the Spanish, and disappeared. The Seminoles were not natives but refugees from Georgia, and would have to wait for the Americans to be mistreated.
Ponce de Leon never searched for the Fountain of Youth, and that favorite story of my childhood was made up out of whole cloth by Washington Irving. Andrew Jackson was a bastard, but I had suspected as much. Allman criticizes the economic and racial reality of The Yearling, my mother’s favorite coming of age YA novel about a boy and his deer. It was published in 1938 when she was 21.
Which is the problem with Allman: his unrelenting moral outrage. Everybody was a bastard, at least among the Europeans and their descendants. No doubt the only things ever produced out of Florida were racism, cupidity, and film-flam, though being a Texan I don’t know why that makes them so special. But truly, I really doubt that every Floridian woke up every day thinking I’m going to go out today and do something evil, or at least really stupid. Allman can even get indignant about Stephen F. Foster’s “Old Folks Back Home” for what seems like acres of print. It just hardly seems worth the effort about a fake sweet song about longing. All that righteousness does get wearisome, and honestly, I don’t know what he wants me to do? Not go to Florida? Tell all Floridians whose ancestors weren’t either Seminoles or slaves that they are deeply flawed? Of course there is Florida Man. Maybe they are deeply flawed.
Which gets back to how hiring a guide to go fishing for four hours is just a bit like going to Disney World, but then all travel is. At worst I’ll have a thrill ride courtesy of some poor fish, at best I’ll understand just a bit more of the world. I do need to watch Where the Boys Are. I haven’t read Allman’s criticism of Spring Break yet.
