Passenger view of a florida landscape
BY GWYN SISE
This state will sink eventually and what’s tenuously sturdy ground now will soon become hot marsh. Every so often we pass a billboard, or a strip mall, or an abandoned school bus in the grassy trenches a few meters from the edge of the road, and I imagine them all sinking too, swallowed by the wet earth. Years and years and years from now a paleontologist will brush away the dry dust only to find the bones of an advertisement for oranges. She will say, Check this one out, Sandy, and then Sandy will peer over her shoulder and he will say, Maybe some sort of religious relic, and then they’ll haul it out and take it to their lab to restore it to its full tangerine glory.
We pass a field full of cows and they look like meaty ghosts swaying there in the dirt. I point them out to Paloma, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you pass a field full of cows, and with only one hand on the wheel she tells me they’re beef cows because only beef cows would be given so much room to wander and eat grass. I realize now that this is why she eats burgers but only drinks almond milk. That has always been her admirable way of things, warped absolutism, figuring that half-assing something is better than no-assing something if fullassing it is off the table. I still take cream in my coffee despite my best efforts to do the same.
There are so many gas stations in a 10 mile stretch and then there are none for what seems like forever until you reach the next 10 mile stretch full of gas stations. A Citgo has a sign outside that says “LAST STATION FOR 56 MILES FILL ER UP WHILE YOU CAN!” and then of course I imagine the paleontologist again and she is laughing either because she doesn’t know English and the font is silly or she knows English and the text and the font are silly. In the parking lot of this Citgo and probably so many others like it is a girl, around 17, sitting on the hood of her car drinking what looks like a slushie. She is reclining against her windshield and looking up at the sky, or at nothing in particular. I imagine her name is Anna and maybe she just got off her 6-hour shift at the Citgo and she just wants a second to breathe before driving back home. The sky above her is huge, the air is still and humid, and her slushie is blue raspberry.
We are driving by endless orange trees. If you walk through the aisles of them you would probably crush so much rotting fruit and the fruit flies would swarm your ankles. I once read that more orange trees are killed by lightning strikes than by plant diseases. It’s hard to imagine, one flash of light and then a pile of pulp and branches, but maybe that’s preferable to the slow decay of crown rot. I watch the trees until my eyes glaze over and they become blurs of green and I can’t even tell they’re bearing fruit anymore and then Paloma says, Times up, it’s been 5 hours, and then she pulls over to the side of the road and now it’s my turn to drive.