Reach

It juts up out of the earth, silent, stark. No one heeds it; it is part of a forgotten landscape, a footnote in a cow pasture along a side road. A palm tree grows along its base, crowding against the thick swell of its emergence from the sandy soil. Cows graze around it, oblivious to “might have been” in their essential animal concern with sustenance. Yet it remains.

It stretches out of the ground, gnarled swells like arthritic joints, curving upward at an unlikely angle, its tip shattered, stretching toward the pale blue of the Florida sky. In this primal place, it feels as though the past is not so far gone. Its magic still clings to the saw edged leaves of the plants and the thick morning mist. The spirit of the land still moves here, barely lulled to sleep by the encroaching anesthetic of car exhaust and chemlawn, and sometimes one is reminded of the magic below the surface, the magic that the modern world reminds us not to see.

I call it the giant’s finger, the broken twist of tree bone, jutting harshly out of the open pasture behind barbed wire and road shoulder. It curves upward, forever caught in some final rigor, reaching for the sky. I know that its owner is long dead, claimed by the triumph of rationality, the glory of Lilliputian man over the primal giants of the land. Yet there remains a chilling vitality to it, a stretching of the gnarled, arthritic finger joints, an appeal to the pale sky above and the live oak behind. There is memory there, in the last remnant of the fallen titan, silhouetted against the sky. There is determination, still stretching from the ground, reaching for the stars it could once almost touch. I look at it in awe, remembering that there are things beyond our ken, things greater than mere human logic.

The field was empty on the frosted morning when I crept out of my car, braving the strange looks of the drivers whizzing along the narrow strip of pavement in the middle of nowhere. The iced weeds along the road fringe crunched under my boots, and I shivered. Leaning low, I pushed the button on my camera, the click of the shutter loud in the still, cold air of the morning. Practically, there was no reason to stop, no reason to shiver in the cold air, but I needed to take the picture, to remember the honored dead. And I needed to remember that for the giant, even in defeat and death…it was still important to reach for the sky.

Green

People tell me that we have no seasons in Florida, and I smile silently. I know, when they say that they do not live here. We have seasons. Certainly, they are not the cycles of my childhood, and I do sometimes miss the classical turn of the year. I miss the smell of fallen leaves and the spice of false death as the plants withdraw to wait out the winter. I miss the crisp, shivering smell that heralds new snow. I miss the shimmering green and white of snowdrops braving the cold to whisper the promise of summer. But the turning of the year is not gone here, far from it. It is, like so many things in this wild, young place, simply different, unsympathetic to the puny creatures that reside on the primal land, so desperately trying to tame what is not so easily dominated. Here the year turns from unbearable jungle green, bathed in shimmering, tangible air supporting the almost invisible wings of the dragonflies as their heavy bodies hang beneath a sky bleached from blue to white in the heat, to a muted carpet of browns and grays, pitifully unclothed without a forgiving blanket of snow – a denuded land waiting beneath barren tree branches with Spanish moss waving like grave clothes in the wind.

The seasons are less dramatic here, one of the few things that is less dramatic in this wild landscape. They turn quietly, shifting hue without the breathtaking show of leafy color or dazzling snow. I often think that people claim there are no seasons here because their turning is so quiet, and in our day to day lives we are so distracted that it takes the excitement, and sometimes the inconvenience, of dramatic season shift to make us notice them. Yet sometimes there are reminders we cannot ignore; sometimes the inevitable cycle of nature presents us with something so simple, so primal that we cannot ignore it, even in the grip of modern hustle and bustle.

Take the color green. In Florida, green is inevitable. In a “land of perpetual summer” (whoever said that wasn’t here this January), green is stock in trade for attracting tourists and setting social standards for suburban lawns. Mid-range golf courses trying to be upper crust paint their greens…well…green. It’s a part of life here. Florida is green. Until winter at least, when the greens fade into brown and olive, their gradual transition barely noted by those of us who live here; for us, the landscape is familiar, habitual, and we tend to let it blur past our car windows, not really considering its subtle shifts in color.

But spring is upon us. I hurried home yesterday, piloting my metal chariot past acres of Florida countryside, my mind already miles ahead of my spinning wheels, considering all the minutiae that seem to fill our every waking moment. I was planning dinner, television viewing, class material for the next week, and suddenly I was confronted with green.

Along the side of the road, an early crop had been planted; the huge chunk of farm equipment that had done the sowing was still resting in the corner of the field. Behind the machinery, the field stretched back from the roadside, redolent in fresh growth that spurted up from the dull ground in a defiant riot of color. I have no idea what the plants were, and I have no need to know. What I do know is that they were green as only new life can be, riotous with the color that allowed them to live and grow in the light of the sun, jostling for its rays, competing with every ounce of chlorophyll to take and use more of the light to thrive. The color was breathtaking, standing out like neon against the suddenly noticeable brown and grey world around it, reminding me how beautiful life is and whispering the promise of new life that sometimes seems a cliché part of the spring.

That green stayed with me through the barren branches and brown woods of the trip home, reminding me of hope, of the desperate joy of reaching for the light and soaking it in – the need to grow. It was green, not in the painted status-conscious perfection of manicured lawns and golf tees, but in the wild, true way that only the hand of nature colors the world around us. It was the promise of spring and the reminder that life, even just for a moment, can be green.