68, Smell of the South
Ali shakes me awake in the still dark, false-dawn, the few hours before sunrise when east-turning Earth’s horizon allows earliest day’s Sol’s rays to start un-blackening the night sky, reducing star shine.
Smell of the South is that mix of fresh green foliage with orange blossom flavor, a pinch of sea air, and maybe an emanation from soil & soul that identifies America’s southeast corner, Georgia and Florida. It is strongest, early morning on awakening but is shortly crowded out of my brain by the smell, crackle and pop of frying bacon. We rented a motel with stocked refrigerator, and Ali is preparing bacon & tomato with lettuce sandwiches and brewing coffee.
Smell of the South is that mix of fresh green foliage with orange blossom flavor, a pinch of sea air, and maybe an emanation from soil & soul that identifies America’s southeast corner, Georgia and Florida. It is strongest, early morning on awakening but is shortly crowded out of my brain by the smell, crackle and pop of frying bacon. We rented a motel with stocked refrigerator, and Ali is preparing bacon & tomato with lettuce sandwiches and brewing coffee.
True dawn’s glow fills the eastern sky as I sit beside Ali watching her drive down a highway west of Savannah Georgia. We parallel the ocean but cannot see it and the terrain is swampy with many inlets and rivers. And the bridges rumble distinctively as our car’s tires roll over their loose lumbers. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Gold Bug took place near here.
After 3-hours drive we rumble over St. Mary’s River into Florida and the highway heads straight south, and soon Atlantic waves roar ashore on our left.
After 3-hours drive we rumble over St. Mary’s River into Florida and the highway heads straight south, and soon Atlantic waves roar ashore on our left.
Sol, the sun, 45 degrees above the Atlantic now, warms us. To our left are railroad tracks and moments ago a hurtling Silver-Arrow painted-logo locomotive pulling 9 cars caught up to us and ran ahead with our speedometer reading 70 miles (113 km) per hour and Ali's gas-pedal foot to floor. Ali, who memorizes famous train schedules, gives out: “Miami 3 PM special: Penn Station to Miami 1600 miles in 30 hours!”
Our car speeds south on an empty highway, by beige sand and blue sea and white surf. An hour passes as do turnoff signs: St. Augustine recalls Ponce de Leon’s quest for eternal youth; Daytona Beach – playground of the rich and infamous like gangster boss Al Capone; Cape Canaveral – beautiful deserted spot which tourism will one day make ugly; and Indian River – orange groves galore. We rumble across one more bridge and I doze. Am jolted awake by Ali’s braking for a woman on the road ahead beside an old town & country car with a flat tire. She is handsome, age about forty, hair streaked with gray and dressed in brown army shirt open at neck and work pants with boots. Looks interesting!
“Thanks, folks, could you give me a ride to the lake?” She gets in back and introduces herself: Marjory, amateur conservationist studying Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades into which it drains.
We arrive at her campsite on the lake’s east shore: What a lake! We cannot see the far shore and she says it is the second largest lake wholly within the United States: 35 miles long with a 135-mile shoreline. Several nearby huts are of distinctive Seminole Indian type – poles that support thatched roofs and walls of colorful blankets. The Indians dress with band about head, simple jacket pants and moccasins. She dispatches two Indians with change of tire to retrieve her car while we relax in her hut. It is 4 PM and as she brews herbal tea I ask if we may stay the night. Delighted, she offers a hut, says we may wash up in the lake, and asks if we require swimsuits. Ali asks if she can go with no clothes on and Marjory replies, “Only if you can stay out of sight around the bend on my private beach.”
69. Who Owns What Land
Pleasant discourse with Marjory, a lady on a conservation crusade! The local powers want to destroy Lake Okeechobee, to drain it to make residences for northerners. But Marjory who has spent fifteen years studying the Lake and living with its inhabitants sees it a vestige of the original habitat for American Indian survivors of the Europeans’ massacres and a beautiful sea with grass, shrubs, trees, where not only Seminole Indians but thousands of local animals and plants are t’home. To destroy it to make box-like homes and pavement and artificial lawns and swimming pools in order to sustain the Malthusian madness will be compounding the crime of European rape in this hemisphere.
A fine person and the best to her!
But who owns what land? Back of every war is what the Nazi's label Lebensraum. We Japanese want to organize our Co-Prosperity Sphere, a grand design that will include China, Korea and southeast Asia under our Japanese umbrella. But to the Koreans, Chinese and local native groups who live there, we are illegitimate aggressors. The Zionists claim Palestine because their Holy Book says Jehovah promised it to Jacob to be enjoyed by the seed of his grandfather Abraham, but the people who live there now consider that a racialist excuse for take over of their land and homes by Europeans, and no more relevant today than a land grant from Genghis Khan or an entitlement from Attila the Hun. In the Union of South Africa a white minority claims its right by being the original Christians and possessing advanced civilization compared to the pagan untutored Blacks. And this land of liberty – U.S.A. – is a racial murder zone by self-invited Europeans.
Who owns what land? Nobody!
The land existed four-billion plus years sans human law. When land was the sole form of capital and its yield the sole source of wealth, the game of acquiring control used every device – oaths of loyalty, guarantees of protection, forced marriages, blatant blackmail, destructive dispossession, and, in the last resort, as the whites did to the Amerindians who refused to cede ancestral homes, the sheer brutal outright murder of every resister. Out of that arose the ruling classes, whether hereditary landed aristocrats, financial plutocrats or lesser property owners. But we must seek another measure to justify occupation of land: I suggest stewardship. Only recently we humans, because we are the most intelligent animals, have ascended to its stewardship. How we conduct the stewardship determines our right to control the planet. Of course the ‘our’ is the question. To whom does ‘our’ apply? The Nazi's? We Japanese? You European-Conqueror Americans? The Jews in Palestine? The Whites in South Africa? History suggests that the unknown power has bestowed the land on those best able to kill for it, but no deed of ownership goes with that. If landowners have not acted as good stewards, Nature has risen up with cataclysms and killed the killers, and new stewards have wrested the land from them. Anyone can go from there and make a judgment in each particular case of land dispute: first power and will; then management of Earth’s resources. From what I have seen of this civilization I think it has entered an uncontrollable downward spiral because of poor stewardship. The growing contradiction between Homo sap's intelligence and his still primitive animal emotions spells catastrophe in the coming century.
I end this Sad Soliloquy with a Happy Hooligan Hurrah sitting in our Primitive Hut and seeing my American Dream – a veritable New Eve – dreaming away happily on the bed mat below and to my left. I am contemplating this Wonder of a New Era and it gives me hope for Ecstatic Evolution. If I am not wrong, my Ali is its most advanced form. Give another five hundred years to make more of her and she all will do to H. sap as Cro Mag did to Ne-an. And good rid to bad sap!
To read next, click 2.70 Clara's Kosher Boarding House in Miami Beach
I end this Sad Soliloquy with a Happy Hooligan Hurrah sitting in our Primitive Hut and seeing my American Dream – a veritable New Eve – dreaming away happily on the bed mat below and to my left. I am contemplating this Wonder of a New Era and it gives me hope for Ecstatic Evolution. If I am not wrong, my Ali is its most advanced form. Give another five hundred years to make more of her and she all will do to H. sap as Cro Mag did to Ne-an. And good rid to bad sap!
To read next, click 2.70 Clara's Kosher Boarding House in Miami Beach
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