Snowbirds, part seven.
DAY THIRTY-SIX
Thursday, March 12th
It was a little sad shutting down our campsite. We were both prepared and eager to stay there forever, we thought. But we were also both ready and excited for a four-day vacation from our full-time vacation. We stopped at the nearby RaceTrac for gas, iced water, and teeth-brushing and, avoiding highways, started heading east on 98 toward 27 southbound. It was a beautiful but hot and sunny day, nearing 90 degrees.
On the way through Kathleen in Polk County, I saw a tall concrete obelisk on the side of the road and knew right away what it was based on prior research into the areas we’d be going through. I turned around just so we could marvel at it. It was a self-congratulatory, bewildering monument to Polk County, branding itself the “Citrus Center” while not specifying what it was the citrus center of. I’m assuming of Florida, if not the world? It was erected in 1930 during the Great Depression--probably an irresponsible allocation of state funds, I‘d say--at a time when the county was indeed populated with abundant citrus groves, making it a national hub for that form of agriculture. However, it certainly wasn’t that anymore: we saw zero fields of fruit while driving through the area. Still, it stood there, cleared of any shrubs or vines that should have devoured it. A clear space where a plaque must have been was empty.
Across the road from it was an eccentric house with a dramatic gate lined in seriously sharp spikes. Behind it was a huge home surrounded by tropical trees and a bizarre grotto of some kind, decorated in animal statues, mosaic disco balls, East Asian dragons, Middle Eastern religious figures, and several Asian lions. We pulled over on the grass again to get a closer look. It was all very strange. At the opposite end of the wall in front, there was an opening, giving view to another structure with even more limestone statues of Asian religious deities. In the backyard, we could see a fountain of some kind and a huge, colorful dragon at least 50 feet long.
Next, we stopped in Lakeland at the Southgate Shopping Center, which appeared in one of our favorite films, Edward Scissorhands. The mall was where Edward cut hair at a salon in the movie. The arch was built in 1957, hence its vintage aesthetic--a style you see all over the state of Florida, it seemed. A lot of the film was shot around Florida, and the suburban neighborhood where Edward goes to stay was actually in Land O’ Lakes where our camp was located. The mall itself was a pretty dead one.
In a residential neighborhood in Winter Haven, one resident had built a 24-foot potty chair in his yard. His name was Steven Chayt and his life was spent as an artist, art student, graphic designer, craft letterpress printer, and publisher with his wife. After retirement from "real" jobs, he built his weird house and resumed being an artist, starting with this thing: the “HOHO Chair”, an idea he came up with in 1992 and completed in 2015, to the dismay of his neighbors who believed it was an eyesore.
The chair was a potty chair, so the seat had a giant hole in it. Underneath the hole was a platform bearing a picture of a clown’s face with a black hole over their mouth. It instantly made me envision god sitting down and shitting in a clown’s mouth. On the other side of the clown, facing the ground, was text reading two coordinates and the words “Put Your Trust Here” and “Put Your Trust There”. It was totally bizarre and cryptic and it was hard to imagine someone holding onto this specific idea for over two decades, but it was a hoot to go and see up close. According to Chayt, it was a portal connected to Marcel Duchamp’s “Etant donnés”, an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that was his final piece. The coordinates sent you right to it, and as the mythology he created states, if you were to drop something through the hole, it would disappear and turn up in Philadelphia. Yup.
Neither of us had ever tried to stop at any of those “gravity hill’ tourist traps before, but we stopped at one that was particularly innocent in a small-town sorta way, right along our route in Lake Wales. In addition to having a cheesy archway with spoooooky font over where the hill began announcing its name--Spook Hill--they had a sign with an elaborate and ridiculous urban legend to go along with it involving a huge monstrous gator and indigenous people. The nearby elementary school was named after it and Casper the Friendly Ghost was their school mascot, presumably defying copyright. We gave it several tries. We pulled up to the white line, we went a little beyond it, we stopped behind it... but whenever we’d put it in neutral and start coasting backwards, nothing looked weird to us; it certainly did not appear like we were floating up the hill, as explained to us. Eventually, we had to give up because local traffic kept coming through and our camper only stayed straight when backing up for so far. We were bummed this optical illusion didn’t work on us for whatever reason, but charmed by the school and local embrace of something so corny.
In Avon Park, we drove through miles and miles of citrus groves--the orange was to Florida what corn was to Nebraska. Down one of the dirt roads cutting through these numerous and vast fields was a small place called Maxwell Groves Country Store, the last fruit-packing house in the county, owned by a fruit family that’d been around since the 1920s. When we pulled up, we saw a man sitting on the orange swinging chair, next to the orange rocking chairs. Everything about it was so pleasant in an anachronistic way. The country store looked old and stuck in another decade, the inside decorated with pictures, newspaper clippings, and vintage ads of just under a century’s worth of family orange and fruit production.
We browsed first through the syrups, jams, jellies, salsas, and sauces, the tacky Florida gift shop sorta knick-knacks, and candies, avoiding the shelves of honeys and wines. In the back were their piles of various strains of oranges and grapefruit, surrounded of course by annoying fruit flies, and a table offering free samples of their homegrown, hand-pressed Valencia orange juice. We each took a complimentary shot and it was among the best we’d ever tasted. Alyssa put some in her black coffee; it tasted like wood to me.
She picked three fruits she wanted, but the guy working there immediately offered to pick better ones for us when we came up to the register. We trusted his judgment. We also had to try their famous orange juice soft serve ice cream, which not only was genuinely made with their locally grown oranges but also happened to be naturally dairy-free and vegan! We each got a creamsicle twist on a sugar cone and were instantly blown away by how good it was: nice and thick, unlike Dole Whip or something similarly artificial, and with a sweet but authentic OJ flavor. There was a $15 card minimum, so we also got two cute floral bowls, since we needed some for our camper kitchen.
Another special feature at Maxwell Groves was this tiny porch and rocking chair, about the size of a birdhouse, attached to a tree out front of the store. In front of it was a little stick, designated for impaling a cob of corn so the squirrels could sit and eat off of it. The stick was unfortunately bare while we were there. (I’ve included a bad photo someone else took of it being properly used.)
While we were sitting in the shade of a tree at a picnic table outside of the country store, eating our creamsicle soft serve ice cream cones, a lovely orange kitty that had been sleeping by the fence woke up and started talking to us, eventually joining at the table. At first, they rejected any offers of ice cream, instead more interested in pets and affection, but soon accepted and enjoyed quite a bit of it. We didn’t catch their name, but they were a real joy to hang out with. As we left, we caught them next door at their house, being licked by their chihuahua buddy.
We stopped in Lake Placid where, visible from almost anywhere you were, was a stunning 27-story, 240-foot, $2.3 million tower that had been abandoned since 2003, standing above a small strip mall and diner that were also empty. Built in 1960 and opened on New Year’s Day, 1961, it was originally known as the Tower of Peace, or Happiness Tower. Its only purpose was as a tourist attraction, offering visitors an elevator ride up to the top where they could take in a 40-mile panoramic view of Lake Placid and use a payphone boasted at the time as the highest one in Florida.
By 1982, it wasn’t making much money, and the owners were forced to avoid paying due taxes to the IRS, so it closed. It reopened four years later, but again failed, even with a diner and petting zoo at its base. It was bought by and maintained as a tourist attraction by the Lake Placid Tower Group, whose name and insignia still adorned the locked doors to the decaying rooms inside. As of 2003, it was just used as a cellphone tower. We tried, but could not find a way into this one. We did get to peer inside at the rooms, most of which looked like they’d been evacuated within minutes, and admired the tiny anoles crawling all over the walls. We also spotted a beautiful Spanish moth.
It was time for dinner and vegan options were pretty scarce. We settled on Chinese takeout at a place called Yum’s in a shopping plaza. They had especially good tofu.
As the sun began to set, we went and found a boat launch area to admire Lake Placid from, It was almost three miles long, and was a particularly serene lake, traced around by upscale homes, many of which were flying Trump flags. One such family was just tearing down a yard sale next to the lot.
We drove for another two hours under dark but starry skies along route 27, between fields of cows, sugarcane, sod, and not much else. Thankfully, the speed limit was 70 for the entire, mostly straight road down to where it would eventually meet I-75. With few options for places to set up camp, we had to slightly detour onto the interstate to find the Broward County rest area, which stood at the beginning of the Everglades and what is known as Alligator Alley. When we started setting up the camper, we were completely bombarded by swarms of mosquitoes, forcing us to put the camper up as quickly as a NASCAR pit stop crew. When we got inside, another half hour was spent killing the dozens of them that got in. They were really leggy and quick in dodging our attempts to squash them, but I knew I wouldn’t survive a night sharing space with them. By the time we had felt confident we cleared the camper out, I was literally sweating.
While there, we discovered officially that the camper battery that cost us at least $100 was completely dead. According to the internet, such batteries weren’t really supposed to ever go below 50%, and if it completely drained and wasn’t recharged right away, it could be killed entirely. After about five hours of driving, the car should have charged the battery enough that the ceiling lights inside would at least dimly come on, but they didn’t at all. It was really frustrating, and we both wished the guy at the RV repair place in Worcester had warned us about this technicality when we asked him question after question about what it was capable of while boondocking like we’d planned to.
We got into bed and watched The Trials of Gabriel Hernandez on Netflix, using Alyssa’s cellphone’s hotspot WiFi and a portable speaker to make it loud enough to hear over the two semi-trucks rumbling loudly on both sides of us.
Vague monument to forever ago.
Weird house.
The Edward Scissorhands mall.
Bizarre potty chair teleportation yard art.
Spook Hill, where the school's mascot is Casper.
Maxwell Groves Country Store--orange everything.
Cute orange kitty hanging out and eating orange juice ice cream with us at the orange market.
This is the little rocking chair designed for squirrels to sit back and eat corn on the cob, as demonstrated in the second shitty photo someone else took.
Tower of Peace/Happiness Tower, closed and abandoned--a metaphor.
Spanish moth, whose name sounds like someone saying "Spanish moss" with a lisp.
Lake Placid is known for its murals, which were everywhere, but this one was the only one I took a picture of. The cows, who are being corralled for nefarious reasons, were all so beautifully done.
Lake Placid.
Bleak reminders of one of the things Florida is known for. I also found it interesting that the sign's description is actually applicable to any and all forms of wage slavery.
DAY THIRTY-SEVEN
Friday, March 13th
We woke up to a sun unobstructed by trees and hence unbearable heat. Our gas gauge was obviously still broken, and we would never be able to afford to get it fixed, but I was feeling pretty confident we’d make it to our next destination, less than an hour away in Hialeah, if we didn’t pass by a gas station before then. By the time we saw a Sunoco shortly after leaving, it was on the other side of the road and I figured it wasn’t urgent enough to pull a U-turn, all while Alyssa said we probably should. It was less than five minutes after passing it that our car died on the side of the road. We pulled over onto the grass, right on the bend toward a traffic light. After sitting and groaning a little, we got out and felt the intense heat pounding down on us. Thankfully, we weren’t all that far from the Sunoco, but we were on a scary road where the “bike lane” was actually just the narrow shoulder of a state route populated with semis going 70 miles per hour. Still, Alyssa immediately started preparing to ride her bike down there to somehow retrieve some gas.
Just as she was beginning to take her bike off the rack of the car, an old guy in a white van with a younger dude in the passenger seat stopped and asked what happened. We told them and our plan of action and he wasted no time saying he had a couple gallons of gas he could give us, offering to return with some for us. It was remarkably kind and we were so relieved. We ended up waiting for about a half hour, during which he stopped by again to reassure us he was coming back and would also be donating a gas jug to us. I told him about our broken gas gauge and acknowledged it was my fault for not going to the nearby Sunoco once I saw it, but he encouragingly reassured me, “Hey, shit happens to all of us.” While waiting, another guy on a motorbike with a thick southern accent also asked what had happened and offered to bring us an empty jug. It was a nice feeling. In the end, the old guy came through with a small jug of two or three gallons of gasoline and a tiny funnel since the jug lacked a spout of its own. Neither of us had ever done this before, and the small blue funnel he gave us was not at all an appropriate size for our car. Just getting the top of the jug off was difficult at first since it was designed like the child-proof cap to a medication bottle. We were both surprised at how quickly and heavily the gasoline poured out, and at first most of it just got all over our hands and the side of the car. Alyssa tried putting plastic over the opening and stabbing a hole in it, hoping it’d at least narrow and decrease the amount flowing out, but that didn’t help. It was a plastic Chinese takeout container folded that ended up being the best option for getting the gas into the tank. We went to the nearest, cheapest gas we could find and then were back on our way. I would never doubt Alyssa’s uncanny instincts about gas ever again.
We weren’t hungry yet, but our next stop was a place called Happy Vegan Bakers, just outside of Miami. It was in an unassuming plaza with a preschool at one end. Owned by two women, they specialized in traditional Hispanic soul food like empanadas and pastelitos. We were very excited for flaky and/or crunchy, sweet and/or savory pockets of deliciousness. Since everything cost either $2 or $4, we asked for one of everything behind the glass. It was still early, so we wouldn’t eat any of it until much later in the day. The lot was way too small for our car and camper and we weren’t immediately sure how the hell I was going to get back out, but Alyssa investigated an alley on the far right end of the plaza and said we could make the tight turn into a back alley that lead back to the road. When we got to the turn, it was very clear we absolutely couldn’t. It was just too tight to give us clearance. We ended up having to unhitch the camper from the car, pull the car forward, and then manually push and pull the camper around the bend and back up to the car. We were both so incredibly fucking grateful to have each other for these stupid moments where one person just wouldn’t have been enough. Alyssa may have had a special sense when it came to low gas, but she apparently lacked decent spacial reasoning.
In Redland, tucked between thousands of acres of edible plant agriculture and the large Spanish-style homes of those who owned the fields, was a magical place called the Fruit & Spice Park, a paradise I was so excited to bring Alyssa to considering how eager to eat things off of trees and the ground she always was. For only $10, you could walk out into their 37 acres of plant life, most of which was edible fruit, herbs, and spices, and browse while foraging. You weren’t allowed to pick things off the trees, but if you found it on the ground, it was all yours! We weren’t normally the types to pay to enter somewhere, but we knew this would be worth every penny.
It was in 1944 that a woman named Mary Calkins Heinlein’s vision of an expansive garden of subtropical fruits put on display began coming into focus with the support of a county commissioner and the purchase of 18 acres. Today, it had grown to cultivate over 500 varieties of exotic fruits, herbs, spices, and nuts native to south Florida and from around the world, including 180 varieties of mangoes, 70 varieties of bamboo, 40 varieties of bananas, 15 varieties of jackfruit trees, and so much more, ranging from the edible to the poisonous, from the purely decorative to the absurdly ugly.
Inside, we were immediately offered samples of fruits grown on the property. I distinctly remember starfruit, which we were generally not very into, and canistel (also known as eggfruit), which had the consistency of hardboiled egg and tasted kinda like a sweet potato. I really loved canistel. After, we wandered but stayed close, admiring the humongous jackfruits hanging from the trees, awaiting the start of the tram tour through the park. Neither of us had ever seen young jackfruit, or full-grown jackfruit for that matter, hanging from their trees before. Many had fallen and been eaten at by the many species of singing birds and sprightly squirrels, or rotted into foul piles of black. Over by the bathrooms, we stumbled on a stone wall crawling in lizards; in addition to the tiny brown and green anoles we’d been growing accustomed to, we saw much larger lizards the size of rats. We were caught off guard at first by the bright and multicolored ones, almost a foot long, which scattered frantically but effortlessly across the walls of buildings. These were mostly male African rainbow lizards.
The tram tour started on the hour. We got to see everything while learning about some of the more exotic edible plants they had there from a knowledgeable guide who was clearly sincerely excited about fruit and had a very strange, indecipherable accent. We even got to stop a few times to try some, plucked straight from the trees. Alyssa and I were giddy little kids about the tour, while actual little kids behind us whined and screamed.
We saw so many fragrant and huge jackfruits; fluorescent, decorative pink pineapples that were edible though apparently not tasty; the most poisonous fruit in the world (under the wrong conditions), the ackee; upside-down trees named after their bare branches and slimming girth from bottom to top; water-resistant lotus leaves sharing man-made ponds with the lily pads. We saw some of our favorite foods, such as fennel, collards, kale, figs, peppers, and baby eggplants; African palm trees where we get palm oil from; an entire row of unripe strains of mangoes; creepy sausage trees named after exactly what their dangling fruits looked like; a small forest of bananas with their bizarre purple flowers, which stood up if inedible or sloped down if good to eat; coconuts everywhere of many different ages, sizes, and colors; persimmons, berries, the tree with twigs that looked like aging bones, sapodillas, chocolate pods, tomatoes, bare vines where grapes would eventually grow, trees that would soon hold avocados, and much more than I could identify then or remember after. We were given opportunities to try Jamaican cherries plucked straight from their tree, which while tiny held such a big burst of flavor, like a spicy cherry, some ripe blackberries, and nasturtium flowers, plucked and eaten whole, which were bright and beautiful primary colors with a deliciously spicy taste, sorta like horseradish or wasabi.
We walked around on our own afterwards, desperately trying to get away from the tourist family and their obnoxious children, while exploring and foraging to our hearts’ content. For the most part, we respected their rule of only eating things we found on the ground ourselves. There was plenty to find, and it was more fun as a treasure hunt, anyway.
Alyssa whipped out her little pink pocketknife and we started surveying the ground meticulously, prepared to eat just about anything. First, we tried a light green hot pepper whose specific name I forgot. We both ate them whole on the count of three; it burned the shit out of my mouth for 15 minutes while she appeared unfazed. We found a perfect yellow starfruit which as previously stated was not one of our favorites. We picked up a small and not-quite-ripe mango that when cut open looked deliciously light green. The meat was soft and had a much more sour flavor that we both liked a lot. Out of season, most of their mangoes were just beginning to grow and weren’t at all ripe, unfortunately. We found what I thought might have been a small and unripe sapodilla/nispero/manilkara zapota, three fruits I was unsure the differences between. I didn’t eat any, but it smelled a lot like cinnamon. Neither of us knew what the tiny, yellowish green fruit with the lovely pink ice cream appearance inside was, and it didn’t have much of a flavor at all according to Alyssa. I think it might have been a very young guava that hadn’t even formed its own seeds yet. In the banana garden, they had some bunches hung up for sampling with their names in chalk above them. We got to try a praying hand banana, which was very small and tasted just as yummy as any other banana I’d ever had. There was something very intuitive and empowering about eating raw plants from the ground. This was a very special situation, but I hoped to continue learning more about things I could eat right here right now right from the Earth, especially considering the imminent collapse of society.
After seeing enough coconuts everywhere we went, Alyssa tried smashing some of them, just raising it as high above her head as she could and thrusting it down with all her might against the concrete paths we were walking along. We could hear the juice floating and splashing around inside when we’d shake them by our ears. The first one she got open was smooth and orange, and sent an amazing and sweet water trickling out from its top like a bottle once cracked. We caught as much as we could in our hands and drank it out of our palms. Their color determined whether you got more water or more meat. The second one was thick, brown, and hairy, and it took forever for her to even get through the first layer of protection before she just started trying to tear it off. When she finally cracked it, the water burst everywhere, but she ate some of the clean, white meat from it. Coconuts were so fucking cool.
One of the highlights of the Fruit and Spice Park that wasn’t something edible was the cool reptilian life hanging around it. While walking along the palm trees by the pond and admiring some ibises, the rustling of the leaves we were walking through sent two iguanas racing up the branches to hide in the palm trees. Next thing I knew, I looked up from my phone and saw an especially giant and spiky iguana lounging in the shade of a tree in the middle of the path we were on. I almost couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. This guy was a fucking dinosaur, and I’d never seen a wild iguana before. They were far less concerned than the other smaller iguanas, though they did still opt to mosey away from us. We stood and watched them for a while as they took their time crawling over to a rock wall by the water where other iguanas and turtles were sunbathing. Another darker one sat under a tree, which people had carved initials in despite a cute sign urging visitors to not do it.
Exhausted from the sun and walk, we got going, but our day of fruit wasn’t over. Not far from the park was a place called Robert Is Here, a huge produce market specializing in exotic fruits grown locally. The “Robert” who was “there” was Robert Moehling, a large and jolly bearded man in glasses who hired his family members and still worked the registers, calculating totals with pencil and paper. He technically started working in 1959 when he was only 7, after his father started selling cucumbers on a coffee table on the side of the road, attracting attention with a sign pointing toward his son, announcing, “Robert is here.” As a teenager, he bought some acreage with money made from that stand and grew mangoes, and by the time he was 24 he had opened his first market. Then, in 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed everything, from the store to his acres of fruit. In the same month, his mother was murdered in an as-of-yet unsolved homicide. But he tenaciously rebuilt and started growing things again. Now it was this huge tourist destination full of exotic fruit, your typical produce options, boiled peanuts, candies, vegan cookies, a full cafe of fruit smoothies and shakes, and more. He also unfortunately added a section of confined animals for human entertainment.
We shopped around a bit. I was very confused to see giant emu eggs for sale by the register, next to the rainbow honey straws. I got a bag of caramel corn puffs, and Alyssa picked out some papaya (a personal favorite of hers), and two fruits neither of us had ever tried before: the mamey sapote and the guanabana. The guanabana cost over $10, so we had to run off with that one. Back in the car, we turned on the AC and ate some sorta dinner consisting of the fried pockets from Happy Vegan Bakers and the fruit we’d just picked up. The baked goods were unbelievable; their meat and potato empanada was particularly good, as was the melted cheese in their spinach and cheese empanada. The guava and cream cheese was a favorite of the flaky, sweet pastries. I loved the sapote, which tasted like if sweet potato were a fruit, but didn’t really like the guanabana, a spiky and green thing with a fleshy white pudding with seeds on the inside. A sign in the store boasted it as the yummiest fruit in the world, but I disagreed.
Our only option for somewhere to camp for the night was a giant parking lot outside of a Miccosukee tribe casino resort. They were nice enough to allow overnight parking and camping; all you had to do was go inside and register your vehicle. I hated casinos and the entire place smelled like an ashtray trying to get fucked. Alyssa discovered that an Americano with a shot of espresso was called something very different in this part of the country.
We were in the “raccoon” section of the lot designated for RVs and campers. The sunset was incredible, falling quickly like a giant tangerine on fire over a vast and flat dirt land. We were still hungry, so we cooked up some Upton's Naturals boxed bacon mac and cheese. I stole two bags of ice from the nearby truck stop. We ate while watching more of The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez. For a casino parking lot, it was a pretty peaceful night, and we got set up before the merciless Everglades mosquitoes woke up to feast this time.
Happy Vegan Bakers, and their incredibly cute logo. They did in fact look like that.
So much fruit and fun at the Fruit Park.
This isn't really an exciting thing to boast about, and we saw no birds inside of them. They looked like abandoned bird slums.
Robert Is Here, and our weird exotic fruit/vegan empanada dinner.
Sleepover outside a shitty casino.
To be continued...
Thursday, March 12th
It was a little sad shutting down our campsite. We were both prepared and eager to stay there forever, we thought. But we were also both ready and excited for a four-day vacation from our full-time vacation. We stopped at the nearby RaceTrac for gas, iced water, and teeth-brushing and, avoiding highways, started heading east on 98 toward 27 southbound. It was a beautiful but hot and sunny day, nearing 90 degrees.
On the way through Kathleen in Polk County, I saw a tall concrete obelisk on the side of the road and knew right away what it was based on prior research into the areas we’d be going through. I turned around just so we could marvel at it. It was a self-congratulatory, bewildering monument to Polk County, branding itself the “Citrus Center” while not specifying what it was the citrus center of. I’m assuming of Florida, if not the world? It was erected in 1930 during the Great Depression--probably an irresponsible allocation of state funds, I‘d say--at a time when the county was indeed populated with abundant citrus groves, making it a national hub for that form of agriculture. However, it certainly wasn’t that anymore: we saw zero fields of fruit while driving through the area. Still, it stood there, cleared of any shrubs or vines that should have devoured it. A clear space where a plaque must have been was empty.
Across the road from it was an eccentric house with a dramatic gate lined in seriously sharp spikes. Behind it was a huge home surrounded by tropical trees and a bizarre grotto of some kind, decorated in animal statues, mosaic disco balls, East Asian dragons, Middle Eastern religious figures, and several Asian lions. We pulled over on the grass again to get a closer look. It was all very strange. At the opposite end of the wall in front, there was an opening, giving view to another structure with even more limestone statues of Asian religious deities. In the backyard, we could see a fountain of some kind and a huge, colorful dragon at least 50 feet long.
Next, we stopped in Lakeland at the Southgate Shopping Center, which appeared in one of our favorite films, Edward Scissorhands. The mall was where Edward cut hair at a salon in the movie. The arch was built in 1957, hence its vintage aesthetic--a style you see all over the state of Florida, it seemed. A lot of the film was shot around Florida, and the suburban neighborhood where Edward goes to stay was actually in Land O’ Lakes where our camp was located. The mall itself was a pretty dead one.
In a residential neighborhood in Winter Haven, one resident had built a 24-foot potty chair in his yard. His name was Steven Chayt and his life was spent as an artist, art student, graphic designer, craft letterpress printer, and publisher with his wife. After retirement from "real" jobs, he built his weird house and resumed being an artist, starting with this thing: the “HOHO Chair”, an idea he came up with in 1992 and completed in 2015, to the dismay of his neighbors who believed it was an eyesore.
The chair was a potty chair, so the seat had a giant hole in it. Underneath the hole was a platform bearing a picture of a clown’s face with a black hole over their mouth. It instantly made me envision god sitting down and shitting in a clown’s mouth. On the other side of the clown, facing the ground, was text reading two coordinates and the words “Put Your Trust Here” and “Put Your Trust There”. It was totally bizarre and cryptic and it was hard to imagine someone holding onto this specific idea for over two decades, but it was a hoot to go and see up close. According to Chayt, it was a portal connected to Marcel Duchamp’s “Etant donnés”, an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that was his final piece. The coordinates sent you right to it, and as the mythology he created states, if you were to drop something through the hole, it would disappear and turn up in Philadelphia. Yup.
Neither of us had ever tried to stop at any of those “gravity hill’ tourist traps before, but we stopped at one that was particularly innocent in a small-town sorta way, right along our route in Lake Wales. In addition to having a cheesy archway with spoooooky font over where the hill began announcing its name--Spook Hill--they had a sign with an elaborate and ridiculous urban legend to go along with it involving a huge monstrous gator and indigenous people. The nearby elementary school was named after it and Casper the Friendly Ghost was their school mascot, presumably defying copyright. We gave it several tries. We pulled up to the white line, we went a little beyond it, we stopped behind it... but whenever we’d put it in neutral and start coasting backwards, nothing looked weird to us; it certainly did not appear like we were floating up the hill, as explained to us. Eventually, we had to give up because local traffic kept coming through and our camper only stayed straight when backing up for so far. We were bummed this optical illusion didn’t work on us for whatever reason, but charmed by the school and local embrace of something so corny.
In Avon Park, we drove through miles and miles of citrus groves--the orange was to Florida what corn was to Nebraska. Down one of the dirt roads cutting through these numerous and vast fields was a small place called Maxwell Groves Country Store, the last fruit-packing house in the county, owned by a fruit family that’d been around since the 1920s. When we pulled up, we saw a man sitting on the orange swinging chair, next to the orange rocking chairs. Everything about it was so pleasant in an anachronistic way. The country store looked old and stuck in another decade, the inside decorated with pictures, newspaper clippings, and vintage ads of just under a century’s worth of family orange and fruit production.
We browsed first through the syrups, jams, jellies, salsas, and sauces, the tacky Florida gift shop sorta knick-knacks, and candies, avoiding the shelves of honeys and wines. In the back were their piles of various strains of oranges and grapefruit, surrounded of course by annoying fruit flies, and a table offering free samples of their homegrown, hand-pressed Valencia orange juice. We each took a complimentary shot and it was among the best we’d ever tasted. Alyssa put some in her black coffee; it tasted like wood to me.
She picked three fruits she wanted, but the guy working there immediately offered to pick better ones for us when we came up to the register. We trusted his judgment. We also had to try their famous orange juice soft serve ice cream, which not only was genuinely made with their locally grown oranges but also happened to be naturally dairy-free and vegan! We each got a creamsicle twist on a sugar cone and were instantly blown away by how good it was: nice and thick, unlike Dole Whip or something similarly artificial, and with a sweet but authentic OJ flavor. There was a $15 card minimum, so we also got two cute floral bowls, since we needed some for our camper kitchen.
Another special feature at Maxwell Groves was this tiny porch and rocking chair, about the size of a birdhouse, attached to a tree out front of the store. In front of it was a little stick, designated for impaling a cob of corn so the squirrels could sit and eat off of it. The stick was unfortunately bare while we were there. (I’ve included a bad photo someone else took of it being properly used.)
While we were sitting in the shade of a tree at a picnic table outside of the country store, eating our creamsicle soft serve ice cream cones, a lovely orange kitty that had been sleeping by the fence woke up and started talking to us, eventually joining at the table. At first, they rejected any offers of ice cream, instead more interested in pets and affection, but soon accepted and enjoyed quite a bit of it. We didn’t catch their name, but they were a real joy to hang out with. As we left, we caught them next door at their house, being licked by their chihuahua buddy.
We stopped in Lake Placid where, visible from almost anywhere you were, was a stunning 27-story, 240-foot, $2.3 million tower that had been abandoned since 2003, standing above a small strip mall and diner that were also empty. Built in 1960 and opened on New Year’s Day, 1961, it was originally known as the Tower of Peace, or Happiness Tower. Its only purpose was as a tourist attraction, offering visitors an elevator ride up to the top where they could take in a 40-mile panoramic view of Lake Placid and use a payphone boasted at the time as the highest one in Florida.
By 1982, it wasn’t making much money, and the owners were forced to avoid paying due taxes to the IRS, so it closed. It reopened four years later, but again failed, even with a diner and petting zoo at its base. It was bought by and maintained as a tourist attraction by the Lake Placid Tower Group, whose name and insignia still adorned the locked doors to the decaying rooms inside. As of 2003, it was just used as a cellphone tower. We tried, but could not find a way into this one. We did get to peer inside at the rooms, most of which looked like they’d been evacuated within minutes, and admired the tiny anoles crawling all over the walls. We also spotted a beautiful Spanish moth.
It was time for dinner and vegan options were pretty scarce. We settled on Chinese takeout at a place called Yum’s in a shopping plaza. They had especially good tofu.
As the sun began to set, we went and found a boat launch area to admire Lake Placid from, It was almost three miles long, and was a particularly serene lake, traced around by upscale homes, many of which were flying Trump flags. One such family was just tearing down a yard sale next to the lot.
We drove for another two hours under dark but starry skies along route 27, between fields of cows, sugarcane, sod, and not much else. Thankfully, the speed limit was 70 for the entire, mostly straight road down to where it would eventually meet I-75. With few options for places to set up camp, we had to slightly detour onto the interstate to find the Broward County rest area, which stood at the beginning of the Everglades and what is known as Alligator Alley. When we started setting up the camper, we were completely bombarded by swarms of mosquitoes, forcing us to put the camper up as quickly as a NASCAR pit stop crew. When we got inside, another half hour was spent killing the dozens of them that got in. They were really leggy and quick in dodging our attempts to squash them, but I knew I wouldn’t survive a night sharing space with them. By the time we had felt confident we cleared the camper out, I was literally sweating.
While there, we discovered officially that the camper battery that cost us at least $100 was completely dead. According to the internet, such batteries weren’t really supposed to ever go below 50%, and if it completely drained and wasn’t recharged right away, it could be killed entirely. After about five hours of driving, the car should have charged the battery enough that the ceiling lights inside would at least dimly come on, but they didn’t at all. It was really frustrating, and we both wished the guy at the RV repair place in Worcester had warned us about this technicality when we asked him question after question about what it was capable of while boondocking like we’d planned to.
We got into bed and watched The Trials of Gabriel Hernandez on Netflix, using Alyssa’s cellphone’s hotspot WiFi and a portable speaker to make it loud enough to hear over the two semi-trucks rumbling loudly on both sides of us.
Vague monument to forever ago.
Weird house.
The Edward Scissorhands mall.
Bizarre potty chair teleportation yard art.
Spook Hill, where the school's mascot is Casper.
Maxwell Groves Country Store--orange everything.
Cute orange kitty hanging out and eating orange juice ice cream with us at the orange market.
This is the little rocking chair designed for squirrels to sit back and eat corn on the cob, as demonstrated in the second shitty photo someone else took.
Tower of Peace/Happiness Tower, closed and abandoned--a metaphor.
Spanish moth, whose name sounds like someone saying "Spanish moss" with a lisp.
Lake Placid is known for its murals, which were everywhere, but this one was the only one I took a picture of. The cows, who are being corralled for nefarious reasons, were all so beautifully done.
Lake Placid.
Bleak reminders of one of the things Florida is known for. I also found it interesting that the sign's description is actually applicable to any and all forms of wage slavery.
DAY THIRTY-SEVEN
Friday, March 13th
We woke up to a sun unobstructed by trees and hence unbearable heat. Our gas gauge was obviously still broken, and we would never be able to afford to get it fixed, but I was feeling pretty confident we’d make it to our next destination, less than an hour away in Hialeah, if we didn’t pass by a gas station before then. By the time we saw a Sunoco shortly after leaving, it was on the other side of the road and I figured it wasn’t urgent enough to pull a U-turn, all while Alyssa said we probably should. It was less than five minutes after passing it that our car died on the side of the road. We pulled over onto the grass, right on the bend toward a traffic light. After sitting and groaning a little, we got out and felt the intense heat pounding down on us. Thankfully, we weren’t all that far from the Sunoco, but we were on a scary road where the “bike lane” was actually just the narrow shoulder of a state route populated with semis going 70 miles per hour. Still, Alyssa immediately started preparing to ride her bike down there to somehow retrieve some gas.
Just as she was beginning to take her bike off the rack of the car, an old guy in a white van with a younger dude in the passenger seat stopped and asked what happened. We told them and our plan of action and he wasted no time saying he had a couple gallons of gas he could give us, offering to return with some for us. It was remarkably kind and we were so relieved. We ended up waiting for about a half hour, during which he stopped by again to reassure us he was coming back and would also be donating a gas jug to us. I told him about our broken gas gauge and acknowledged it was my fault for not going to the nearby Sunoco once I saw it, but he encouragingly reassured me, “Hey, shit happens to all of us.” While waiting, another guy on a motorbike with a thick southern accent also asked what had happened and offered to bring us an empty jug. It was a nice feeling. In the end, the old guy came through with a small jug of two or three gallons of gasoline and a tiny funnel since the jug lacked a spout of its own. Neither of us had ever done this before, and the small blue funnel he gave us was not at all an appropriate size for our car. Just getting the top of the jug off was difficult at first since it was designed like the child-proof cap to a medication bottle. We were both surprised at how quickly and heavily the gasoline poured out, and at first most of it just got all over our hands and the side of the car. Alyssa tried putting plastic over the opening and stabbing a hole in it, hoping it’d at least narrow and decrease the amount flowing out, but that didn’t help. It was a plastic Chinese takeout container folded that ended up being the best option for getting the gas into the tank. We went to the nearest, cheapest gas we could find and then were back on our way. I would never doubt Alyssa’s uncanny instincts about gas ever again.
We weren’t hungry yet, but our next stop was a place called Happy Vegan Bakers, just outside of Miami. It was in an unassuming plaza with a preschool at one end. Owned by two women, they specialized in traditional Hispanic soul food like empanadas and pastelitos. We were very excited for flaky and/or crunchy, sweet and/or savory pockets of deliciousness. Since everything cost either $2 or $4, we asked for one of everything behind the glass. It was still early, so we wouldn’t eat any of it until much later in the day. The lot was way too small for our car and camper and we weren’t immediately sure how the hell I was going to get back out, but Alyssa investigated an alley on the far right end of the plaza and said we could make the tight turn into a back alley that lead back to the road. When we got to the turn, it was very clear we absolutely couldn’t. It was just too tight to give us clearance. We ended up having to unhitch the camper from the car, pull the car forward, and then manually push and pull the camper around the bend and back up to the car. We were both so incredibly fucking grateful to have each other for these stupid moments where one person just wouldn’t have been enough. Alyssa may have had a special sense when it came to low gas, but she apparently lacked decent spacial reasoning.
In Redland, tucked between thousands of acres of edible plant agriculture and the large Spanish-style homes of those who owned the fields, was a magical place called the Fruit & Spice Park, a paradise I was so excited to bring Alyssa to considering how eager to eat things off of trees and the ground she always was. For only $10, you could walk out into their 37 acres of plant life, most of which was edible fruit, herbs, and spices, and browse while foraging. You weren’t allowed to pick things off the trees, but if you found it on the ground, it was all yours! We weren’t normally the types to pay to enter somewhere, but we knew this would be worth every penny.
It was in 1944 that a woman named Mary Calkins Heinlein’s vision of an expansive garden of subtropical fruits put on display began coming into focus with the support of a county commissioner and the purchase of 18 acres. Today, it had grown to cultivate over 500 varieties of exotic fruits, herbs, spices, and nuts native to south Florida and from around the world, including 180 varieties of mangoes, 70 varieties of bamboo, 40 varieties of bananas, 15 varieties of jackfruit trees, and so much more, ranging from the edible to the poisonous, from the purely decorative to the absurdly ugly.
Inside, we were immediately offered samples of fruits grown on the property. I distinctly remember starfruit, which we were generally not very into, and canistel (also known as eggfruit), which had the consistency of hardboiled egg and tasted kinda like a sweet potato. I really loved canistel. After, we wandered but stayed close, admiring the humongous jackfruits hanging from the trees, awaiting the start of the tram tour through the park. Neither of us had ever seen young jackfruit, or full-grown jackfruit for that matter, hanging from their trees before. Many had fallen and been eaten at by the many species of singing birds and sprightly squirrels, or rotted into foul piles of black. Over by the bathrooms, we stumbled on a stone wall crawling in lizards; in addition to the tiny brown and green anoles we’d been growing accustomed to, we saw much larger lizards the size of rats. We were caught off guard at first by the bright and multicolored ones, almost a foot long, which scattered frantically but effortlessly across the walls of buildings. These were mostly male African rainbow lizards.
The tram tour started on the hour. We got to see everything while learning about some of the more exotic edible plants they had there from a knowledgeable guide who was clearly sincerely excited about fruit and had a very strange, indecipherable accent. We even got to stop a few times to try some, plucked straight from the trees. Alyssa and I were giddy little kids about the tour, while actual little kids behind us whined and screamed.
We saw so many fragrant and huge jackfruits; fluorescent, decorative pink pineapples that were edible though apparently not tasty; the most poisonous fruit in the world (under the wrong conditions), the ackee; upside-down trees named after their bare branches and slimming girth from bottom to top; water-resistant lotus leaves sharing man-made ponds with the lily pads. We saw some of our favorite foods, such as fennel, collards, kale, figs, peppers, and baby eggplants; African palm trees where we get palm oil from; an entire row of unripe strains of mangoes; creepy sausage trees named after exactly what their dangling fruits looked like; a small forest of bananas with their bizarre purple flowers, which stood up if inedible or sloped down if good to eat; coconuts everywhere of many different ages, sizes, and colors; persimmons, berries, the tree with twigs that looked like aging bones, sapodillas, chocolate pods, tomatoes, bare vines where grapes would eventually grow, trees that would soon hold avocados, and much more than I could identify then or remember after. We were given opportunities to try Jamaican cherries plucked straight from their tree, which while tiny held such a big burst of flavor, like a spicy cherry, some ripe blackberries, and nasturtium flowers, plucked and eaten whole, which were bright and beautiful primary colors with a deliciously spicy taste, sorta like horseradish or wasabi.
We walked around on our own afterwards, desperately trying to get away from the tourist family and their obnoxious children, while exploring and foraging to our hearts’ content. For the most part, we respected their rule of only eating things we found on the ground ourselves. There was plenty to find, and it was more fun as a treasure hunt, anyway.
Alyssa whipped out her little pink pocketknife and we started surveying the ground meticulously, prepared to eat just about anything. First, we tried a light green hot pepper whose specific name I forgot. We both ate them whole on the count of three; it burned the shit out of my mouth for 15 minutes while she appeared unfazed. We found a perfect yellow starfruit which as previously stated was not one of our favorites. We picked up a small and not-quite-ripe mango that when cut open looked deliciously light green. The meat was soft and had a much more sour flavor that we both liked a lot. Out of season, most of their mangoes were just beginning to grow and weren’t at all ripe, unfortunately. We found what I thought might have been a small and unripe sapodilla/nispero/manilkara zapota, three fruits I was unsure the differences between. I didn’t eat any, but it smelled a lot like cinnamon. Neither of us knew what the tiny, yellowish green fruit with the lovely pink ice cream appearance inside was, and it didn’t have much of a flavor at all according to Alyssa. I think it might have been a very young guava that hadn’t even formed its own seeds yet. In the banana garden, they had some bunches hung up for sampling with their names in chalk above them. We got to try a praying hand banana, which was very small and tasted just as yummy as any other banana I’d ever had. There was something very intuitive and empowering about eating raw plants from the ground. This was a very special situation, but I hoped to continue learning more about things I could eat right here right now right from the Earth, especially considering the imminent collapse of society.
After seeing enough coconuts everywhere we went, Alyssa tried smashing some of them, just raising it as high above her head as she could and thrusting it down with all her might against the concrete paths we were walking along. We could hear the juice floating and splashing around inside when we’d shake them by our ears. The first one she got open was smooth and orange, and sent an amazing and sweet water trickling out from its top like a bottle once cracked. We caught as much as we could in our hands and drank it out of our palms. Their color determined whether you got more water or more meat. The second one was thick, brown, and hairy, and it took forever for her to even get through the first layer of protection before she just started trying to tear it off. When she finally cracked it, the water burst everywhere, but she ate some of the clean, white meat from it. Coconuts were so fucking cool.
One of the highlights of the Fruit and Spice Park that wasn’t something edible was the cool reptilian life hanging around it. While walking along the palm trees by the pond and admiring some ibises, the rustling of the leaves we were walking through sent two iguanas racing up the branches to hide in the palm trees. Next thing I knew, I looked up from my phone and saw an especially giant and spiky iguana lounging in the shade of a tree in the middle of the path we were on. I almost couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. This guy was a fucking dinosaur, and I’d never seen a wild iguana before. They were far less concerned than the other smaller iguanas, though they did still opt to mosey away from us. We stood and watched them for a while as they took their time crawling over to a rock wall by the water where other iguanas and turtles were sunbathing. Another darker one sat under a tree, which people had carved initials in despite a cute sign urging visitors to not do it.
Exhausted from the sun and walk, we got going, but our day of fruit wasn’t over. Not far from the park was a place called Robert Is Here, a huge produce market specializing in exotic fruits grown locally. The “Robert” who was “there” was Robert Moehling, a large and jolly bearded man in glasses who hired his family members and still worked the registers, calculating totals with pencil and paper. He technically started working in 1959 when he was only 7, after his father started selling cucumbers on a coffee table on the side of the road, attracting attention with a sign pointing toward his son, announcing, “Robert is here.” As a teenager, he bought some acreage with money made from that stand and grew mangoes, and by the time he was 24 he had opened his first market. Then, in 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed everything, from the store to his acres of fruit. In the same month, his mother was murdered in an as-of-yet unsolved homicide. But he tenaciously rebuilt and started growing things again. Now it was this huge tourist destination full of exotic fruit, your typical produce options, boiled peanuts, candies, vegan cookies, a full cafe of fruit smoothies and shakes, and more. He also unfortunately added a section of confined animals for human entertainment.
We shopped around a bit. I was very confused to see giant emu eggs for sale by the register, next to the rainbow honey straws. I got a bag of caramel corn puffs, and Alyssa picked out some papaya (a personal favorite of hers), and two fruits neither of us had ever tried before: the mamey sapote and the guanabana. The guanabana cost over $10, so we had to run off with that one. Back in the car, we turned on the AC and ate some sorta dinner consisting of the fried pockets from Happy Vegan Bakers and the fruit we’d just picked up. The baked goods were unbelievable; their meat and potato empanada was particularly good, as was the melted cheese in their spinach and cheese empanada. The guava and cream cheese was a favorite of the flaky, sweet pastries. I loved the sapote, which tasted like if sweet potato were a fruit, but didn’t really like the guanabana, a spiky and green thing with a fleshy white pudding with seeds on the inside. A sign in the store boasted it as the yummiest fruit in the world, but I disagreed.
Our only option for somewhere to camp for the night was a giant parking lot outside of a Miccosukee tribe casino resort. They were nice enough to allow overnight parking and camping; all you had to do was go inside and register your vehicle. I hated casinos and the entire place smelled like an ashtray trying to get fucked. Alyssa discovered that an Americano with a shot of espresso was called something very different in this part of the country.
We were in the “raccoon” section of the lot designated for RVs and campers. The sunset was incredible, falling quickly like a giant tangerine on fire over a vast and flat dirt land. We were still hungry, so we cooked up some Upton's Naturals boxed bacon mac and cheese. I stole two bags of ice from the nearby truck stop. We ate while watching more of The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez. For a casino parking lot, it was a pretty peaceful night, and we got set up before the merciless Everglades mosquitoes woke up to feast this time.
Happy Vegan Bakers, and their incredibly cute logo. They did in fact look like that.
So much fruit and fun at the Fruit Park.
This isn't really an exciting thing to boast about, and we saw no birds inside of them. They looked like abandoned bird slums.
Robert Is Here, and our weird exotic fruit/vegan empanada dinner.
Sleepover outside a shitty casino.
To be continued...