I’m writing this on the bus back from the track trip to Florida. It seemed like we traveled through time overnight on the ride south, forward to the spring or backward to last summer: the sun set over a dry, empty field somewhere in the midwest winter and rose on a blooming southern wood. As we passed into Florida, the forests became greener and denser, filled with palm trees and other tropical vegetation that I assumed had died out along with the dinosaurs. We must have crossed the border to Georgia an hour or so ago, because I can already see the hints of the early spring we’ll return to in the empty trees and brown grass.
I’d had minimal experience with Florida before this trip. I was a fan of the Florida Man twitter account, knew that there was a 30 Rock episode about it, and was pretty pissed at the peninsula as a whole after the 2016 election. There were jungles, I knew, but my only conception of jungles came from the background art on certain Bionicle canisters. And I was pretty sure there were alligators somewhere in those jungles, but I wasn’t entirely convinced that alligators existed in the first place. Florida was, in short, a fantasy land, built on tropes and imagination; a place where houses fell into sinkholes and forests grew thick and things never got as complicated as the midwest.
I doubt this will come as much of a shock to any of you, but my main takeaway from this trip is that Florida exists. And it exists in as much detail as anywhere I’ve ever been. I don’t know why exactly I expected somewhere simpler than Iowa, somewhere hastily put together by God after making all the important parts (most of which are scattered across the upper midwest). But I must have, because the tiny details that proved its existence always jumped out at me. If I wanted to preserve my dignity, I’d say that I was just floored by the biodiversity, since that’s where most of the impressive details came from: the two thousand year old tree with overgrown limbs sinking into the ground and bouncing back up again, the lizards skittering between islands of foliage in mall parking lots, the little red strands living in sand on the beach that turned out to be an odd breed of worm. The human-made realness of the place took me by surprise too, though, particularly the distinct accents and proliferation of IHOPs.
I guess the realness of Florida shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to me, since I’ve been on the receiving end of these strange perceptions of foreign states. When I moved from Waco to the Twin Cities in seventh grade, I milked my novelty value as a Texan for all it was worth and in turn got bombarded with a bunch of questions about my home state. Did I ride a horse to school? Did my family own a stockpile of guns? Why didn’t I speak with an accent? I wasn’t exactly put off that the stereotypes were wrong (even though it wasn’t true for my family, they did sort of hit the nail on the head with the gun thing). It’s just that there was so much more to it than that. Waco, Texas was a real place with real people, and to describe it all would mean articulating everything, down to the heat glare on the asphalt of a grocery store parking lot.
Over the past few days I’ve been reading Ecotopia, a battered paperback science fiction novel I bought in the forgotten corner of Grinnell’s game store (which is more or less a forgotten corner itself). There’s not much to the plot or characters. It’s more of an extended world building exercise, an ethnography of a place that never existed. It never quite holds up, though. The alternative history always stands out from the real history and the Ecotopians all seem uniform in a way that people in the real world never are. As wildly imaginative or tediously detailed as it is at times, it never captures that same sort of tactile realness as I found with a week long stay in Florida.
Isn’t that sort of a dark note to end on, that our perceptions of a place can never really match the overwhelming detail of the real thing? Maybe not for most people, though as a fiction writer I can’t help but be a little depressed by this conclusion. But maybe this just reveals that I’ve been holding fiction to a very high standard. As wonderful as it is, it’s probably a stretch to say that it’s a suitable replacement for real life. At best, it’s a supplement. And the tradeoff is that there are always new places to go, bits of the map where shallow facade of our perceptions is ready to be burnt away and replaced with something real.
