| | The past few days have taken me over Florida's pretty middle. On the way to Melbourne, I skirted Okeechobee's southern and eastern coasts, through the sugar capital of Clewiston, mango country, banana & coconut groves. South Central Florida is beautiful and strange-- it's not underwater because of an extensive system of canals, dikes, and locks, and also because of a high earthen wall surrounding the Big Lake.
You can drive all the way around Okeechobee and never even see it if you don't stop and climb the hill. Here's Big Lake in all its glory:
Don't be fooled. Whole huge water is only about nine feet deep.
Stayed for a day with friends at a beach-house east of Melbourne.
And returned today, along the Dixie Highway
through the highlands' scrub desert
(yes; the poor soil & frequent wildfires give it a desert's vegetation; no, it doesn't look like desert, especially during thunderstorm season)
orange country,
cattle ranches,
along Okeechobee's northern and western shores, and on through sugar country again.
All around Big Lake, the soil is not Florida sand but rich black swamp-dirt, and the air is so thick it hurts to breathe. Thick and sweet-- you can taste the sugar, just a little.
Here's the Kissimmee River, right before it goes into Big Lake:
heat
During the heat wave that was crippling the Yankee states, Florida stayed cool-- mid nineties, just like it's been here since late April. But today the heat was crushing... well, at least, if you measure the crushingness of heat by how fast your shirt starts sticking to you when you go outside. The air is so wet it's hardly breatheable, and it's swimming with all of God's creatures-- palmetto bugs, ants, spiders, snakes, lizards, you name it. Come dusk, the skeeters swarm.
They speak of children with faces only a mother could love. I love Florida most in August-- because only a Floridian could love this place in August. Sitting on his porch, swatting at skeeters, gnawing the juice off a mango seed.
And it was lovely to cross the wide wet middle, with its thousands of acres of tropical fruits, tiny towns (with names like Yahoo Junction) populated by handfuls of migrant Mexicans. The land is flat, and the sky is wide. When you're crossing those Florida prairies, the land feels big big big.
Tomorrow, though, I fly to New Mexico, which will dwarf my expansive Florida. Very looking forward to it.
fruit
it may be that the buddha has a new favorite fruit.
favoriter, you ask, than the mango?
it may be.
our candidate is the longan, a relative to lychee. One friend claims that a peeled longan looks like an eyeball. It does-- in fact, 'longan' is Vietnamese for 'dragon eye.' Longans are sweet but not strong. They're easy to pick, easy to carry, easy to peel. And right now, the tree in the backyard is busting with them.
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| | Posted 8/8/2006 7:55 PM - 2 views - 6 comments
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