Waking up
-Good morning.
I’m about to reply but then she says it again in Arabic. She says it a few different ways. She’s not speaking to me.
My head is throbbing, tropical fruit ooze must be leaking out of my ears. I don’t remember how we got back to my uncle’s house, or if Rama and I slept in the same bed. I don’t remember the question of us sleeping in the same bed even coming up.
I open my eyes to check and she’s gone. I am in an empty bed, maybe she took one of the other bedrooms. I sit up and see she’s sitting on the huge ottoman in the corner of the room on the phone with her father. She says the whole retinue of goodbyes, pauses, and then says them again. Then she sets down her phone inside her notebook.
-My dad says hi.
I sit up in bed, now I really am confused. But before I have time to think Rama lets me know the plan for the day.
-So!
She holds up her notebook to reveal an illustrated treasure map of Tampa Bay and the remaining artifacts of its tourist traps and roadside oddities. Oh, why didn’t I think of that. She’s obsessed with these places, they have a whole atlas online. On our second date I thought we were on our way out to Flushing Meadows for hot pot but it turned out to be a pilgrimage to see the Whispering Column of Jerash.
-But first! Let’s go see your childhood home.
I give a thumbs up signal but I have no idea what that even means. Does my childhood home mean the one I first lived in, my dad’s house, we wouldn’t be able to get past the security gate in any case. or one of the many places me and my mom moved to when she and my dad got divorced? None of them seem particularly more meaningful than the other.
But I don’t say any of this. I’ll just pick the one I think remember how to get to. we’ve already passed over St. Joes Creek a few times, I should be able to navigate us there. I just need to throw up first.
Pleistocene
We drive straight south on an avenue flanked by a phone store, and a subway sandwich chain shop, and a gas station, and a pharmacy, and a burrito chain story, and a local surf shop, and while we do that, Rama lists the name of the some of the Florida roadside attractions lost to time: Bongoland, Weeki Wachee Spring, the Atomic Tunnel, Citrus Tower, Coral Castle, Midget City, Parrot Jungle, Moonshine Still, Skull Kingdom, Mai-Kai Gardens, Waltzing Waters Aquarama, Marineland. We drive by a perfectly circular lake. We pass by an empty drainage ditch. Rama tells me about diving board horses and elephants on water skies, how the mid-century Florida roadside attraction is a sort of skeleton key for unlocking the political economy of consolidation in the tourism economy since the 1970s.
We pull into a shopping center and Rama goes into the pharmacy to buy some things for the trip that she had forgotten. I sit in the car in the parking lot and feel like I’m going to throw up. I need to distract myself. I look up at the marquee where a fiberglass caveman drags a fiberglass cavewoman by the hair. There were never any cavemen in Florida! Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by Cavemen.
I close my eyes, but all I can see is the wine dark sea, that makes me even more noxious. I look around the car, what is this book Rama put into the car door pocket? Parable of the Sower? She always has a book with her. Oh yeah, I brought a book too. Rama parked the car underneath some sort of oak tree, and I try to identify it. Maybe a willow oak (Quercus phellos), young but doing well stranded here at the edge of a parking lot. What else is there to look at. A bunch of stupid crepe myrtles (Lagerstroemia). Haha, the field guide refers to them as “trees for dullards with no imagination.”
I wonder what it has to say about cavemen in Florida. I sit in the car and look up Pleistocene in the index of my field guide.
Pleistocene geology of Tampa Bay
As you gaze wistfully upon this devastated landscape, its habitable areas filled with sprawl and scatterization, and you try to picture in your mind the Pleistocene Arcadia it must have been prior to ecocidal motorization, you may make the mistake of imagining it centered around more or less the same contours of the Bay as it exists now. But that would be a mistake! When the last ice began to come to an end about 17 thousand years ago, the Gulf coast of west-central Florida would have been about 120 miles west of its current position. By the time of arrival of humans (which can only be approximated by the sudden and precipitous extirpation of megafauna) Tampa Bay was more or less a freshwater savannah-like swamp. When you imagine your ancestors here, on the pitiless hunt for a diverse megafauna that included mastodons, giant armadillos, and saber-toothed cats, you may lament the lost indescribably rich paradise that once was one that was perhaps slightly dryer from the one you reflexively imagine.
I guess I haven’t imagined it at all. Florida, Paradise, without the people. The Milky Way reflected across a shallow lagoon, a flock of birds settling onto the canopy of long pine, the brushing sounds of enormous creatures migrating through the grass.
Rama seems to be taking a while. There is nothing left in the parking lot to identify so I read more about the bay.
Anthropogenic Changes to the Bay and its Watershed
But we can also mourn the Bay as you may have initially imagined it. As environmentally destructive as the native genocide of the megafauna and the 19th century dredging of wetlands for sugar cultivation may have been, nothing could compare to the changes that the Tampa Bay watershed would begin to see starting in the late 1940s and early 1950s. To support rapid post-war coastal urban development, dredge-and-fill techniques removed sediment from shallow parts of the bay, depositing them on-land to create an artificially well-defined shoreline. Onland, regional urbanization has also affected the ecological and hydrologic characteristics of the watershed, through the removal of natural upland and wetland habitats and their associated plant and animal species, and the construction of roads, parking lots, sidewalks, rooftops, and other impervious surfaces. As the watershed as it existed as a system of natural filtration and stormwater channeling has now essentially been destroyed, water now falls over a toxic and impervious urban landscape, soaking up a cocktail of petrochemical products and microplastics and spraying them out over the now sterilized and scarred bottom of the bay, creating a thick sludge layer in which will serve as the only record of our wasteful era preserved in the sediment.
Rama gets back in the car and hands me a bottle of iced coffee and a single packet of Tylenol for the headache. That’s nice of her. Then she hands me a bottle of sunscreen.
-Here, this will help.
I open up the vanity mirror to see my face bright like a tangelo.
-Shit.
She tells me that while she was bored waiting in line she was reading about Webb City, “the world’s most unusual drug store.” where the owner James Earl “Doc” Webb, a patent medicine man, used to sell dollar bills for ninety-five cents and shot the Flying Zacchinis out of a cannon in the parking lot.
-Can we go visit it?
Rama sighs, no, it’s long gone.
As we pull out from the dappled shade of the oak tree I tell her she shouldn’t feel so melancholy about mid-century America, it hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s all still here and will be forever encased in the fossil record.
childhood home – منبت
After crossing a few bridges, we are in the part of the city that feels familiar. My sense of orientation kicks in and I can remember how to get home. I recognize a shopping center whose identical box stores are arranged in the specific order that makes it my local shopping center. I see the Publix we used to shop at, the Burger King where I went to several birthday parties.
Rama drives while holding her cell phone on speaker, speaking to her father again. Cornhole, Gusanos, Coozies, Parrothead. Because of the words she is unable to easily translate I can tell she is recounting last night’s adventure. Or she’ll say the word, and then translate it piece by piece. She has to resort to switching between English and Arabic, she keeps asking for my help. A foam sleeve for keeping your beverages cool. A game where you throw a small cotton bag of rice into a slightly inclined board with a 6” hole in it. Man, when you describe it like that, it sounds so strange.
She has a harder time trying to describe parrothead. Sometimes you can’t describe a subculture, you just have to see it. And even the name, those with the heads of a parrothead? No it’s more like metalhead, deadhead is like a fan of a type of music. Deadhead? Yeah, like the Grateful Dead. So parrotheads are like tropical deadheads. She just continues to just say Parrotheads.
It’s surprising whenever a gap appears in Rama’s seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of American culture. The rare moment when she pronounces a word in English incorrectly. She once said aluminum as though she’s only ever seen it written. Her imported cultural memory, Her turing test English.
هر تورنغ تيست انكلش
We exit the highway and turn onto a wide car avenue, five lanes of traffic in either direction. We come to a red light. I see a lot where I used to explore and build forts out of old sheets of discarded metal and wood, hidden and remote in the bramble. The lot has now all been mowed down and half of it converted into a long-term RV parking lot. We cross over an irrigation ditch and I recognize it immediately, it is St. Joes Creek. The house must be right around here.
The neighborhood is smaller and closer to the ground than I remember it, seriesa of low-slung ranch style houses separated by ornament strewn lawns. Everyone gets their own ugly little sculpture park. Sports team flags, religious wind vanes, concrete dolphins and manatees and metal wire herons and all the other animals that were pushed out to build these houses.
But We pull up to an enormous thicket. Vines crawl up big heaps of broken branches gathered in piles, young pine trees act as tent poles holding up sheets of leaves. I look across the street to confirm, and I see the enormous Salt Life Shrine our neighbor built. Yes, this is where my house used to be. We step out of the car and I stand in front of the tangled wall of vegetation.
They look familiar, they’re the plants I grew up with, familiar but nameless leaf shapes and textures. I pull out the field guide. The ground is covered in a patch of Largeleaf Pennywort (Hydrocotyle bonariensis). the Australian Tuckeroo tree (Cupaniopsis anacardioides) my mom planted a long time ago has gone feral, clusters of red and yellow fruit rotting on the branch. a beautiful patch of Spanish needles (Bidens Abla), an escaped Lantana. It’s botanical chaos.
And a bog cheeto! I say crouching down next to a puddle. I remember these. I pull out my loupe and examine the orange flower, which is really a bouquet of even smaller little flowers. They sparkle like a piñata.
-Bog Cheeto? That doesn’t sound very appetizing
-That’s the common name, I flip to the color-coded flower chart. Orange. you know what’s cool about these? This is a type of Milkwort and is maybe the only plant in this whole neighborhood that actually belongs here, its native habitat is pine-barren depressions and swamps in coastal areas of the southern and eastern United States.
I stand up.
-That’s what this all used to be. I only ever used to see them in abandoned lots and drainage ditches. Bog Cheetos. I wonder what the actual scientific name is. It’s called a Polygala lutea.
– How come you care so much about the Latin names for things?
-How come you care so much about the Arabic translation for things?
Ha.
-Naming things makes them richer, you remember them like friends and then you recognize them in the wild.
Looking into the darkness, holding the entire knotted structure up, I can see our old Live Oak (Quercus Virginians) buried alive. It used to spread its wide, curling branches across this entire yard, the Spanish Moss that draped down, making the whole yard look like it was inside of a Green circus tent. The neighbors hated it for some reason, thought it looked unkept.
Rama stands next to me and puts a consoling hand on my shoulder.
-I’m sorry about this, I wonder why the new owners abandoned the place, so sad.
-Sad? Are you kidding, this is the best thing that could have happened!
