Sunken Gardens
It is a short drive to the first destination on her list, the Sunken Gardens. She says, wow, this guy sounds like your kindred spirit, and then reads from her phone.
In 1902, George Turner, Sr., purchased 4.1 acres of land in the newly incorporated City of St. Petersburg. Using his skills as a plumber, he drained a sinkhole on the property and began growing tropical fruit trees like papayas, mangoes, bananas, and guavas in the fertile, mucky soil. George and his wife Eula sold their abundant harvest at the family’s fruit stand.
Rama parks the car in between two charter buses, parallel parking without a pause in reading.
Eventually, George retired as a plumber and began gardening full-time, expanding the variety of plants in his backyard garden, and adding colorful scallop-patterned walkways for visitors. The family started charging 15 cents for garden visits and strolls and by 1936, Turner’s Sunken Gardens was officially open as an attraction.
But there is really only one thing I am interested in. I want to recreate this photo. I look at her phone screen, the same dimensions as the old postcard projected on it.
Don’t you love it, the incongruence, those two ladies nonchalantly standing in front of what looks like the gates of hell. Those cartoonish, caveman letters. I want to get our picture taken here too. Fake caves are one of the foundational monuments of modernism.
We pass underneath a bougainvillea archway from the parking lot into the gardens. Oh I think I’ve been here before, on a fieldtrip maybe. I don’t think I remember seeing the fake grotto. But I could be wrong. I’ll help her find the grotto. This is the first time she’s asked to have us both be in the picture.
Rama says that in its heyday, the park hosted crocodile wrestling matches and a Christian wax museum, and that there were preliminary plans to turn it into a nudist colony. I would have remembered a nudist colony.
Towards the entrance we pass by a closure crowded with flamingos. Everyone is talking and pointing at the flamingos and they, in turn, seem to be arguing with one another. It’s a racket. ٍIn a dramatic way, Rama clears her throat (tanHam) and I look at her like she’s about to say something. Huh? Nihaam! Rama says. (نحام) What’s Niham. They are. Get it? I don’t get it, it must be the Arabic word for Flamingo. A flamingo starts shaking its head like she’s told a bad joke.
Like everything else we’ve seen, this garden is a lot smaller than I remember it from my childhood. We we have to move to the side of the sidewalk for a couple doing a photo shoot with their baby. The photographer adjusts the train of the baby’s white gauze outfit, looking like a victorian doll. They have her perched on top of an urn of roses. Rama looks at them out of the corner of her eye as she explains the differences between plaster, concrete, rebar, faux wood are what the French call faux bois, shotcrete and gunite. The baby reaches out to touch one of the roses and pricks its finger. It begins to cry. Rama in unphased, too busy extolling the virtue of imitation rock, there is something truly modern about being able to imitate rock, to no longer crouch into the cave you come upon, but to turn into whatever you want, a Montmartre cabaret, a Coney Island tunnel of love. Artificial concrete is totemic, phantasmogoric, plasticine glory.
We pass over a little bridge but are blocked from getting off by a couple taking selfies. They are being affectionate, stopping between shots to make out. Yeah, that’s what I want. We just got to find this grotto first. While we wait patiently to pass I look over the railing at the fish in the little pond below. Rama climbs up and sits on the railing of the bridge, talking to me with her mouth making exaggerated toothy phonemes. What is she doing? Is she looking down at the koy fish? She is telling me something about Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a quarry and a garbage dump turned into a grotto complete with faux stalagmites and stalactites and a cascading waterfall. Ulf Strohmayer argues that the park’s design, a “landscape full of simulacra…modeled on repetitions,” was a triumph of humankind’s capabilities. To be able to reproduce the grandeur of the natural world was to play god.
The couple casts us a glowering face as we lose our patience and force ourselves by. We only get a little ways down the narrow, plant-crowded pathway before immediately get caught behind a multi-generational family looking at a big red flower. An acceptable reason to be caught in traffic.
We get closer and I can see that the flower is attached to a long vine, hanging all the way down from the tall tree above. Rama laughs, apparently this one is called an African sausage tree, pointing at the sign. The grandparents start lining up, each one holding their grandchild’s hands. They are each going to get their picture with the grandkid in front of the sausage tree flower. We’ll need to wait for them too. Rama pushes behind the family to get closer to the sign and reads some more African sausage tree facts while we wait. The fruit of the African sausage tree is poisonous if not prepared properly, but many African cultures have found ways to safely utilize many parts of the sausage tree. She is speaking in that strange exaggerated way again, gesturing up with both of her hands at the long hanging vine. The deep red flowers open at night to attract bats and insects that act as pollinators for this species. She curls her fingers like they’re claws and sticks out her tongue. Traditional uses include: roasting the fruit and seeds for safe consumption, fermenting the fruit to create an alcoholic beverage called muratina, drying the fruit into a cosmetic skin treatment, or hollowing the tree trunks to make canoes.
That’s cool I say. The grandmother of the family says something under her breath and holds onto her grandchild as we finally nudge our way by. Rama points through the artificial jungle at a piece of bulbous concrete sticking out from behind a banana plant. She almost pushes over another child running over there. It turns out to be a modest waterfall. False alarm! she calls out. We keep walking.
At one point the thicket opens up and there is a group of about twenty people doing yoga in a grassy clearing. A sign invites us to learn more about renting the “wedding lawn”. Very pleasant, everyone is having a nice time. Except for Rama, this is all so normal nad pleasant, where’s the phantasmagoria?!
We walk underneath a trellis draped (mutahadil) with more exotic plants. Rama eyes a family, waiting close by them, and then when the father takes out his camera she starts reading me another sign like she’s a dinosaur struggling to speak.
Behold the Indian Clock Vine. It is an evergreen vine that sports uniquely shaped flowers of deep red and yellow. The father scoots around to another angle. Rama does the same amount of scooting. He tries backing up. She steps forward. Oh now I see what she’s doing.
Cut that out!
No!
This is how I achieve a lasting legacy, recorded for eternity in a hundred strangers family archives. Maybe I’ll make it onto a Christmas card . She keeps reading the sign as the father gives in and takes his photos.
This species (Thunbergia mysorensis) is not an orchid, but its intricate blooms are no less stunning. I shrug.
What’s wrong, Rama asks, I thought specifically you’d be into this place?
It’s nice!
But?
But these are all exotic plants.
tropical exotic plants, what’s wrong with that?
African sausage tree, Indian clock vine, none of these plants belong here,
Wow, I didn’t know you could fascist about plants!
Haha, botanical gardens were cool if we were Victorians, but now you can see this kind of stuff anywhere. It has no relationship to the local environment. I stop myself from explaining anymore, have we checked over there yet?
We look everywhere but can’t find the artificial grotto, why don’t we just ask somebody I ask. No! Rama is despondent. I should have known better, it was most likely taken out long ago, shotcrete is easy come easy go. And the whole garden has been de-kitschified, ya lil-khasarah. Rama frowns. why does everything have to be so mundane? Can’t there be any romance or style anymore?!?! She covers her face with banana leaf.
Oh come on, here, I’ll show you something that hasn’t been removed. I have seen it through the thicket several times during our perambulations. We walk and stand by a few parrots leashed by their feet to a pole and I tell her to look up. It’s an enormous, gnarled tree, with massive branches stretching out in every direction, vines race up its trunk, mosses grow on its branches parallel to the ground, like it’s protecting the entire garden in a paternal embrace.
Now I read from the sign. Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana)
In 2019, arborists estimated the southern live oak in the Oak Pavilion to be approximately 150 years old with a limb span of over 150 feet. In 1977, the National Arborist Association recognized this historic specimen, commending those who had the vision and foresight to preserve it. This oak shaded the homestead of our founding family after they built it in 1931.
Rama says, hey this is like the one at your old house. She likes the tree’s mien, it looks ornery. I keep reading
Southern live oaks are native to Florida and provide more food and habitat for birds and pollinators than most other trees.
Now you see, this is what I mean, these trees are native. It’s not just an aesthetic preference, an certainly not a xenophobic thing. It has a scientific basis. Lots of species of insects can only live on specific plants, because they evolved to depend on them. The African sausage tree? It gets pollinated by African bats and moths which have also evolved to be immune to its poison, its phytochemicals. Same thing with Quercus virginiana.
I open up the field guide and show her the picture of the moth and its caterpillar version
.
At dusk the females lay eggs in large groups on the underside of oak leaves. Fully-grown caterpillars pupate and overwinter in shallow underground burrows. But they can only live in oak forests, and based on their range, only oak forests in Florida. They’ve been here for millions of years, depending on the Southern Live Oak in an ancient relationship, long before humans even evolved in Africa.
I’m embarrassed, I’ve said too much. Rama stops looking at me, and moves around to stand next to me. She’s had enough. No, she looks behind her to make sure the tree is in the shot, she holds up her phone and I can see both of us on the screen, underneath the embrace of the Live Oak. She takes our picture.
Morris the Casino Cat
Now we’re in Gulfport, standing in the sun behind an old WWII-era A Quonset hut made out of avocado green bricks. Sitting atop one of the handrails we find it. A rough blob of orange and pink concrete, like a melting piece of coral reef. Resting here for evermore, with bleached blue eyes and a red collar, Morris the Casino Cat.
Rama reads from her notebook
For 15 years Morris was the unofficial animal of Gulfport. His favorite spot was the city’s beachfront casino, and when he died in 1985 his ashes were entombed in a custom-made mini-mausoleum that stands between the casino and the beach.
This is what these tourist attractions are all like, I never know whether we’re supposed to be reverent. Paying our respects to a sherbert-colored cat statue.
She reads the plaque “In memory of Morris the casino cat. His ashes rest here beside his mansion by the sea 1970-1985.” I can picture the type of guys who would have made this, they don’t exist much anymore. Hawaiian-shirt retirees, playing dominos in plaid lawn chairs while listening to the game on radio and agreeing to chip in a bit of their retirement cash for something nice for Morris, he was always twirling around your ankles, lying asleep on the billiard table. It was probably all a well-natured joke amongst the guys.
Rama says jokes become running-jokes and then running-jokes become rituals and then rituals become religions. Maybe it was the same with the ancient Egyptians. A simple love for cats lounging in the temples, twirling around the funerary columns, lounging in the lap of Horus, weaving in through the crowds of worshipping slaves, maybe someone joked that they came to be worshipped and they simply obliged, a running joke keeps being funny and then eventually your entrails filled canopic pots in the shape of a cat.
عفريت أزرق
While applying more sunscreen in the vanity mirror, I get a text message on my otherwise silent phone.
-Hey Waladudah, Bryan says you’re in town, no running away from me now, let’s meet up while you’re here.
It is from someone my phone has saved as Molly, it takes me a moment to remember who she is. a girl I went to high school with. I vaguely remember. I think she was in the scene.
I don’t know. On the one hand, I feel like I should have more to show for my childhood more than one estranged relative. Rama seems so social, everytime we go out we’ve run into someone from her program, or from her cultural events. The whole reason for coming here was for her to get a glimpse of my background. If we don’t meet up with a single person I went to high school with, she’ll think I emerged out of a cocoon.
As Rama drives I use her phone to do some snooping. I type in Molly’s full name and her social media accounts pop up. She has blue hair and is covered in tattoos, including some stretching across her neck.
Rama asks if our turn is coming up. I switch apps and see we just missed it.
-Oh I’m sorry, here just take this next exit and we’ll loop back.
-you know it doesn’t count as you being an ascetic by having an old-fashioned phone if you just use someone else’s whenever you need to google something. That’s just being cheap.
I look over. Is she teasing me or being annoyed? I sit for a moment with her phone in my lap looking out the window. But I’m too curious, I look back at her phone as soon as Rama’s point is no longer in the air. Molly has posted some pictures of her at the opening of an art exhibition, a picture of her with blood flowing from her nose, taking a pose for the camera while she is nude but covers herself in a fur and a necklace made of a rabbit skull. Thank God, she’s eccentric. Rama will love her. I text her back on my phone.
山伏
After a couple more stops by chance we see my old favorite sushi restaurant and pull over, the one where you pick trays off of a conveyor belt, which seems to move by a lot faster than I remember, and Rama keeps choosing rolls with Unagi and can’t bear to look at all the fish whizzing by and end up ordering a bowl of plain rice, and Rama calls me a Yamabushi and orders chicken feet, which are somehow on a secret menu, and I puke in the bathroom again.
World’s Largest
Rama tells me for this next attraction I should just stay in the car. Or I can come look for birds on the boardwalk. She just needs a few minutes. She’s acting suspicious. We’re at John’s Pass, a tourist trap beach-themed hell hole. What object of interest could possibly be here.
She parks me at a wooden railing alongside a bunch of other doughy tourists, and says I’m sorry, just stay here, I’ll be right back. Look, you can hang out with your friends, pointing out to a line of pelicans perched on a railing out in the water. I’ll be RIGHT back. She darts up a flight of wooden stairs next to an ice cream shop.
I try my best to be zen, to concentrate on the pelicans, and a heron that flies overhead, but this place is chaos. Ugly people are milling about and looking at their phones and eating treats and making all kinds of noise. The pelicans glance over disdainfully. Another few take off and fly away. People keep coming out of the store with enormous ice cream cones, and plates of fried food. Dough people. I wince as a young child begins screaming when a seagull flies by and steals a french fry from their plate. My tylenol is wearing off. Out in the channel a boat full of dough people chug by, taking pictures of the people on the boardwalk. The people on the boardwalk wave and take pictures of the people on the boat. Tourism is idiocy (ان السياحة بلاهة)
What is taking Rama so long? Where did she go, she’ll take me to see a stuffed two-headed cow, but she doesn’t want me to see this? I start wandering up the stairs. There she is, having her picture taken by a group of bikers. She looks at her phone that she’s handed them and gives them some artistic direction. Is this a fucking Hooters? I walk up the rest of the way to the top of the stairs. Now I can see. She’s posing like a fisherman, standing under a cross-beam, with an enormous bright red fiberglass hunk suspended on a fishing hook. One of the classic types of roadside attractions is the “largest”. Largest ball of twine, largest pistachio. Last week Rama asked me if I had any interest in renting a car to go to Edison, New Jersey to see the world’s largest lightbulb. There she is, giving the peace sign, looking adorable in a fisherman’s hat, standing under the world’s largest chicken wing.
Gone with the Wind
I doze off in the car for what only feels like a few minutes, but when I wake up and look out the window to look where we are, all I can see is a gigantic confederate flag.
Jesus.
Don’t get too excited, Rama says, it’s only the world’s *second* biggest confederate flag. It’s only 50 ft by 30 ft. The title of world’s biggest goes to some morons up in Virginia who supposedly have one that’s 51 by 31 feet.
I hope you’re not planning on us going there. I have absolutely no interest in the confederacy.
Oh, well then you might want to stay in the car again. You can go back to napping.
Wait, where are we going? I sit up straight in the car seat and look at the highway signs.
Jesus, Plant City?! How long was I asleep? Rama, where are we going? She grits her teeth. Look, I know this is a little bit of a detour, but it’s the one extant piece of the original Cypress Gardens. It used to be an attraction there! Our one chance to resurrect the glorious past. Also! It’s the world’s largest collection of its kind.
Of what kind?
Rama says oh look we’re already here, taking the exit.
Rama, of what kind?
Rama grits her teeth…World’s Largest Gone with the Wind memorabilia Collection.
Pffffft. NO thanks. That’s going to be where I draw the line. I’ll wait in the car.
But I miscalibrate. Through my grogginess and headache that comes off sounding genuinely annoyed, not teasing.
Rama drives as fast as she was on the highway down a long stroad and then goes past a used car lot and then becomes a two-way road as the trees all disappear. Then we’re driving past warehouses and empty grass lots and what looks like an unused fair ground. She keeps checking her phone. It should be right around here. A meat market, an empty field, a lot filled with cargo trailer, and empty field. She’s getting frustrated.
Rama, did you check the website.
She grits her teeth, they don’t have a website.
Did you check their Facebook.
They didn’t have a Facebook page…
I’m getting frustrated. I’m going back to sleep.
Fountain of Youth
Our world used to be build out of stone and wood and cloth. In my grandmother’s village you can look into the grooves of a wall and see the horsehair used to bind the mortar, the rocks themselves are the same ones as the fields outside. You stare up at night at the rafters and it’s the same trees that grow in the village. Not like this, this featureless geography of abstract glass and concrete and steel.
Rama is losing her radical optimism. The great American landscape is wearing on her. We’ve gone too hard today. The water tower shaped like a cake, The UFO house on top of a strip club, the Sphinx of Tampa. There was no trace to be had of the Gone with the Wind museum.
We had parked the car close to what she said would be a culmination of the day, a roadside attraction that distilled the history of Florida as a promised land: victorian sanitariums, post-war resorts, cable tv miracle cures. She is rambling and losing steam as we circumambulate a parking complex on foot. A surface parking lot surrounding a parking garage. We should have stopped after seeing the two-headed cow.
I feel bad, she’s had to do all the driving, and I’ve gotten in several naps. I think I’m starting to get my second wind. Towards the back of the parking complex we butt up against the enormous glaring poison grass expanse of a baseball field. It’s got to be around here somewhere.
Rama, if you don’t tell me what we’re looking for, I can’t help. But she wants it to be a surprise. I might not make it, i’ve recovered from the sexual alligator, but I still might get sun poisoning. I pull my shirt up over my head to protect my face from the sun. A car honks at us mockingly as we cross a long stretch of sidewalk that borders some sort of treeless park, a wide terraced field of low-cut grass. We are heading towards a pair of geodesic domes. Rama is rambling on about some guy named Buckminster Fuller.
Oh, this is the Salvador Dali museum, weird why is there a Salvador Dali museum in Florida? I don’t have a good answer. I do tell her I went as a kid, they don’t have that melting clock painting, but I do remember they have this enormous painting called The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, thinking she might like that since it goes with the theme of new world explorers getting lost. She rolls her eyes. I’m relieved she has no interest in going.
As we round the curve of the road, on the opposite side of the street is an even larger grass field. We’re on the grass field tour. Out far across the cement and dead grass I can see a few small aircraft. Jesus what is an airport doing in downtown st Petersburg? This place makes no sense. I’m getting agoraphobia. I’m getting a sunburn. Rama, come on, what are we looking for? She goes on, slightly out of breath, talking about how St. Petersburg, was once known as “Health City,” a veritable Mecca of health quackery, about how Industrialist Edwin Tomlinson discovered the aquifer spring while digging a well in 1889, how he bought the property and opened a spa, how it became a popular stop on the tourist circuit as people came on a daily basis to fill up their jugs with the smelly drink, how the resort hosted count statues of Ponce de Leon before its final closure in 1975.
Rama, what are you talking about? What are we looking for?
We’re searching for the Fountain of Youth.
I thought that was in St. Augustine, but leave it to Florida to turn it into a franchise.
Or didn’t nobody ever find it
I tell Rama that there used to be a stone sign near my house when I was a kid indicating the site of the indigenous village where Cabeza de Vaca arrived and from where he set out as the first white man to discover the Americas. This only makes things worse. What kind of Eurocentric nonsense is that, to claim to be discovering a new continent when you’re just a colonizer wandering around starving in someone else’s backyard. Oh, she’s actually in a bad mood.
I try to make things better by asking some of those historical speculation questions she likes. How did the first explorers do it do you think? Couldn’t have been too comfortable tromping around the bush in a clunky metal helmet. Hiking up their medieval frocks. The sidewalk ends and we have to start walking in the street. More cars pass by us honking. She doesn’t answer. I nervously just keep talking.
Well I used to love this book about his travels when I was a kid, it had all of these maps of Florida from the 1500s, with a little dashed red line showing Cabeza de Vaca exploring the Bay. So many of the things he saw and then later wrote about, it is the very record of it.
Rama responds to this. There was a whole civilization living here, until Europeans obliterated it.
Okay sorry I mean the first extant written description of Florida, maybe indigenous people wrote about it too, but we don’t have any surviving records, but when Cabeza de Vaca got back he wrote up the whole thing, the first description of the Mississippi river, being held on an island as a slave in Texas, in his own account I always tried to imagine where exactly he was wandering around lost, is it a Publix supermarket now, a Harbor Freight?
When the brigantine departed, we went inland again, this time with a few more people, skirted the shore of the bay we had found. Having gone four leagues, we took four Indians and showed them corn to see if they were familiar with it, since we had not yet seen sign of it. They told us they would take us to a place that had some. So they took us to their village at the head of the bay near there, and there they showed us some corn, which was not yet ready to be picked.
I ask Rama what the first explorers must have thought of all of this space, it must have mostly all been a Long Pine Savannah back then, before the Europeans got here Pine forests once towered over nearly 90 million acres, when Cabeza de Vaca landed in 1528 on the shores of Boca Ciega Bay they called the spot “Punta Pinal,” or point of pines. That’s why the county here is called Pinellas County. I can’t imagine going through millions of acres of empty Pine forest just to find some gold.
It wasn’t empty, it was filled with people, it says it right there in the journal, filled with villages, with agriculture, the original inhabitants, planting native plants just like you like, in harmony with this land before the white man showed up. It has been that way forever until they came and burned it all.
Well…
Well what?!
Rama stops in the street and glares at me. Go on, well what?
Well technically the Tocobaga Indians only arrived in Tampa Bay in the 900s. And the corn…
What about corn?
Well you said corn is a native plant, but it’s not native to Florida.
Oh jesus.
It was most likely traded for with other tribes. Corn was the cornerstone crop for all of Mesoamerica, and had spread during the precolumbian era all over North America. From its origin in central Mexico it became the currency in a continental trade network between indigenous peoples, from the Southwest desert to New England. Even here in Florida. And it was domesticated corn, not native at all… I’ve said too much.
She scrutinizes my face, hiding from the sun inside my shirt. She then turns and starts walking own the sidewalk alone. When I finally catch up to her she is huddled underneath the sparse shade of a crepe myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica). Ok, Google maps says it’s right at the end of this block. If we get back to the baseball field we’ve gone too far. I follow behind her sheepishly until we arrive at the end of the block. We’re back at the Baseball field. Rama growls. Wait, Rama, is it this? I point to a small white cement kitabe in fake Gothic script “the Fountain of Youth.” It is a tiny concrete dias hidden behind a slightly raised curb at the edge of a parking lot, a modest Italianate water fountain. Rama doesn’t even have the heart to drink from it.
Looking at Rama so glum, I get an idea. A place I remember loving as a kid. I tell her I have an idea, I want to take her to a real fountain of youth.
