Perhaps, in a sense, we don’t only our money does. I’ve long thought: humans were never intended to live here. Dark wiggling meanders (where is the gradient that would straighten them out or speed them up?), the color of tea from the amount of leaf matter swilled out of the sandy ground, and old white dead straight-no, not authors-roads, silver in the sun, made from sand or crushed shells. (And when it teems with bouncing white rain, Day One.) Brown when wet, tan when dry, gray when grown over by the duopoly of pines and palms. Inadequate separation of earth and water, the world as if God had thrown in the towel after Day Two. Round and straight, round and straight, like so many noughts and crosses.

Gridded by highways meeting at infinity, and then the plops of the round ponds. Well, easy come, easy go, as is not-but might as well be-the state’s motto (which, if you must know, is “In God We Trust”).įrom the air, it is cities, bays, jungle, and mottling-what the booksellers call foxing-like a form of rot a level scape of little mushrooms on blotting paper a pointillist blotch the dotting of millions or billions of lakes and ponds among the slabs of forest and field and just swampy spare ground waiting to appreciate the round clumps of “tree islands,” sometimes called “hammocks” in the palmetto and vine scrub sinkholes as much a possibility as mobile homes, like the holes in Swiss cheese, sinkholes popping up-popping down-in the porous limestone when the sand plugging them abruptly drains out of them.

And presumably still impeccably gerrymandered. Where better shoot for space, publicly or now privately, than from the flattest and lowest and most unstable of them all, its highest point barely a hundred yards up in the soggy air? A plump peninsular dangle haunted by the promise of its physical (dis)appearance decades hence, or, the way things are going, sooner than that-shrunk to bone (it has no bone, there is no bone), hence merely atrophied and shortened to a carious stumpy shrivel or wizen, ending at maybe Orlando, all the rest taken back by the Atlantic and the Gulf. The southernmost of the continental United States, the so-called Lower Forty-eight. Steidl, 136 pages.įloridas by Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans.

Hard truck 2 texture through trees