St. Joe’s creek
We stand at the ugliest parking lot yet. It services a warehouse where they sell laundry equipment. Behind a sagging chain link fence topped with barbed wire there is another lot with vans and trailers, all bordered by a thicket filled ditch.
I pull out a copy of a Citizens Title and Abstract Company
map of Pinellas County from 1925 and extend it to the length of my arms. Rama studies
it from behind my shoulder. The grid on the map is mostly a surveyor’s wishful
thinking. If you look closely you can see that most of what is actually there
is sinkholes and and swamp. This was back before the Euclidian mindset had
won out, and all the creeks and wetlands had been straightened and squared and
dredged and drained and canalized.
I point to one of the many lakes.
We are here.
I then look at Rama’s phone to orient myself, yes, the creek starts here and meanders towards the West. Creek may be too generous of a term. From here where it starts, it is a sun-bleached drainage ditch with a little rivulet of algae-green water trickling down it, encased on either side by sickly grass. We walk over to the featureless culvert that passes over the ditch. I can already see a white ibis, its football shaped body and long orange beak, carefully walking down the green rivulet, looking for something to eat.
We stand now at the headwaters of a once mighty waterbody,
Welcome to St. Joe’s Creek! Back when this map was made, this part of the
peninsula was all still pine savannah, with just a few dirt roads leading down
to the town of St. Petersburg farther south. Where we’re standing wasn’t even
farmland, just untamed swamp. St. Joe’s Creek ran free back then, so free you wouldn’t
even recognize it as a creek, like the underground aquifer, the movement of
surface waters was interconnected, extensive, and wild. back then, you couldn’t
quite say at any given time where the land ended, and the water began. But it
was perfect for someone like Joe Silva, a 19th century trapper who would come
to hunt turtles. Think of him now, a haggard, sunburnt settler, long white
beard and a straw hat, stomping around in the muck, he would have had the whole
place to himself!
Over the years, as more Anglo settlers arrived, the city would began to encroach, more cabins, more farms. At the turn of the century the creek still acted as a drainage basin for a large part of the peninsula, fluctuating in size according to the seasonal rains and meandering out of its banks. It wasn’t until the 1940s when engineers would finally imprison its path in this cement enclosure. Once entrapped, the city was free to grow according to the grid the city’s first planners envisioned. Housing subdivisions, shopping centers, highways, could all colonize and criss-cross over the area that once all belonged to St. Joes Creek. By the last decades of the 20th century, not only was the Creek deprived of its nourishment and freedom, it would be relegated and forgotten as merely an ugly sewer drain back behind people’s houses and places of business. If ever mentioned, it would only be for serving its transactional, municipal function as a drainage basin for channeling storm water.
But much is preserved through neglect. Forgotten by humans, St. Joe;s Creek has been able to eke out its own ecological freedom. In a place like suburban Florida, ditches and medians and empty lots are the only places that don’t get sprayed by herbicides or mowed by lawnmowers. Forgotten by civilization, most of St. Joe’s Creek has become a thick, narrow jungle, overflowing with trees and plants and reptiles and birds. It is untamed, mutant wilderness. When I was a kid, St. Joe’s Creek ran right behind my house. I could jump over our short fence and suddenly be in the middle of a forest. To me St. Joe’s Creek was heaven. Any day after school I could come back here and find new things.
We drive back on a road running parallel to the creek until we find another spot where it crosses over the creek. Here the mowed grass has given way to haggard palm trees which have escaped captivity. Look Rama, I point out over the chain-link fence, at the border of the ditch. It’s one of your compatriots! She looks confused. I’m referring to that palm tree. Don’t let it fool you, it’s not native to Florida at all. It’s a Date Palm, native to the Middle East. One of its dates, planted in front of somebody’s mansion or golf course, was eaten by a bird most likely, and the seed ended up here, free to grow wild with all these other plants and trees.
We
continue on and I use Rama’s phone to find the next time the creek crosses
under an avenue. This time, when we stand on the bridge overlooking it, the
entire drainage ditch has been taken over by a dense thicket of palmetto,
Silver buttonwood (Conocarpus erectus), oak, Giant Leather Fern (Acrostichum
danaeifolium), and all other kinds of vines and ferns and grasses I can’t
identify. It even comes up out of the ditch and overhangs the cement bridge,
protecting us with its thick bramble shade.
If you really want to see where I grew up, it wasn’t a house
or a high school or a movie theater. The formative site of my childhood was
this drainage ditch, where I was able to sneak between the crack of civilization and disappear. You
could follow the course of this little creek for miles and miles, capture anole
lizards in your hands, find groups of frogs convening inside a used tire, wildflowers growing in the muck. I would collect debris and garbage, dragging planks of wood and plastic debris to make forts and hideouts. Now if we were to walk through here, and I’m not saying we should, but I could show you all kinds of things, a fascinating mix of mutant exotic plants and animals, pet store snakes and ornamental orchids and civilizational flotsam. The field guide has a great passage on novel ecosystems.
But what I could also show you is the secrets hiding place that the creeks reprovides to look back at the so-called civilized world. The backyards of houses and seeing the back of businesses that aren’t meant to be seen, we could follow the creek and travel through the tunnels and engineering infrastructure, the bowels of water treatment plants, stand underneath of cloverleaf of highways and grasp truly what a monstrosity they are. At one point the creek passes by the county jail. Hidden from respectable society’s view, this carceral capitalist castle can be clearly seen from the bramble. Imagine , in turn, what a refuge this little thread of wilderness must provide for the people who look out on it from inside.
When I was a kid, every year that I got older I could venture a little father, be a little more daring, get closer to the coast. One long summer day, I just kept going, past the Go-Kart track and the plant nursery, past the trailer park and the water treatment plant, where other streams and creeks fed into it and I had to walk alongside an increasingly wide and deep river, where the thicket alongside it grew wider too, harder to push my way through, from grass, to a dense thicket, to impenetrable brush. By the time I couldn’t go any further, the city was no longer visible. All I could see was mangrove forest. I didn’t make it to the open water that day water, but I did get to where St. Joe’s Creek was once again interconnected, extensive, and wild.
Rama spends a while looking out at the thicket.
مدها متان
She holds her arms
behind her back pensively. You know, this landscape really is beautiful. It has
a wild tropical pastoral quality. She says it looks like a redneck version of a
Martin Johnson Heade painting. Sometimes she makes references to American
culture that I don’t understand as well.
اكواتاريوم – aquatarium
We park at the base of a tall apartment tower block, blocking our view of the ocean. The only movement is an old couple in the tennis court next to us, dressed in matching white outfits, languidly pop a tennis ball back and forth to each other.
It is a day of surprises and wonder for our young explorer Ross B. He would have been content if the day has been spent travelling through time to witness dioramas of the golden age of piracy. But the penninsula has so much more amusement to offer. His father brings him the station wagon down to the water for yet another magical roadside attraction. This time he is transported to another mysterious realm, that which lives underwater in our vast oceans. Welcome to the former site of the Aquatarium.
I pull the old brochure from my backpack and read directly from it.
The Aquatarium is located on the Gulf of Mexico at beautiful St. Petersburg Beach. Opened officially in June, 1964, the main structure houses the largest aquarium tank in the world. Whales, porpoises, turtles, stingrays and thousands of marine fishes live as they do in the open sea. Through dozens of picture windows, set in two level, visitors can study and observe these sea dwellers close up with all the drama of the struggle for existence in the areas of the world that occupy nearly four sevenths of our entire globe. Under the Golden Dome of our spacious amphitheater of the main aquarium tank, showtime is hourly every day. A snack bar, gift shop and film shop for your convenience. No visit to the Sunshine State would be complete without seeing the St. Petersburg Beach Aquarium.
I hand over the brochure to Rama so that she can take a look. She groans nostalgically at the Jet-age modernism. Two large interlocking circular structures, one is two large cement ring stadiums surrounding a bright green pool of water, the other a smaller golden geodesic dome. Oh no, what are you doing to me?
She then turns the brochure over at half a dozen color photographs with captions.
Colorful reef fishes against a coral background form settings of beauty for any visitor’s camera.
Under the Golden Dome trained sea lions and educated porpoises entertain.
Wow, that text. It communicates more about the earnestness and excitement of that age (يعبر عن حماسهم الناصع). It’s pure poetry, Rama says. Next you’ll be telling me about Alph, the sacred river, which runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.
في زَنادو* أصدر قبلاي خان
قراراً ببناء قبّةِ ابتهاج فخمةٍ :
حيث جرى النهر المقدَّس، ألفْ،**
خلالَ كهوفٍ لا يستطيع إنسان إدراكَ مداها
أسفلَ إلى بحرٍ لا تطلع عليه شمسٌ
Haha, some other strange reference.
Earnest people from another age, unspoiled, who could be enraptured simply by a fish in a porthole.
Yes, so you can imagine the surprise of young Ross B. pulling up in his station wagon to the Aquatarium on that sunny day. First an enormous pirate ship, and now this time as he pulls into the parking lot it looks as though they have arrived at a space station, or a sea base. Imagine Ross waiting timidly by the side of his father as he waits in line for a ticket.
I point at another spot on the brochure.
You can see in this picture the large shotcrete grotto built above the ticket window, an underwater ferryland inhabited by mermaids and sea creatures. Ross staring up at what would be for him a gargantuan diorama of fantasy. A shark framed by fake concrete, snarling down at Ross, the scaled tail of a mermaid propped up sitting on the edge of the rock shelf, so close Ross can almost touch it. He hides behind his fathers leg, clutching onto his pants, hiding from the glassy glare of Poseidon staring down from atop his shotcrete throne.
Once out of the blinding sunlight of the parking lot, Ross’ family would be greeted by a night’s sky of aquamarine nebulas, as their eyes adjusted it would be become clear that these were not nebulas but rather a hallway of windows looking in on bright coral aquariums, filled with hundreds of kinds of technicolor fish, gawking and puckering their lips back at young Ross. (الشاب روس).
Undersea “picture windows” on two levels enable visitors to view panorama of life below.
The family enters a curvilinear hall, two stories with a balcony, all along the outer wall is a gallery of windows looking out at various aquariums, including the big central tank where the main show takes place. Ross visits each one, gazing up on the assortment of fans and spiny rocks and swaying sea grass. His eyes are transfixed, feeling like he has submerges into the depths of the ocean, he forgets to breathe. This is what the waves conceal in its depths, its hidden crustaceans and urchins and curtain tailed fish and manta ray who slowly beats its enormous wings and coasts by. A fish with clown yellow sides turns around behind a fork shaped rock and looks him directly in the eye. The fish stares back.
I can’t believe my eyes! He says to himself, a stranger next to him chuckles.
Ross! Come look at this! He breaks the stare and looks across the curvilinear hall. His mother is pointing at a window looking in on the main aquarium tank.
Dancing girl skin divers feed the porpoises and other marine species.
Out in the hazy green ether (أثير), he sees something moving. It’s a woman! Ross can faintly make out the figure of someone in a banana yellow swimsuit with a little flailed skirt, breathing with scuba gear, being circled by an assortment of every size of fish. Grouper, Saw Fish, Tortoise, cobia (سكل). They close in and snatch things from her hand. Bubbles steam out of the side of her face and fish swim through the airy curtain. She’s feeding the fish! Ross’s dad hoists him up onto a small ledge they’ve installed so that he can get a better look. He can’t believe his eyes! (العيون لا تُصدق) The diving girl waives at the window, Ross waives back. He sees behind her another dark figure approaching, it has a fin, is it a shark?!
Watch out! He wants to tap on the glass to warn her. Ross’ mother pulls his hands away, no Ross it’s okay, that’s a porpoise.
Porpoises, most intelligent of the creatures of the sea, are genuine crowd pleasers.
An announcement comes on the speaker in the curvilinear hall, it is time for the main attraction! The crowd makes its way to the stairs and Ross takes his father’s hand. They emerge out into a stadium where men in fedoras and crisp white shirts, taking it all very seriously, take their seats in the grandstand. Women in triangular sunglasses and belted dresses, taking it all very seriously. Ross tries looking down into the pool to see the scuba diving woman, but can’t look down into the tank from where he’s sitting. A man dressed in all white wearing a milkman hat struts out with a metal bucket of fish and takes the microphone. He explains some facts about the tank, that it’s 100 feet in diameter, 22 ½ feet in depth, containing 1 ¼ million gallons of filtered sea water, which is circulated at the rate of over 1,900 gallons per minute.
and then before you know it it’s time for the
“Flipper Stand.” The Aquatarium’s family of sea lions bag of tricks is endless at showtime. They seem to enjoy the show more than the crowd does.
Ross can’t believe his eyes, these enormous man-sized creatures clapping their paws and listening to the instructions of the trainer, who communicates back to them. They seem to smile, their whiskers upturned at the corners. They mount some type of striped cylinder and lift their flippers into the air. They line up and each receive a fish. One hoists its back end up rests it on the other, creating what the trainer calls a “sealbarrow.” Ross laughs and laughs and tugs on his mom’s shoulder to make sure she understand the joke as well. The seals line up and each receive a fish and then dive back into the water so that the next sea creature can take its turn. There is the fin again, but Ross knows better this time. The porpoise sticks its head up out of the water and speaks in chirps. Ross gasps. This creature communicates too. The man in white tosses an orange ball and the animals starts pushing it along the surface of the water. It leads the ball over to another edge of the pool and then pops it up into the air. It goes through a hoop! Then the trainer fetches a large ring attached to a cross beam and brings it close to the water. Everyone starts clapping and cheering as the fin zooms around the circumference of the tank, picking up speed, and then leaping out of the water and through the hoop.
“Thor,” one of the Aquarium’s educated porpoises likes traveling in the “best circles.”
Ross looks up at his father, also wearing a Fedora, and he smiles down at him. He is impressed as well. But now look at this.
If this wasn’t enough the man in the milkman hat walks over to a mechanical crows nest, which is hoisted up high above the middle of the pool, where more fins circle. One is bigger than all the rest, it zooms around the circumference of the tank, picking up speed, and then leaping out of the water, it is a whale!!
“Jonah,” 1600-lb. whole, leaps for food.
As I finish narrating the water show, I reach into my backpack to pull out the bright red view-master. (فيو ماستر) and hold it behind my back. I tell Rama to close her eyes. It is now time for us to submerge and explore the depths of the ocean ourselves. I hold the viewfinder over my eyes and click until the wheel of images has moved to one of the hall of windows. I take it and hold it gently over Rama’s eyes, she can feel the lenses against her face and she opens her eyes. She squeals!
OMG it’s 3-D.
She reaches out her hand as if to try to touch the fish. What is this? She reaches her hands up to the contraption being held up to her eyes and takes hold of it.
Oh! I remember seeing these on tv when I was a kid. I didn’t realize this is what they did. This is incredible.
I tell her I have other reels of tourist sites, a big ream of them from my grandfather’s collection. She narrates what she can see through the view-finder. A porpoise in mid-flight, it’s Jonah! You can see the splash coming right for you. A genuine crowd pleaser. A porpoise bouncing a ball off its nose, right into the lens. Another image is of the shotcrete grotto overhang above the ticket window to the Aquatarium. Wow, you can see the stiff, vacant looks of the stone mermaids, it’s like I’m really there!
With her eyes in another decade I can look unabashedly at the rest of her. I like how she looks. I like how she dresses. She flips the dial on the viewfinder and is swarmed by seat turtles and sea stars. She lets out a little laugh. I like the little sounds of excitement she makes, not like she can’t control them but that she isn’t trying to suppress them. I like how she is curious and uneasily satisfied. I like the color of her skin and the color of her hair. I like how an uncertainty about whether or not she likes me is giving way to a certainty that we’re having fun together.
She sets down the viewfinder and smiles back at me.
I can’t believe my eyes!
Driving test (تَشَدَّقَ)
We pull into the parking lot of the DMV. It is almost full so Rama expertly parallel parks in a corner of the lot. I applaud her. She says nothing can compare to trying to park in Beirut.
Let me get it all out once and for all. We’ve done a lot of driving the last couple of days. The car is a technology which has allowed us to see so much, to travel to the far corner of this city. I guess city is too generous a word, something implying a unitary logic or structure. We’ve travelled all across this sprawling metropolitan area, this undifferentiated and generic patchwork of scatterized living and superfluous shopping, this metastasizing construction site. But every place we’ve travelled, in general, looks like everyplace else. Nicer and worse variations of the same drywall and plywood construction. It seems to go on forever.
It reminds me of being a young kid, looking out the window captive as my mom drove me someplace, to the supermarket or the home goods store. I could never tell from looking out the window how far we had gone, or how much farther we had to go. It all looked the same back then even when I was living there everyday. Whenever I tried to go off and explore on foot or by bicycle in middle school I was often cut-off before too long travelling in any direction by an avenue or a highway. My friends lived too far away to get to by myself, and so I continued being reliant on my parents for rides. Rides. Getting rides. Your whole life a series of getting rides. As a species we evolved to stand up off of our hands and walk on our back legs, conquering the entire world’s habitats with our opposable thumbs and stalking gate, but now here in the era of decadence we’ve devolved and now need a ride to do anything. A ride to get to school. A ride to see a friend. A ride to buy a carton of milk. We’ve built ourselves a civilization of self-willed invalidism.
I wouldn’t have been able to find the words to express it back then, but as a kid I knew something was wrong. The way we’d set everything up. Even though I was born here, it felt like something was off. That sense of injustice and the absurd is channeled, in apolitical american cultural production, into a more nebulous hatred and railing against the suburbs. Half of punk music is complaining about it. But this confuses the symptom with the cause. It’s not the box stores and the ranch style homes which make the world into a scatterized hellscape, if they were all closer together, you could just walk between them. That would be nice actually. It would certainly give you more room for other things, like mangrove forests. No, what makes the landscape so inhospitable is the cars!
And I knew this in high school, I just didn’t know how to express it. Cars are a religion, cars are the water we’re swimming in. So my way of expressing things was to be a pain in the ass. I was always bumming rides from friends, or showing up an hour late because I insisted on taking the bus. The one thing I refused to do was drive myself. It was the principle of the thing. It was as though I wanted to prove that a normal human being, left only to their natural appendages, couldn’t navigate this habitat.
When I think about it, now that I have the words, that’s the real reason I left. People move to the Big City to become famous or to become successful, city of dreams and what have you. Working at bars I’ve met a million aspiring movie stars. But I didn’t come to the city to be successful. I just wanted to be in a place that was scaled and built for the human, not the car. A city inhabited by pedestrians and organized around public transportation. Where you can walk to a park and sit in a park. Even though it’s the farthest thing from nature, it still feels more natural than being in this sprawling, low-slung junk yard of cheaply built chain stores and tract housing. I just love living in the city because I never have to get into a car.
More than anybody, my dad hated all of this. He wanted me to be a normal person and drive a car like anyone else. He loved cars, he had two or three that he kept as playthings. Whenever he’d pick me up for his visits, it would be in a convertible. It was completely beyond his comprehension how someone could see cars as anything but manifestations of the American dream: luxury and convenience! Eventually, as I got closer and closer to finishing high school as a cripple in his eyes, he was fed up. I imagine so were many of my friends who acted as my chauffeurs. I could only put up a fight so long before my youthful aspirations for a simple and moral lifestyle were ignored, and like everyone as a rite of passage I took Drivers Ed and had to take a driver’s test in order to get my license. Sitting in the classroom felt like being in a reeducation camp, forced to listen to enemy propaganda. Once the course was over, there was nothing left to do but take the final exam.
But whereas the real estate test I purposefully flunked the test, when I came here to this DMV and actually took my driving test, I earnestly flunked. I sat in the driver’s seat with the examiner in the passengers seat, just like in the movies. He has his little judgemental clipboard and kept furiously writing notes as I tried my best to remember what I had learned in class and during practice. But my instincts took over. I failed to yield while entering the highway, I ran through several stoplights, and I almost rear ended a dump truck. And failed utterly at being able to parallel park.
My dad was furious, he said I failed on purpose. He didn’t believe me when I said I just couldn’t do it. But it was the truth. There are things in life that you can find of such little value, so useless that you refuse to participate, that when you’re finally forced to adopt them, blackmailed by the normal maintenance of modern living, that you have so much antipathy towards them that even when you try to take it seriously your instincts fail at them. You’re physically unable to comply.
Anyways, that’s why I can’t drive.
