In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  Piloting the scooter took some getting used to. I don’t know if the growers had tampered with the steering column or what, but the tiller on this baby was as responsive as a Formula 1 car’s control yoke. I had to be extra careful when I felt a cough or sneeze coming on—one involuntary twitch to the right, and I went reeling across both lanes. Fortunately, I’ve spent months behind the bar of a shopping cart, a baby carriage, and a jogging stroller. The muscle memory is there. I can lean over these handlebars just the same, use my body weight to keep her steady as she goes.

  I had excuses at the ready, but no police stopped us. The law enforcement presence in Everglades National Park is light; plus, officers patrol an area that is larger than Delaware. What’s more, traffic on the Tamiami Trail is now a fraction of its former volume thanks to the “Alligator Alley” leg of Interstate 75, which was built out in the eighties. We saw more roseate spoonbills than Miccosukee PD cruisers.

  “Did you know ninety percent of the wading bird population has disappeared in the last fifty years?” Glenn said, reading grim statistics from his phone. “Only two percent of the original Everglades ecosystem is truly intact.”

  Our shadows lengthened considerably. Magic hour had come for the Glades, and we were still a ways from the next campground. I led the charge past wet-black alligators lining the highway. They looked like close allies of geology. We avoided eye contact with these grinning dullards as though we’d ventured onto their gang territory. We focused instead on the bristling saw grass. Over there—a hardwood hammock floating between sky and tinseled water. Look right, and the ibises whitening a solitary tree took off in a single body. In doing so, one dropped a dead fish into our path. Its eye had been eaten out.

  I’d like to call this beauty “otherworldly,” but that would not be correct. This beauty was absolutely of this world. Of the fundamentals of this world. Heartbreaking beauty like this will remain long after there is no heart left to break for it.

  * * *

  —

  When we broke camp at dawn, rags of fog were caught in cypress branches. Behind them in the Trailside canal, a flock of large birds could be heard taking off, fluttering a few dozen feet, alighting, taking off again. The sound made by the movement of their wings was something like oxygen being bellowed into a fire. Relative humidity: 97 percent.

  The rising sun swatted away cloud cover as though it were a skein of cobwebs. We overtook a family of Miccosukee drifting in the canal. Subconsciously I reverted to stereotype, held up a “how” hand without (fortunately) saying “how.” Noah and Glenn followed my lead for some reason. The father stood in the canoe, which tippled not at all, and asked, “Wanna buy some crabs?” “Nah, bro, thanks,” Noah said.

  An hour or two into the day’s work, and we’d settled into our state of mindful no-mind like weavers at the loom. Blankly we stared into the future while advancing east toward Miami. Trucks rushed by, gusting mosquitoes off of us for a tail-swat’s worth of time. Miles distant, powerful airboats sheared through prairie; as far away as they were, we could feel the vibrato of their engines in our ribs. Another mashed python had dragged itself under a guardrail to die. All we needed was a panther, and we’d have our Everglades roadkill bingo: gator, water moccasin, osprey, python, big cat.

  Eyeing us sidewise from the tall grass as if from a pulpit were many gaunt wood storks, the bird world’s reverend sirs. I was trying—honestly, I was—to unpucker my soul and allow the beauty of this place to pierce me once more.

  Ergo, I scarfed two handfuls of ’shrooms.

  I chewed them, holding the acrid cud on my tongue as long as I could stand. These doses I chased with swallows of half-evaporated spigot water from a crunched Zephyrhills bottle. Here I should mention that I’d stopped supping from our stash of protein bars. Likewise, I’d grown tired of Pemmican brand dehydrated meats. For all intents and purposes, I had been fasting these past couple of days.

  Being no dummy, I pulled my scooter off the shoulder. I drove through the mown grass between road and guardrail. I asked Noah if he wouldn’t mind keeping his mitts on or nearby the two push handles in back of my ride. He said he’d try his best to keep me from drifting into traffic. “We’ll create a sacred space together, voyager,” he deadpanned. He was grateful for the entertainment.

  In the beginning was aesthetic experience. The swamp tilted slightly on its axis, as though shifting into an italicized version of the Everglades. Colors became more saturated: lush greens, golds like angel hair. I almost understood the prophet birds as they shrieked their messages and took to the air ahead of me. I found it difficult to remain seated. I had a strong desire to flee from anything made of plastic or rubber, and also to undress.

  Time expanded, as if time had unbuttoned its pants after a long day. Half an hour, an hour passed. I remained firmly in control of my craft, so I gobbled a few more caps and stems. “Easy there, kemosabe,” Glenn cautioned. I closed my eyes and saw his words streak past me like shooting stars. “You’re filming this, right?” I asked. I opened my eyes and watched a Tercel inch toward me like a periwinkle fist in search of a bump. I understood on a subatomic level that I was living between immensities. For no more than a fraction of sidereal time. In a world that I—you—we did not make.

  My duty, I saw, was to the present moment.

  KENT

  (over shoulder to Glenn)

  You ready for a take?

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Hit me.

  KENT

  I feel really Floridian in this moment. I’m seeing only the present, having forgotten the past and taken care not to think about the future. The present. My duty is to the present.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Nice. Got it.

  I leaned my head back, stared into the gas-flame-blue sky. I could feel my coldness, my separateness melting away as though I were thawing out of a block of ice. I turned and nodded at a wake of vultures dotting a staff of power lines like musical notation.

  KENT

  It’s crazy, right? These people, driving somewhere, like they’re failing to realize what the whole point is.

  NOAH

  Oh boy.

  KENT

  The great mistake is thinking that one is alone. Uniquely alone. And that that condition is permanent.

  The thin familiar film was peeling aside. A bell had been rung—was still ringing—and its waves of deep sonority were passing through me, reviving memories of a place well beyond. I tasted an internal and external harmony the likes of which Saint Francis is reputed to have achieved.

  KENT

  Every time we turn over the ignition or, like, take two extra ketchup packets—we are feeding quarters into a machine that kills us and— Hold on.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Get more spiritual. Give me some God. Give me something like…the mushrooms are giving you Koyaanisqatsi pangs for the Gaia Mother.

  I took Glenn’s direction. For more than a few moments, I tried to collect my thoughts. It was as difficult as hugging water to my chest in the deep end of a pool.

  KENT

  —that kills us, profanes our dead, poisons our children-to-be. We’re asserting our appetites without regard to the whole! And you or me asserting our appetites without regard to the whole—that is never not wrong. Confusing my self with the outside world—that is what we used to call sin.

  I reclined on my scooter, pleased.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Ehhh. You can do better.

  I sighed. Minutes later, I bent forward and turned my head to the camera.

  KENT

  The stakes are real. Environmentally. Spiritually. There’s mercury in our Lenten fish! Our moral and economic debt, having accumulated for quite a while now, is coming due. What yo—lee Jesus! Get that!

  I was seeing, a dozen feet fr
om the Trail, a pair of wings flapping on either side of an alligator’s jaws. The long white wings went slack, and then they draggled like unmanned oars.

  KENT (CONT’D)

  That’s there, right?

  NOAH

  Oh yeah. Real as hell.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Try saying, “Real as climate change.”

  NOAH

  Oh, yeah. Real as climate change.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Well done.

  NOAH

  Eat shit, Julian.

  I well know that drug-induced “spiritual” experiences are basically a kind of metaphysical pornography. A gross simulacrum of the real thing that, after you see it out, leaves you feeling emptier. And as is the case with pornography, an overreliance on drug-induced “spiritual” experiences can only result in a roaming unrest that ultimately despairs of and actually resents the real transcendence one is seeking. I get all that. This was a facsimile of positive emotion aroused without the encounter of a living person—the living God in this case. It’s a type of psychedelic idolatry in which I was confusing a chemical form with the superform of God, who is not one being among many but nothing; that is, no-thing, nada y todo, the very ground of all being, whose presence can be revealed through material mediations but is not reducible to any material form, let alone a fucking fungus. Nothing short of a life given over to prayer and practiced virtue—along with a goodly dose of grace without reason—can dispose one to communication with the divine. Yes.

  But, hey. Dostoevsky suffered from grand mal seizures, and he said of those neurological quickenings: “I feel complete harmony in myself and in the world, and this feeling is so strong and sweet that for several seconds of such bliss one would give ten years of one’s life, indeed, perhaps one’s whole life.”

  So I popped another toadstool.

  KENT

  My heart is a lump of wax in God’s hands!

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Uh-huh. Listen, why don’t we get you over to the Airboat Association of Florida while you’re in this state. I read that beginning this year, no new licenses will be given—

  I pointed to a dead gator floating on its back in the canal. Spread-eagled and inflated with the gases of decomposition, it looked like an overturned pool raft.

  For some time, I watched my scooter rive the dense air like a prow through water. When I looked away from that, I found dragonflies composing cursive messages to me. Beyond them, the saw grass soughed in the breeze. Mangroves knitted their hands in prayer. The berm beside the Trail released its stored lightning in the form of a cottonmouth, which hissed as if asking me to shush and keep secret what I was seeing: the subjecthood of animal, vegetable, even mineral. Everything was kith and kin; everything returned my gaze. A dimension of intentional meaning was communicating itself. I perceived a creative intelligence in the fabric of it all. Presently, I made no formal distinction between nature and art. All was poetic achievement.

  KENT

  I’m still not positive the growers didn’t sneak me moldy enokis.

  NOAH

  I’m sure it beats walking, whatever it’s doing to you.

  There was still an observing “I” here, yet it felt as though this consciousness was not burbling forth from my brain. “I” was simply a receptor of the consciousness being transmitted to me. And being transmitted to me then was: This universe did not emerge as the result of arbitrary chance, a show of force, or a desire for self-assertion. Creation is of the order of love.

  Before me, two swallows whimmed across the Trail, whirling up mosquitoes and exulting.

  And the business of any creator is not to bully his material medium or to escape it, but to serve it. Doing so, he will realize that its service is his perfect freedom. Service to the beloved gives form to liberty; liberty is actuated through duty to the beloved.

  KENT

  Eat shit, Juliiiiiaaaaaan!

  My heart was flapping in my chest like well-trafficked saloon doors. I swiveled to admire Noah. Then to admire Glenn. I was sending out love and love was coming back to me, such is the circuitousness of love—to receive it, you must give it freely. In that moment, I realized: There was no Noah. No Glenn. Our souls had mingled and blended so completely that the seam joining them had been effaced.

  Tears flooded from me. I wanted to address a thank-you note to each blade of saw grass, to the cloud luffing up above. To every individual who deigned to humor us along our way, or placed a grimy penny into our mendicant bowl.

  KENT

  (garbled)

  …gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder…

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Safe to say that Kent is officially gorked the fuck out.

  (to Noah)

  You got him?

  NOAH

  (alongside Kent)

  I got him.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  I just don’t want this to become Exhibit A in our involuntary manslaughter trial.

  KENT

  (garbled)

  …maturity to rejoice in what you have and not weep for what you have lost, or never had. Where are we going? Home, always back home.

  Gradually I descended from the heights of my short-circuited repentance. Selfhood seeped back in. By the time we reached the hokey, tourist-trap Miccosukee Indian Village, the sky had turned the color of watermelon juice, and I’d mellowed into a state of awed confusion. I guess I must have been still somewhat dilated when we talked with tribal representatives, because they denied us filming access and allowed us camping privileges only at the canalside turnoff to the Shark Valley loop road.

  I slept soundly. So soundly, in fact, that I took no notice of the long, meaningful poke Glenn gave me in the wee hours. He had opened our tent flap onto the fifty-degree night in order to go pee, he told me later, but he reconsidered when his headlamp illuminated the eyes of alligators gathered on the warm asphalt around our tents. “I was too weary for panic,” he explained. One more day of walking and we’d be out of the Glades. Glenn wasn’t going to let some ticklish situation get in the way of that.

  —

  FADE IN:

  EXT. CANALSIDE—AFTERNOON

  The camera is back on its stroller-mounted setup, as Kent has abandoned his BATTERY-DRAINED MOBILITY SCOOTER in Shark Valley. Presently, the three friends are walking through the easternmost remnant of the Everglades. In stark contrast to the chaos at feast in the heart of the swamp, this cleared and drained region is eerily still.

  GLENN

  We need to prep our denouement before we reach Miami.

  NOAH

  Say what we’ve learned?

  KENT

  (grimacing)

  Give us an idea what you want.

  GLENN

  In my case, I feel I have won a great and righteous loathing as to the obnoxious filigree with which other people adorn their self-indulgent lives.

  KENT

  Hell yeah.

  NOAH

  Fire flames.

  GLENN

  For example, the bougie hipster-man shops that are everywhere in Toronto. Where they sell extremely expensive trinkety objects and self-grooming kits. This kind of elevation of, like, self-care. I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it when I get home.

  KENT

  The phrase “self-care” in general makes me want to shoot the person saying it in the stomach with a Civil War revolver.

  GLENN

  I guess I always found it obnoxious. Now, it’s abhorrent.

  KENT

  (exaggerated narrator voice)

  “Having walked a thousand miles, the friends realize there is a level of disdain which is the appropriate response to much that exists
in the world.”

  GLENN

  It’s banal. But that’s supposed to be one of the tentpoles of this genre, right?

  NOAH

  (unflattering impersonation)

  “I walked, and I walked, and now I’ll never look at the world the same way again!”

  KENT

  Or actually, no—it’s like the human-scaled fantasy of the Grand March. History is supposed to be this splendid progressive march inching nearer to the more perfect world of happiness and justice. If you’re moving forward, you’re getting better. Why would a walk be any different? When it ended, you’d have to be better from when you started.

  NOAH

  “And if you do like me, then you too will come home enlightened!” Like you’re going hiking to receive a reverse lobotomy or something.

  KENT

  When in fact it’s like, Fuck outta here, that’s not how this works at all. Have a little humility. Understand human nature. If anything, walking like this makes me realize how much more difficult nonwalking life is.

  GLENN

  There’s definitely, you could argue, a nugget of useful wisdom to take from realizing that expecting a sudden transformation while on a journey is itself juvenile and counterproductive.

  GLENN (CONT’D)

  This is all banal, too. But we’re talking about the consumerist salvational dream, where if I can just find that one product that eludes me, or trip that eludes me, or experience—upon purchase and consumption of that, finally, I’ll be whole.

  KENT

  Suburban “seekers” of the world—unite!

  GLENN

  Don’t get me wrong. This trip has made me want to give back. To the people who were kind enough to film with us, but to the world at large, too. I know I should become a participant in the gift economy. Or whatever you call it.

  GLENN (CONT’D)

  It’s just that I also know I’m going to promptly forget this upon my reintegration into the rhythms of my narcissistic life. Like, as soon as I go to buy deodorant, which will be my archway back into normalcy, and a pharmacy cashier is rude to me, forget it. Out the window.