Cypress Swamp Dreams

The soft, delicate spray of needles of a bald cypress glows with a living light in the early morning hours. There in the shaded confines of the forested swamp, amid large and dark trunks and covered by the dense canopy, I stood still and silent, at peace with the moment, asking nothing more.

There were many birds about, the small ones flitting about in the trees, the larger ones sailing in on outstretched, motionless wings, or filling the forest with strange, haunting calls from afar, quavering screams that seem of another age entirely. These kinds of places don't just feel wild, they feel ancient, a part of the long unbroken continuum. 

This is the way things used to be.  

Walking II

I was thinking more about walking the other day as I walked up to the grocery store. Partly I was reflecting a bit further on the article that inspired the previous post, which I forgot to mention and link to. It was a feature Slate did called "The Crisis In American Walking," a four part series, and worth the read.

 One thing I realized is that when we think about it, we often say to ourselves that walking to the store or work is wasting time, given that we have a car and can get there that much faster; with the time we save, we can sleep later, or catch a little more of the game, or whatever. Yet while actually on the walk, it never feels like wasted time. The sun is shining on your back, there is the primal comfort in the repetitive sound of your footsteps, the birds going about their birdly business all around you, etc. Yes, it takes twenty five minutes, rather than the five minutes driving, but only the most unconscious mind could call it wasted. Indeed, the time is much improved.

And all that brings me to an interesting website mentioned in the Slate series, in the third article. It is the Walk Score, sort of a real estate tool (be prepared for a lot of ads on that site), where you can put in your city, zip code, or neighborhood and get a walkability score for it. I recently moved to Cape Coral (yes, that crappy giant subdivision of a city I've mentioned on here before), renting a room from one of my crew-mates. Looking at the zip code I'm in, I see that my new neighborhood rates a 38. Pretty poor.

Of course, if you looked only at the immediate area in which I live, it would show better. The colors on the map bear that out, showing a bit of yellow (though no green) just around here. Most of the Cape is totally unwalkable (red), but this house happens to be quite near a crossroads where there's a decent collection of retail, grocery, and restaurants. Mostly big box stores and strip mall stuff, but I can easily walk to all of them, which is nice, considering that the house I just moved out of, where one only walked to exercise the dog, scored a 3. Yeah, a 3.

So this new place, it's no Greenwich Village, but it's a good step. Now, keep in mind, you have to be careful with the scores. They aren't perfected yet, and here's an example why. I checked a few places in Detroit, and while some of them, like the Wayne State neighborhood, and the enclave city of Hamtramck (yes, that's how they spell it) score pretty high, they are NOT anywhere you want to be walking. At least not at night, alone.

Cape Coral isn't really anywhere you want to be walking either, for different reasons than crime. Mainly it's just boring and too spread out, and so you almost never see anyone walking. Still, I'm going to be walking or riding my bike for shopping, and with bus stops nearby, may take the bus to school (I start back this fall). It would save me the 2 dollar toll on the bridge, plus with a student ID it's less expensive than gas. There's also a bike trail (a glorified sidewalk, but here in sprawl-ville Florida, it gets the designation of "trail) that I may try riding. It runs right along a busy road, though, so the noise is rather obtrusive. But at least it's a safe place to ride, away from the crazy bad driving of the old and the indigenous rednecks...

Time in the Tropics

Well it's getting towards Halloween here in the subtropics of Florida. Driving around you see a few people who have decorated their houses with Halloween paraphanalia; the pumpkins, hay bales, chinsy ghosts and witches hung from the palm trees. It's too weird. What meaning can a fall holiday that marked the final harvests mean in a place that has no real autumn, no real harvests (Florida is for cows and citrus, and little else, and what other crops are planted, they're still being planted now), and a bunch of suburbanites that don't have any real connection to the seasons anyway? We get the same food in winter that we get in summer, only the prices change some. I figure most of the people decorating for the holiday are transplants from up north.

Which got me to thinking. Holidays like this are how we mark the year and its seasonal changes. Here in the subtropics, there isn't much of that kind of change: it cools down in the "winter," maybe even getting some frosts for a few weeks in December and January, but it's sandals-and-shorts weather most of the time, and the seasons are more about rainy season and dry season than anything else. So the old holidays, while observed out of tradition, mean even less down here than they did in the northern cities, where people are still divorced from the land but at least still have the seasons.

I was wondering how people in the tropics proper mark the year-- do the tribes in the Amazon or the South Pacific have holidays in any way reminiscent of those of northern Europe? I wonder if they don't mark the year at all, and whether their sense of time is moreso one of constancy than change. I can't even get my head around it. And could this be why paradise is so often associated with the tropics, a place of seemingly no change? The prefect weather the same every day, the sun always high in the sky, never seeming to "die" or leave for the south.

If this is the case, that they don't see the world as going through a life and a death or dormancy, than it must greatly affect their cosmology. A people who know winter will end up with a cosmology of salvation, a sun god who dies and returns. Such a cosmology would probably be largely unintelligible to a tropical people, who don't see the world in this life and death struggle that needs saving.

I say this because you can look at the religions of the Middle East, clearly shaped by the empty desert and it's single, austere, harsh god, and compare it to the lush and fertile India, with its endless count of gods, its cyclical, constantly returning cosmos of no end, Brahman's dream. And then to China, a temperate land of seasons, summer and winter, with a strongly dual concept of yin and yang. Where people live can really affect their understanding of the world. Not that it's the only thing, and let's not get carried away here, but it's an interesting thing to think about. I don't know much about tropical peoples and their basic beliefs, I wonder if this is true.

Is this why I'm so uncomfortable here in Florida? I mean besides the awful heat and oppressively strong sun, of course. I keep expecting, subconsciously, a shift that never comes, a cool down, a time of rest and silence that is winter, and it never arrives. I'm a man of the North, so that makes sense. But I wonder what it'd be like to be a man of the South, or more precisely and less Northern-Hemispherecentric, a man of the Equator.