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An alligator rests so heavy  on his belly  you can never imagine him and the muddy bank as two as separate entities. Only a few yards away, a two lane highway whurs and whizzes with the sounds of its daily traffic . You count egrets and herons and these prehistoric monsters with your brother as your parents drive through the familiar bridges and stretches of land that string the Keys together.  A seventeen mile stretch of stinky sweet mangrove is the constant separation between you and ‘permanent’ land. After a few years of living here you will move to a nearby southern state and excitedly remark to your classmates that all around you, for countless miles, exists uninterrupted land. No longer will you stay up after your little brother has made those few telltale sounds at night, the gentle ‘cluck, cluck ,cluck’ that he made with his tongue against the roof of his mouth, letting you know he’s asleep and its safe to peek out of your window and look upon that black water. When you watch long enough, the mullet jump out of the canal and smack down on themselves and back into the water from where some predator has frightened them into a glittering burst into the still and humid night air. Once, on a very rare and lucky night, you see a reticulated reptilian tail swish out of the very top of that water and duck back under… and when the  tourists come to visit their summer rentals and dive from their corrugated tin roofs into that very same canal, you will wait in quiet and knowing wonder to see if they will resurface. You learn never to trust the black water made from man-made structures, because you have seen and understood that it is beyond you.

You are 9 years old and this world is Key Largo. You will never really forget this place.

………..

My family moved to Key Largo in 1993, about a year after the devastating Hurricane Andrew, when my father got a job in nearby Homestead, FL. We moved from Athens, Alabama, a small but sweet country town where we had lived for a little over a year. Florida was just another place to add to my list of ‘lived there, done that’, another chance to start new with schoolmates and create a different identity. It was yet another new place to discover, piece by piece, until the jigsaw of the new landscape made such perfect sense that you could never undue what you would soon make known.

Now suddenly, next week I turn 27, and recently have realized that among my childhood homes, it may have been Florida that cast its spell on me more than any other place I would spend my adolescence.

So what was it about this place? As an adult, its easy to cast Florida aside as chintzy beach town paradise, a buffet of amusement parks and outlet malls, sleepy lazy southern towns, beach bums and driftwood: the poor man’s tropical paradise. And while you can never speak for an entirety of people by one example itself, we can probably agree that Florida does tend to have quite the personality… it just depends on which one you meet that day that will make its strongest impression on you.

The truth is, just like many other southern states, Florida can get a bad wrap. But if I could bet on it, I would probably say you just don’t know it like my nine-year old self did.

If you met her, she would tell you about all the adventures she had, but she probably wouldn’t use the word ‘adventure’, she would probably just describe her day…watching lizards sun themselves and pump their beards among her Barbie dolls she had left outside overnight, the coral snake she had accidentally come face to face with when she was helping her brother fish minnows out of the canal, the cheeky pelicans who hang out near the fishermen waiting for pouches to fill with a mid day snack…

The wealth of wildlife was so overabundant for me and my family that we quickly got used to the families of endangered manatees that would visit us in the canal in our very backyard. The first time my mother spotted them she called out ‘Manatee! Manatee!’ and we all ran scrambling out of our home to the edge of the canal and stood in awe of these loveable sea cows. Each time these creatures made it down our canal, one of us would sound the same alarm ‘Manatees! Manatees!’ until this became such a common rallying cry, you could liken it to your mother calling you for dinner. ‘Ill be there in a minute’ you would say, not even bothering to leave your seat.

The truth is, I could write for indeterminable hours on my memories of all things Florida, but for now ill settle for one of my most powerful memories. This was of the week spent on Pigeon Keyfor an environmentally focused field trip. The trip took place during the week of Earth day and my fourth grade class stayed on this tiny island.  During that week we suffered dangerous sunburns, sketched sunrises as we drank our Swiss Miss hot cocoas in the mildly chilly mornings, swung on ropes into shallow lagoons beneath the underpass of the original Seven Mile Bridge above us. Videos capture us playing games of volleyball, sitting cross-legged in camp circles, and singing homespun songs as we trudged our way along the bridge to the campsite. We swapped ghost stories, roasted marshmallows, attested to hearing Flagler‘s ghost train pass in the night, and ran in fear from the island’s rumored evil house cat- a scruffy Persian with the murkiest of intents.

I was glad to learn that the island is still fostering the education of those of all ages, though I don’t think it offers the same feeling of unassuming private intimacy that we experienced during our five days there.  My school group was one of hundreds to have spent a time there, but it was small and special to us. The huts and houses from the remnants of Flagler’s railroad village were simply our humble cabins. It was the refreshing little camping spot to return to after a day cleaning up a nearby beach, or visiting the turtle hospital. Thousands drive by this island daily, yet it remained somehow closed off from the rush of daily life.  Perhaps though, what made this place most memorable of all was that I was first introduced to it during one of youth’s most exciting things: an extended overnight field trip. Oh what places you will go, what people you will meet! What memories you will make, when you don’t expect too much from an overlooked place…

And maybe that is exactly what Florida is to most people: a dangerously overlooked opportunity.As an adult, I’ve almost made the same mistake myself on travels back, but if all I have to do is remember for a moment what it was to be 9 years old and living in this strange land of tropical wonder. A bit heavy handed? Perhaps, but I dare you  to see if I’m not  just a little bit right.

In fact, I cannot help but to find it a bit curious, since the original intention was to create a blog focused on logging my progress back to many of the roads upon which I had made such headway. So where have I decided to begin the road back from derailment?  Well with the roads previously traveled, of course!

Recently I have thought that is often so easy for us to miss the significance of the opportunities we have had in life because we are only looking forward. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but with no time spent recognizing where we have been or where we come from or the opportunities we have had along the way, we are in great danger of missing the point altogether.

To get to the meat of it, I should mention that recently I complained that I have not traveled nearly enough, nor could I see the very real opportunity of ‘real’ meaning ‘foreign’ travel in the near future. The person hearing me complain scoffed at me and reminded me that in less than two weeks I would be traveling out of the country on a business conference. Embarrassing? A bit. Only because I felt like a Greedy Gus. You see, I suffer from that pernicious disease of being one of those travelers who will never ever be satisfied, who will always compare herself to the places she has not yet been and her neighbor has. If there is a cure, I wish someone would offer it up, but I fear I’ll have to swallow the most bitter pill of all for the perpetually unsatisfied and hardly suffering: Perspective.

You see, I have traveled. To be more specific, I’ve lived in more states than I can readily remember, even another country for a brief part of my adult life. I am one of those people who don’t have a quick answer for you when you ask me where I’m from. Try moving to a foreign country and being asked this over and over… trying to explain where you’ve lived and where you are ‘from’ are two entirely different stories. The truth is, nobody cares. They want the quick answer. So you offer them up a state of the Union, and they will mostly walk away satisfied, maybe give you a few anecdotes of their time spent there.  But in the end, it does matter because every place you have lived has made its impression on you.

I know that without all the experiences of the many places I have lived and traveled, even within my own borders, have shaped me into who I am now and where I want to end up in the future, and so with that, I hope you will be interested in a sentimental look back in sincere efforts to make some movement forward.