Time Duplicated

Not only does the state have two time zones, one of its counties is similarly inconvenienced. This clock change follows the Alabama/ Georgia state line, enters Florida and heads due south making for the Gulf of Mexico, only to suddenly head off in a nor’westerly direction, in so doing, making a mockery of the time zone world map that graced the anonymous pages at the beginning of a diary. Confusion, especially for the clocks on our various pieces of tech.

Spring Time

The season is slowly turning. Much of the pastureland in southern Florida is shorn winter brown, what stock that are grazing are being supplemented with baled hay. The roadside verges are no different. Then we travel into an area that has had a wet day not so long ago. The run-off from the asphalt has allowed a greening in a few fortunate selected parts. The early spring flowers are just starting to bloom. Sudden sparks of life in a monochrome of dun. In this instance it’s Zephyranthes lily.

Southern Food

We’re starting to see the slow, changing progression of street food offerings. The gas stations still have the coldest beers, the non-stop drip coffee, the gargantuan sacks of chips. However this one offers up a taste of south, along with what we’ve come to know as an Argentine institution: gas and camp. A fuel-stop with a night-stop attached. They’re never the quietest of places, but there’s a never-ending cavalcade of characters passing through. The deer hunter in full jungle camouflage, the heavy cage in the rear of his truck emitting the howl of a large hound. The duck hunter whose boat is decked in branches and palmetto fronds. The grumbling bike clad in fringed leather tassels and the near mandatory rebel flag. It also includes the local sheriff just checking to see who’s around. As for the illuminated advertisement, we can confirm the beer’s temperature, that the ‘brownies’ are giants and that the nuts taste exactly for what they are: beans.

Singing Sands

Sometimes in the correct conditions it’s possible to get snow to squeak as you plod through it, it’s a noise like rubbing styrofoam. It’s a pleasurable phenomenon, in part because the conditions need to be cold and dry, which means that it’s generally high pressure sunny. Up until now I’ve not encountered the same in sand. At first I couldn’t work out where the noise was coming from, as it sounded distant yet it stopped when I did. Was it the pair of shoes that I was carrying, brushing against something nylon? Eventually I narrow the squeak down, then with exaggerated strides and scuffing heals I can get the sands to sing, albeit in a monotonal mouse’s symphony. We’re on St. Joesph’s State Park, a barrier island of white sand at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. Plodding through some of the whitest dunes I’ve seen.

Sunday Ride Out

It’s early morning Sunday and we’re being passed by two surges of traffic, ones that start as quickly as they stop. One for going, another for returning; their timing determined by he length of the pastor’s sermon. That ingathering cleared, we’re overtaken by the next sabbath demographic: a posse of hunters hauling skiff craft and barking hounds, their pick-up trucks disappearing up sugar sand tracks into the woods, or down boat ramps into the water. Then comes the next assembly. I can hear them long before they morph from speck to blob in my mirror, long enough to recognise that anthemic score:
“Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?”
Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody, and I can trace it all the way through to:
“Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me
for me
for me…”
before all is drowned out by the vibrating grumble as another tribe of Harleys rumble by. They all wave… is it in sympathy?