A Lap Around America

by Shawn Inmon

  Bamahenge is the creation of artist Mark Cline, who was commissioned by billionaire George Barber. That’s the difference between a billionaire and myself. If I turn to Dawn and say, “I think I’d like a life-size version of Stonehenge in the backyard,” she tells me to pound sand. When George Barber says that, he has the wherewithal to make it happen. As crazy as many of my ideas are, it’s probably just as well that I don’t have billions of dollars. For instance, I’d like a device that will wipe out the part of my brain that remembers my favorite books, so I could read them all over like new again.

  We found Bamahenge in the middle of nowhere, and we were the only people in sight. Hard to believe people weren’t flocking to this place from all over the world. We had a bit of fun, pretending we were druids dancing in the moonlight. Wait. Check that. I had a bit of fun pretending I was a druid dancing in the moonlight. Dawn just looked at me like I had lost my mind. It’s an impressive illusion until you knock on one of the stones and it sounds like knocking on a Corvette fender.

  The sun was setting on another glorious day on the road, and even though we hadn’t seen any major tourist hot spots, this was exactly the kind of day we had envisioned. We’d seen a part of the country we’d never visited, spent the entire day together, and laughed a lot.

  We made it into Pensacola, Florida, just as it was getting dark. I hadn’t made a reservation because we weren’t sure we would make it to Florida, so we cruised the strip looking for a likely suspect. We found a place at least three notches above the usual motels where we’d been staying, and the vacancy sign was on.

  We’d been hitting the sights so fast and furious, I thought it might be nice to have another mini-break, so we took a room for two nights. That meant another day to relax, enjoy the giant swimming pool at the motel, visit the local beaches, and get caught up on our laundry. We were ready for the break.

  Day Twenty-Three

  And on the twenty-third day, we rested.

  I’ve heard people refer to this part of Florida as the Redneck Riviera. It may be so. I might have a little redneck in me, because I loved Pensacola and the gorgeous white-sand beaches.

  No crowds at the Redneck Riviera

  When I’ve gone to Maui, Hawaii, I’ve always loved the beaches, but they can get a little crowded. In Pensacola, the beaches were every bit as lovely, the water every bit as warm, but they were almost deserted. We spent four hours out in the waves, swimming, bodysurfing, drying off, then going right back to it.

  We didn’t make any progress on our lap, but we had an excellent day.

  Day Twenty-Four

  It was probably inevitable that on this trip, with so many different climates and cuisines, that one of us would eventually feel a bit under the weather. Dawn was the lucky winner, as she woke up not feeling great.

  It was also highly likely that at some point, the Irish guy with the pale complexion would get sunburned. The previous day on the beach was that point. I woke up looking more lobster than man. I had slathered SPF 30 sunblock all over, a brand guaranteed to survive many dips in and out of water. It didn’t. I burned. So, Dawn was sick, I was burned, and neither felt like embarking on a grand adventure.

  The philosophy beaten into me in my youth is that you will feel better if you are up and doing something. Dawn’s philosophy has often been to tell me to stuff my philosophy. In this case, we took off, anyway.

  We’ve driven through most states on a pretty direct line. Not Florida. We are entering the state in the far northwestern corner, then driving across the Panhandle, down the Gulf Coast, then over to Miami, all the way down to Key West, then all the way back up the eastern coastline. We were going to be in Florida quite a few days and I wanted to get started on it.

  We learned almost immediately that the scenic route through Florida wasn’t going to be quick. We hit what looked like a small town, according to the atlas, called Destin. The 2010 census says 11,445 people live in Destin. If that’s the case, every one of them was on the road this day. It took us nearly an hour to navigate through the town.

  Our one tourist side trip was to swing through Seaside, Florida. Have you seen the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show? The majority of that film was shot in lovely little Seaside. The Truman Show is about a baby raised completely within an elaborate TV show set, for an audience that witnesses every aspect of his growing up—even watching him sleep at night. Truman is surrounded by actors playing a role 24 hours a day but is blissfully unaware that his reality is a fiction. The producers hunted extensively for a town that could serve as the fictional perfect town but came up blank. They were already constructing sound stages in Hollywood when they stumbled upon the master-planned community of Seaside, whose every aspect had been designed from the start, as opposed to the willy-nilly growth patterns of most cities. Master planning makes for a beautiful, pristine city, but with kind of an odd vibe, like a Stepford town.

  Dawn said, “I’ll bet if you drop a gum wrapper, a robot cop will have you in jail before it hits the ground.” She had a point. Everything was so immaculate, it still kind of looked like a movie set. We even tracked down the house the fictional Truman had lived in.

  Truman’s House

  I was glad we’d stopped in Seaside, but in the end, it gave both of us the heebie-jeebies. I don’t think we’re cut out for living a vacuumed-up, buttoned-down life. We like things a little messy, at least in the corners, where no one but your mother-in-law might check.

  We drove the rest of the Florida Panhandle in the afternoon, then settled for the night in tiny little Perry, Florida. If you’ve never heard of Perry, congratulations: You stand with almost all of the rest of the world.

  We had a pleasant conversation with the innkeeper at our roadside motel. He was Asian Indian, as so many of our hosts have been on this trip. He told us he was from Detroit, Michigan, but had come to Perry because he got a good deal on the motel. It was a modest place by any standard, but it was clean, neat, and well-maintained. I could see the pride he took in his business. Having driven through Perry, I also thought he was a pretty good salesman to talk his wife into coming here.

  I went through my nightly Sherpa routine with our bags, but it was easy tonight—this was a one-story motel, so no stairs. While Dawn was getting us ready for the evening, I peeped into The Magical Mystery Bag. There was much more bag than there was magic or mystery, so I ran down to the local Winn Dixie to restock our supply of bread, cheese, and trail mix.

  I hustled through the aisles of the Winn Dixie, picked up my few items and headed for the checkout, where the young cashier looked so bored I was afraid she might fall asleep before I got there.

  We held a conversation that I have almost every time I travel to the Deep South.

  “Did you find everything alright?”

  “Yes, I did, thank you.”

  The bored look slipped away, and a light came into her eyes. “You’re not from around here, are you?” Every time I go south of the Mason-Dixon, my inherent Yankee-ness seems to roll off me in a cloud, so I’m used to that question.

  “No, I’m not,” I answered.

  She nodded wisely, happy to have her suspicions confirmed. She closed one eye and looked at me slant-wise. “Where you from?”

  I knew that “Orting,” or “Enumclaw” would only result in a blank look, so I said, “Seattle.”

  She knit her brow critically, and said, “Wait. You’re from Seattle, and you’re spending the night in Perry?” The way she said Perry, it sounded like she had said black plague. She was obviously not her town’s number one booster.

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  “It was getting dark, and we needed a place to sleep?”

  “That’s the only reason I can think to stay in Perry if you don’t have to.”

  Her words rang in my ears as I drove back to our little room. Looking around at the town, I got what she was saying. And yet, I remember my own years growing up in Mossyrock, population 400: In high school, all I could
dream about was getting away from there. Away from the tiny dot on the map that had no entertainment beyond a bowling alley. Away from the rolling green hills, lakes, and country roads.

  Now, decades later, I remember Mossyrock fondly as the place that helped shape who I am. I don’t know if the young girl in the Winn Dixie will ever feel that nostalgia about Perry. But I have a hunch she might. Our hometowns remain our homes, no matter how far afield we wander.

  Day Twenty-Five

  I’m glad I wasn’t expecting the sticky humidity to improve once we got to Florida, because I would have been horribly disappointed. I had started planning on the shortest distance between air-conditioned indoor spaces. I don’t think I would ever get used to that weather. I’d swear I could see small drops of moisture hanging in the air, waiting for me to pass so they could attach to me. I was absolutely loving Florida, but I thought I might be happier there in, say, January.

  We drove south and straight through the heart of Tampa, not following our usual practice of avoiding big cities, because there was something that I knew Dawn would love on the southern side of the city. Beautiful place: lots of water, bridges, gorgeous views. Still, too much like a city for my liking. We did drive by the Raymond James Stadium, where the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers play. I like their old, uniquely designed stadium, nicknamed The Big Sombrero by ESPN’s Chris Berman. This new stadium just looked like a stadium, as opposed to headgear.

  Dead ahead was Big Cat Rescue, a facility designed to provide permanent homes to big cats rescued from circuses, closed zoos, roadside attractions, and the homes of people who unwisely believed a full-sized lion or tiger would make a great pet.

  Almost all of the feline residents have had difficult, abused lives. One we saw had been found chained inside a crack house. Many have been declawed or otherwise damaged. Having been semi-domesticated, they can’t be released into the wild, and they shouldn’t be in private homes. So, Big Cat Rescue it is. It may not be their wild environment, but it is as good as the rescue can possibly make it.

  We signed up for a walking tour of Big Cat Rescue. It’s not free, or even inexpensive, at $36 per person, but every dime you pay goes into the care and feeding of the rescued cats. As you walk through, you pass by many caged environments. It’s not like a zoo, though. Each enclosure is designed for the specific cat living there, and there are places they can go when they, like Greta Garbo, want to be alone. As we walked through the maze of enclosures, the guide told the story of each cat and how it arrived here. Many of the stories would break your heart.

  We were in central Florida, so as I mentioned, it was hot—probably 90 degrees. It was humid. There was thunder and lightning and intermittent rain. Looking at the magnificent cats strolling casually around just a few feet away, it was easy to imagine we were standing on the African veldt. In fact, it very much put me in mind of the story “The Veldt,” by Ray Bradbury, from his book The Illustrated Man. Then, you’d look at a 300-pound tiger casually admiring his claws like Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, and find yourself feeling glad those cages are secure.

  Big Cat Rescue, in my opinion, is doing the work of the angels—taking care of animals that would never receive this level of care anywhere else. The moral of the story is, big cats are not pets and should never be domesticated. As happy as these cats are in the refuge, I know their lives would be fuller in the wild.

  We drove down the western side of Florida, hugging the coastline as much as we could, and were rewarded with our first spectacular Florida sunset—a burnt-orange display that filled the sky and shared its colors with the water.

  Here’s another of my occasional travel tips. If you’re going to be taking a massive trip like this, it’s a good idea to pick one website to make reservations. Many will give you rewards for booking a set number of nights. We’d been using Hotels.com, which gives you a free night for every ten you book. The price of the free room is calculated by averaging the cost of the ten nights you stayed. Unfortunately, that means that you can’t stay ten nights in fleabags, then take a night at the Ritz, but it’s a fair system. By now we’d used the website enough to get a free night at a nice hotel in Estero, Florida.

  It even had luggage carts and an elevator. Heaven!

  Day Twenty-Six

  What is it about mankind’s periodic attempts at building a utopia that fires my imagination? I am endlessly attracted to both the idea and the attempted execution. Our first pass through one on this trip was in Maryhill, Oregon, where Sam Hill attempted to build the perfect Quaker lifestyle and failed.

  Our second was just north of Estero, Florida, in Koreshan State Park. This is not a typical state park, but it has a lot of history attached to it.

  In 1869, a young doctor named Cyrus Teed did a series of experiments with electricity. One experiment went awry and knocked him unconscious. While he was out cold, he had a vision that changed the direction of his life. Parts of his vision were incredibly progressive for the time—he believed in complete equality among the sexes, for instance—but some of his beliefs were a little out-there.

  In a nutshell, he believed we were all living in a nutshell. Okay, that’s not quite right, but he believed that the Earth was hollow and that we were all living on the inside of the crust, not the outside, which he described as “a void.” He even conducted scientific experiments that he claimed proved this to be the case. I believe scientists call that “confirmation bias.”

  He changed his name to Koresh, and formed the religion Koreshanity, which drew a number of followers. He moved to southwestern Florida, bought a bunch of land and started building his utopia. As these things go, it was pretty good. He didn’t build the society simply to enrich himself, or take dozens of wives, although there are rumors that he had a way with the ladies.

  Everything went along swimmingly until Koresh passed away in 1908. His followers fully expected him to be resurrected. When that didn’t happen, the wind went out of their sails. The last of the Koreshans carried on until 1961, when they deeded the land to the State of Florida.

  Now, the whole utopia is contained in the state park, and you can walk freely through the grounds and through many of the buildings. It was fascinating to see how they lived more than a century ago, and the things they used to support their belief system. There’s even a model that reflects the way that Koresh saw us living—inside a perfect sphere.

  Beyond that little quirk, he was a pretty cool guy. The society was essentially matriarchal, as the ruling council was made up of nine women. He knew that wouldn’t fly with the outside world, though, so he appointed men to meet with outsiders to carry out the wishes of the women. Fascinating stuff.

  One of the unexpected benefits of the trip was the number of ideas it was giving me for new stories. As we walked around the deserted utopia, I wondered: What would it be like to be the last two people keeping a place like that going? Once upon a time, they were part of something they believed in. They may have thought they were changing the world for the better. Then, life happened, and people died, or gave up, or moved on. So, what was it like for those last two? I don’t know, but I decided to try to find out by writing about it when I got home.

  Leaving Estero, we headed south by southeast toward Miami. I wasn’t much interested in Miami proper, but there is an attraction that I was interested in—the Coral Castle.

  Before we could get to the Coral Castle, though, we passed through the little flyspeck town of Ochopee, Florida, which boasts the smallest post office in the United States. There was a time when Ochopee had a pretty normal, if smallish, post office. But it burned down in 1953. The town needed a replacement, and quickly. After all, the U.S. mail must go through! As a temporary measure, the post office moved into a deserted irrigation pipe shed. Sixty-three years later, it’s still in use. You never know when temporary becomes the new normal. I didn’t measure it precisely, but the whole building looks to be the size of a very small bedroom. We mailed postcards to our grandkids, knowing they would be post
marked from the tiniest post office in the country. It doesn’t take much to make us happy.

  We drove through areas boasting wildlife preserves that are supposed to be filled with alligators, but try as we might, we didn’t see a single one. We drove down deserted roads, pulling off in spots where they are known to be; we even stopped at viewing areas set aside just for that purpose. Nada. We were not destined to see a gator on this day.

  We drove into Miami via a series of small, dusty back roads. When you see pictures of Miami on television, it almost always shows the sparkling water, the glimmering high-rises, and all the beautiful people cavorting on the beaches. The part of Miami we drove through, coming at it from the northwest, was more like an agricultural center. We saw lots of open fields and farms everywhere. It was kind of cool to see this other side of the city.

  We stopped at the Coral Castle before turning farther south toward the Keys. The Coral Castle doesn’t look like all that much from the outside, but we were pretty dazzled by what we saw inside the fences. It represents a tale of love, obsession, and a total inability to “just get over it.” Since I kept a flame burning in my heart for thirty years for the girl I could never get over, I could relate to the project. I’d just longed for Dawn secretly in my heart, though. I never built anything like the Coral Castle.

  The story begins in 1913, when Edward Leedskalnin was still living in his native Latvia. He was engaged to the girl he loved, Agnes Scuffs. On the day of their wedding, Agnes reneged on their engagement and told Edward she wouldn’t marry him. Life is full of disappointments, but it’s always about how you react to them, right?

  Edward reacted by moving to North America, where he did manual labor in Canada and the United States until he contracted tuberculosis, which was not a trifling matter a century ago. He moved to Florida for his health and eventually found his life’s work: building a shrine to his lost love, many thousands of miles away.