What I see when I look up (II)

You can't really own a tree. And you certainly can't own the sky. But at the very least you can rent access to them, which I have, apparently.

Oh look I just bought a house

I think this is the spinster version of posting pictures of your kids, but here are some photos of the house I now own, or will own in about 30 years.

House

Swing!

A view from the deck

Blurrily inside (there's a loft!).

(We shall never speak of this again. Except for when we do, because it relates to Important Things I am writing about. Like trees.)

On another note

We may need to rethink the whole Florida thing.

During my very cursory, five-day visit, I felt a resigned malaise. The natural world seemed too exhausted to replace the decaying artificiality -- like someone dropped LA into a swamp, and then sprayed it with a fine dust.

The green seemed not quite green. Like one of those movies where everything is shot with a blue filter to make Mel Gibson killing stuff  look cooler. But instead of blue it was all gray.

And the heat and the sky didn't do much to temper the gray -- it just washed out the contrasts.

The new and shiny parts (Orlando I'm looking at you), seemed desperate.

I'm not sure Ponce de Leon arrived in Florida so his name could one day adorn a shopping mall featuring a Sears and a Blockbuster. Actually, I don't know, maybe that's exactly what the Spanish were thinking when they arrived.

Along my drive, I began imaging a Florida edition of "Escape from New York," in which the whole state is walled off and depopulated and then filled with criminals.

But without the criminals part, because then that's really not changing much (Election 2000 I'm looking at you).

Anyway, it'd be cool if we gave it back to the alligators, just until it gets its color back.

I did not see any alligators, although there were signs alluding to their existence.

Florida

I went to Florida for five days to see rail yards. There were trains and stuff. But all I really remember, or want to write about at this exact second, is the ocean.

Like most of the Atlantic coastline, or at least the beaches I've been to -- a boardwalk in South Carolina, a dark rocky corner of a Massachusetts beach, a rocky fly-infested stretch of Montauk, Coney Island -- the beaches in Florida are brown and well tread.

I only went to two, so I might not be accurately describing all of Florida's beaches. But I'm going to assume they're all brown and well tread until I find the great, undiscovered tropical-ish paradise someone, somewhere said was in Florida.

On my way to Georgia I made a not incredibly necessary stop in Daytona Beach, and on the way back I stopped in St. Augustine, the spot on which the Spanish first starting fucking things up.

I had this ides that beaches advertised on highway signs would lead me to places of quiet solitude, or at least places where sky and ocean overwhelm whatever man has built.

Daytona Beach, not so much.

It seems like there's a blue print for tacky beach-side tourist locales.

All restaurants must feature fried things that may have come from the sea, and have either sea creatures (weird) or pirates (kinky) as mascots.

The closer you get to downtown more utilitarian thoroughfares are replaced with little cobblestone roads that look like they're taking you to the beach, but actually take you to another filled lot of $10-per-hour parking.

Located across from one another, on all streets, are tourist-oriented outlets with the same beach towels, sunglasses, shot glasses and T-shirts.

Beach-related puns abound.

(Just a word of advice, "Hair on the beach" is not an appealing title for anything).

Imaginative names -- Driftwood Drive, Mermaid Circle, Ocean Boulevard, Beach Street -- aid in disorientation.

It seems like it should be an easy enough thing, but even the ocean was hard to find in Daytona Beach -- where dingy high- and low-rise hotels, all painted orange or pink, obscured the area's main draw.

All along the sand people not walking their dogs or taking pictures seemed confused about why they were there -- this is vacation, right?

St. Augustine was pretty much the same. Only the claustrophobic beach strip was more annoying because you couldn't tell it was the beach strip until you hit the luxury condos that signaled the end of it, and the beaches were less impressive, with more orange people on them.

It didn't really matter though.

Water is water. The ocean, even the parts we have touched, is connected to something great and wide and very old and very primal.

When I finally touched the waves I did not care about what had been constructed around them.

I think I frolicked (really), jumped up and down, sort of ran, stumbled in, stumbled out. And got sort of wet. And then walked away, and then walked back, and got really wet.

And all of this in 10 minutes, and I felt whole, and like crying, and like I was home and missed home.

And I thought, the beaches I left are so much better than these. So off I will go again, one day or another.

Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan

I recently went on the first of what I expect to be many trips driving around the Midwest visiting rail yards.

In the Midwest, there aren't so much adventures to be had than things to pass by. Constructing a narrative seems tricky, and I'm too lazy to write a "things I think when driving in my car" essay.

So, here is a rundown of the things I saw between here and other Midwestern states:

• asphalt
• towering windmills lazily turning, as if they knew someday they will be gods among ground dwellers who have forgotten their purpose
• mist above the grass, as the impossible heat dissipated
• grey blue sky
• a round round orange sun, hovering, not setting
• traffic circles and knitted off-ramps
• courtyards of highway
• fluorescent cones
• determined, sickly prairie in the medians
• a field of flowers, surrounded by a winding train, left to its own purple and white devices
• plains re-forested
• forests cut out to make way for plains
• Indiana, a strange idyllic state
• "Kum & Go," "Love's" -- both real, both gas stations
• tall tall light poles riveted along concrete conveyor belts
• those mushed and aging buildings in wayward sections of urban sprawl
• speaking of which, "Chicks on Dix" (on Dix St., Detroit) 
• and oh yes, corn.