When the Wisdom Dude sits here and does what he does, he is essentially taking out his thoughts and playing with them, first for his own amusement and perhaps instruction, then for yours. Let me tell you a little bit about life in the hammocks, and how it differs from the Big City — even a Big City as intimate and friendly as Tampa is. We are accompanied in the remote areas by the sounds of nature: sometimes hostile, and now and then intrusive, as snakes look for nice, warm places to sun. The cats like the same places — don’t wager the baby’s Savings Bonds on the snakes!
Out here in the hammocks, we import our own sounds and make our own mark. We have to; there’s a lot here that isn’t us! But the big, busy satellite “bird” 22 thousand miles up in the sky brings the world’s sights and sounds to us. And all it brings isn’t too bad; we think out here that it being brought at all is pretty nifty, worthy of celebration. (Of course, we’re Gulf Coast people: we think anything is worthy of celebration.)
Once upon a time, what is now a quiet and residential community in Tampa, on West Hillsborough Avenue, was something close to wilderness. On Saturday nights, people for miles could hear the cars crashing at Speedway Park. The sound of bulldozers clearing land was probably almost as loud as downtown traffic noise today, as huge areas of the state seethed and rolled with this new life, us.
Disgruntled snakes soon found — instantly found! — that our improvements on the landscape were just to their liking. We had ditches and drains for hiding out and nice, warm slabs of concrete for sunning. In my boyhood Florida, where Babe Zaharias was a local figure and Ike was new on the job up there somewhere among those underprivileged Northerners, the snakes were coming out of the pockets and mucklands like crazy and discovering all these new accommodations. It got positively slapstick out on Hillsborough: “Space Patrol” on the radio and a little diamondback snake coming in under the front screen door to say howdy. They get through and into impossibly small spaces, they really do. There were gators in the yard, too, and a hell of a hike to the school bus stop. All that and a baby-boom school explosion.
(We’ve still got snakes, out here in the hammocks. Mother Mary found one in her underwear drawer recently, and said something unspiritual. The Wisdom Dude told her to relax, that there were snakes in the Garden of Eden, and anyway, if St. Patrick could rid a whole island of snakes, surely Mother Mary could drive a few snakes out of her dresser. Mother Mary said something very unspiritual to the Dude.)
I have a pair of bifocals that allegedly render me less venerable in appearance: they have no lines. They also inhibit my peripheral vision, which with my background — those snakes can go anywhere! — tends to make me a little edgy. The Wisdom Dude sometimes takes a proactive view of erring on the side of caution. Even after years on streets where the snakes all wore Bally of Switzerland or Joseph A. Banks, I have remained conscious of small, almost whispering movements out of the corner of my eye, and just what is going to be there where I place the next footstep.
There are times, even whole periods, when finishing the race at all seems plenty good enough, and my Florida boyhood was one. But it left its mark. For the rest of my life, I will continue not to miss very much; I will always keep the awareness that that little “breeze” in the tall grass could really and truly kill you dead if you blindly poked face or finger into it.
And on the streets of Washington, D.C., for years, I saw the people who so often decide “the best for the rest” (their phrase) stride obliviously not just through mud puddles but over and through the chewing gum that binds together every square inch of concrete on every sidewalk in Washington. Washington, D.C.: where arrogance is expressed in many ways, large and small, and spitting out gum in the path of passers-by is one of the small.
But few people pay any attention to where they’re going in Washington. People fall down open manholes in the Northeast megalopolis cities all the time; it’s not a terribly uncommon accident. I can’t really imagine that. Nor can I imagine stepping into an obvious pothole full of water, as viewers of the movie “Groundhog Day” will remember with a certain affection — and that happens in the Northeast megalopolis all the time. I do recall once coming close to such a blooper, while visiting some northerly clime, but my Florida-kid’s almost instinctive recoil from stepping on a submerged log saved me. Some things you just never quite get over, and stepping on a submerged log that turned out to be a gator was the kind of bad dream that kids talked about in the schoolyard of my bygone era.
Out here in the hammocks, we’re not tall swamp, and there’s no Pogo or Albert
Alligator
The sky is up there, and it’s all full of stuff, just hanging there saying, “Pick me.” On a good night you need almost no help to see the satellite “birds” out there sending you “Nick at Night.” Sooner or later, we’re going to have to start paying calls up there to fix things that have broken down, and some sort of on-site maintenance and repair is going to look like a paying proposition. And word is that there’s a lot of stuff hanging there in orbit that’s ripe for the taking. A person or persons with some decent investment money and a sharp eye for things in the weeds could find ways to advance the frontiers, but more to the point, to make a buck. That’s why the birds are up there now, to make a buck, however noble-sounding the palaver about communication or acquisition of information.
That’s me, in Florida, dreaming at the night sky. There’s no night sky into which one could cast a dream in Washington. Despite the in-town presence of the techies from the satellite communications companies, the techies are just menials and tradespeople to the governing class. It might as well be magic for these people have no sky.
They have no sky! Can you imagine that? Buildings and other artificial structures all around, always a glare, ever a reddish haze on the horizon, just a dim light or two up there — two of them turn out to be planes going into National Airport, and one of them a chopper. There is no Universe from there; the government drones are it — and all alone in it too.
Yours and my yearning for the Universe is a fantasy for the babus in Washington; they have no sky. Every year or so, the D.C. area gets some real cold, snow and ice. They get no winds to speak of, nor are they built for it. Nature consists of the deer that dot the suburbs and the bunnies who ravage the gardens. Nature consists of Bambi and Thumper, in other words, and there is no beckoning Universe beyond regulation 657,947,431(g).
The Tampa Bay area has more violent electrical activity than any place on the planet, and some storms seem to tear at the very fabric of space-time. Who really knows what that kind of power can do? What does it do to people? They’re finding out.
In the Washington, D.C. area, the Powers That Be have developed a sudden concern with exposure to ambient electrical power: yet another thing to barge into someone’s heretofore private premises to inspect and regulate. They profess concern at the juice from our computers and toasters; perhaps, as George Carlin once remarked, we’ll all wake up one morning and have one leg two inches shorter than the other, so let’s regulate the hell out of it now to save the poor babbitry from themselves.
How about an August thunderstorm in Tampa, where your hair stands on end? How can someone making noise of some little burp of power from a PC ever comprehend megawatts crackling overhead, megavolt-bolts stopping off in the neighborhood?
Washington’s perspective is as local as mine. Our government drones are attuned to nuances in people the rest of us might not see. But they are comparatively oblivious to the Universe, and they see the forces of nature through a nursery-rhyme vision. It made sense to them to destroy the Space Program in favor of soup kitchens. They can see the slums; they can’t see space. For them, there’s nothing overhead but gray limbo.
140 : 03Aug09