Snowbirds, part eleven.
DAY FIFTY-THREE
Sunday, March 29th
I never slept and started getting things together pretty early before Alyssa’s cellphone alarm woke her up. We loaded a bunch of things into the car and camper across several trips between our room and the parking lot. It was bright and sunny out, pretty warm, and when it came down to it we were both pretty amped for another road trip.
We took the back roads and for the longest time it was just a lot of traffic through towns of corporate chains next to abandoned local ones. We pulled over at the Homosassa Springs state park parking lot to admire a huge manatee statue outside of it. The place was otherwise closed and involved an unethical “wildlife park”, anyway. After about an hour of driving, my total lack of sleep started to catch up with me, so I traded seats with Alyssa and took a nap for a half hour before we got to our next stop.
Off of the otherwise dull route 441 was a particularly beautiful pet cemetery called Garden of Love, founded in 1980 by a married couple and currently managed by a nearby veterinarian. Pulling in, we were immediately captured by how gorgeous the grounds were, with all the oak trees draped in Spanish moss, completely enveloping the entire park. An elaborate sculpture depicting an angel holding a cat as a dog looked up to her and a horse came from behind them welcomed you off to the left, bearing an engraved Lord Byron quote that was almost entirely faded away:
“In our gardens repose the remains of those that possess beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and the virtues of man without his vices: our pets.”
I don’t approve of the word “pet”, but the quote was still very powerful.
We walked along the plots, almost all of which were neat rows of small traditional gravestones with the names, birth and death dates, a short epitaph, and a picture of the decedent. They were all so heartwarming. Some had fresh flowers, toys, or chew bones left at them; others had their own sculptures or stone benches. An entire section seemed to be designated for cats. I saw a grave for a rooster named Romeo and another for a conure named Annie Fife, whose epitaph made me start crying. It was a really serene place to lay animal friends to rest and we were both just so touched. An old woman played fetch with her dog there. A couple on a motorcycle rumbled in and started walking around with cigarettes, disrupting the calm of the atmosphere.
Shortly after leaving the pet cemetery, not far from our next stop in Gainesville, we heard a light, descending whistle, like the dropping of a missile from the sky, from somewhere inside the car. Suddenly, the air conditioning jolted and got a little warmer. Next thing we knew, the battery light came on and I lost all power steering. Both freaked out, we pulled over and Alyssa started Googling. We opened the hood even though we both knew neither of us could interpret anything we might see underneath. Thankfully, the internet told us the symptoms were almost certainly a broken serpentine belt, and we could easily detect it inside. Sure enough, it was frayed, ripped, and jammed where it shouldn’t have been. We got back in the car as the 90-degree heat quickly began to make the car a burning building. The only, and closest, thing to us was a gun shop. We joked that maybe it was a sign to finally give up.
Alyssa requested roadside assistance through her Progressive insurance and I called the nearest auto mechanic that came up, who told me his workers wouldn’t be around until the next morning but that we could get the car towed there. On the phone with the tow company, we were told their trucks couldn’t accommodate our camper unless they used a separate truck for $80, and they knew as well as we did that our insurance would not cover anything involving the camper. We also got an automated text saying we needed to get alternative transportation to the garage because coronavirus precautions required we not ride in the truck with the driver. It was all really overwhelming. Alyssa cried a little, and I knew how easily her anxiety lead to her clamming up, so I pushed through my own anxiety to call them back and be very clear about our situation in a way she hadn’t been, hoping putting it all out there would inspire them to be more flexible: we lived in the camper, we couldn’t just leave it on the side of the road and have nowhere to stay, we had no money, and we couldn’t get it fixed until the following morning.
The guy, Tom, was surprised to hear we couldn’t find someone able to do it more quickly, considering how simple a fix it apparently was, and while they didn’t own enough tow trucks as a small, independent company who just had one of their four die on them, they did have mechanics on their premises. He said he’d see if one of their guys, who happened to be at the garage that day, could do it for us before sunset. We covered ourselves in sunscreen and I sought shelter under our small, purple umbrella as we anxiously waited the call back, hoping for some sort of good luck. When he called back, he told us their guy Phil would be able to do it as soon as the car was towed to their garage and it would only cost about $100. The tow truck driver who picked us up thankfully didn’t care about the coronavirus. In fact, he believed it was a conspiracy by the Illuminati, pointing out that no one seemed to personally know anyone with it but that several celebrities were suddenly getting it and a lot of suspicious authoritarian laws were being sneaked in during the chaos. We steered the conversation toward more rational radical ideas and he was a surprisingly progressive, woke, compassionate guy who wanted as little to do with this system as we did. We were caught off guard several times by some of his profoundly observant comments--all made with a youthful, deep southern dialect by a tow truck driver in dirty clothes. Never judge a book by its cover, I guess.
We were welcomed by another friendly man named Marco, who said they’d bring us to a restaurant or something had they not all been closed for indoor seating. Instead, we were lead to a back room in their garage to sit and wait in a comfy couch and recliner with a strange fan that circulated cold air from an Igloo cooler. The mechanic, Phil, assured us he’d have it done that day, and had immediately discovered a pulley or whatever had come completely apart, breaking our belt. He’d fix all the pieces for $130. It took several hours to fix because he had to hunt down the parts, and at first came back with the wrong one, but he was as kind and personable as the rest of the guys we’d met from the Spartan Roadside Rescue and Towing Company, and we were just so grateful he was taking the time so last minute to help us out. We paid for it using $75 one of Alyssa’s old professors sent her, $25 of what little remaining DoorDash money we had left, and $30 in cash from the dumpstered cabinet sale in my wallet.
We immediately went to find food because neither of us had eaten a single thing the entire day. I suggested we go to Reggae Shack Café, my go-to for food in Gainesville. While neither entirely vegan nor even vegetarian, they had the best vegan menu in the city, with traditional Jamaican flavor combinations that were both familiar and totally unique. We were gonna pay for it with a forgotten $50 gift card Alyssa had found in her stuff, but it couldn’t be used like a normal debit card, forcing us to drive around in circles trying to find somewhere she could get cash back for it. It took three goddamn stops before we found somewhere, and in the process I wound up giving a homeless guy on a bike the rest of the spare change we had in the car. We picked up our big dinner and headed over to the University of Florida to dine while watching bats.
Gainesville, and the University of Florida, is home to the world’s largest occupied bat houses. Home mostly to the Brazilian free-tailed bat, many Southeastern and Evening bats also called them home. The combined capacity of the houses was 750,000 bats, and the current population was as many as a half million. Back in 1987, one of the school’s halls had been destroyed in a fire, forcing a colony of bat residents, suddenly homeless, to relocate to the bleachers of the university’s track and soccer stadiums. Covering their new area with piss and guano, the school eventually decided to build them a new home in 1991, thankfully forgoing extermination of any kind. Several thousand bats were physically caught and moved to the new house, but they all abandoned it a day later. More than three years later, the bats decided it was actually a pretty good home, and returned. In 2009, their weight caused its collapse, but it was quickly restored. A Bat Barn was added in 2010 and a second House in 2017 to replace the old one.
At sunset, you could sit at benches or lean on the wooden fencing and watch them fly out in dense swarms to eat and exercise. I experienced it for the first time three years prior when I was last in Gainesville and knew Alyssa would find it magical. We lined the fence with our food and patiently waited along with a small audience. We got a steak sandwich (pan-seared handmade seitan sautéed in Caribbean sauce with LTO, mustard, and ketchup on a whole wheat Kaiser bun), a plate of the escoviech tofu (crispy tofu cooked in a tangy sweet-and-spicy sauce with carrots, onions, scotch bonnet peppers, thyme, and allspice berries), a plate of spicy tempeh (local organic tempeh crumbled and simmered in homemade spicy jerk and sweet Caribbean sauces), and an order of their new off-menu vegan wings with Caribbean sauce. The sandwich came with their famous seasoned dutty fries and each plate came with rice and beans, steamed cabbage, and plantains (which I hate and did not eat).
We scarfed most of it down while waiting for the bats. Soon enough, they burst out from underneath the Bat House in a steady volume for 20 minutes straight, flowing through and over the trees, across and along the road, as if they had an organized, collectively synchronized route in the sky. Their little chirps filled the air and we stood under them in childlike amazement. Altogether, they ate 2,500 pounds of bugs while we ate like 15 pounds of vegan Jamaican food.
We started driving back out to 441 to pick our camper up, which we hoped was still there. It was outside of someone’s house, so we had left a note saying our car had broken down and we’d be back to get it. I included my number just in case. We were relieved to find it still sitting there, untouched. From there, we started heading to a nearby rest area we’d planned to spend the night at. The first one was too small and populated for us, so we continued toward the next one. Less than three miles later, we thought we heard a thwap sort of sound, but weren’t sure where it came from. Then the battery light popped back on and I was back to not being able to steer smoothly. We pulled over on the side of I-75, looked under the hood with our cellphone flashlights, and there it was: the brand new serpentine belt, split apart, resting at the bottom against the hot steel, emitting the smell of melting rubber. Despite new pieces, it had broken again in only about an hour’s worth of driving. We sat there for a moment in disbelief. This scenario was even worse than the first one. I called the guy who’d fixed it and asked him what could have gone wrong. He sounded genuinely bewildered and said, “I haven’t the slightest idea.” He of course offered to fix it first thing the next morning, but that didn't help us right then and there.
Alyssa started crying again and we sat there in the dark while semi trucks zoomed by at over 70 miles per hour, no one moving over for us even though it was the law and also just the courteous and safe thing to do. I tried to move over further into the grass because of how dangerously close everyone was getting to us. Alyssa sent out another roadside request to Progressive and the same company, Spartan, called us back. It was Marco, who we’d spoken to a lot while our car was being fixed, and he’d be coming to get us this time.
We were pretty much entirely out of money. I had $18 in cash left in my wallet, $8 in my bank, and Alyssa had $11 in hers. We technically had over $500, but it all was needlessly delayed by fake digital processing delays. Since Alyssa wasn’t good at it, I made the difficult call to her father to ask for help, and he thankfully Venmo’d us enough to afford a two nights at a hotel and an Uber ride from the garage to it. Marco towed us and we had no other choice but to leave the camper on the side of the interstate, as worrisome as it was. The ride to the garage, he carried on really calming conversation, telling us about the towing monopoly in Gainesville and its corrupt, mercilessly predatory business model. In fact, the first time I’d ever experienced a towed car situation had been in Gainesville in the lot of an abandoned McDonald’s. He told us he and Tom had started the business emphasizing helping people first, and they only towed people in need. They wanted nothing to do with a business plan that profited off of literally stealing people’s cars and then holding them for ransom. The motley crew of Spartan employees were exemplary businessmen. He even drove us to our hotel afterwards.
The Super 8 was especially nice for only $50 a night. Despite the kindness of the strangers we’d encountered, and just barely but successfully getting through the day, we wanted to give the fuck up.
Giant manatee!
Such a beautiful pet cemetery... :(
Car breaking down, round one.
The best food in Gainesville.
BATS!
Car breaking down, round two.
DAY FIFTY-FOUR
Monday, March 30th
By 9:30, Phil was calling to let us know the car was fixed again. He said he wasn’t entirely sure what happened, but chalked it up to a low-quality serpentine belt. All other possible car parts that could have lead to it breaking were in good shape, according to him. He said it was free of charge. We still slept late because the day before had just wiped us out of all we had left mentally, emotionally, and physically. When we got up, we went straight to pick the camper up off the side of the interstate, both with visions in our heads of it obliterated and our belongings strewn along the side of the road. Thankfully, it had survived again.
We started heading back to our hotel and on the way passed through the Paynes Prairie wetlands. We pulled over to admire one of the views by a pier. As usual, there were a couple of people who couldn’t see the beauty--only an opportunity to pretend they were alpha predators and trick and kill fish for fun. It was always a bummer to see almost every piece of nature contaminated by humans destroying it. We walked along it to the end. There was a short streak of mushed dog shit at the beginning. One man fishing had a bucket of tiny fish in dirty brown water to use as bait. The wire fencing had bunches of discarded fishing line tangled in it. At the very end was a couple fishing, the girlfriend with a pink camo rod, with two empty styrofoam gas station soda refill cups tossed on the ground and piles of discarded tobacco from a gutted blunt wrap lying on the wooden trash can box, fence, and much of it floating in the water. I cut what fishing line I could find off the fence with scissors and threw it away, and then we both did some little graffiti tags on the trash can for fun. As I normally did around fishing areas, I wrote “FISHING IS FOR COWARDS” next to mine.
As we walked back, I guess the couple looked at our tags out of curiosity and noticed what mine said. All of the sudden, we heard the man yelling as he half-seriously walked toward us, “Hey, white boy! What’s up? Come back, bitch! With your cracka ass!” His feelings were quite hurt. I looked at him and gave him an animated shrug and then we sat in the car and laughed as we watched him desperately try to buff the words that offended him. We wondered if it was his pick-up truck that had the bright pink sexy underwear hanging from its rear-view mirror. Humans were not predators in the natural sense of the word, and only total fucking scumbags killed animals and litter. Our oceans would be empty within our lifetime and fish felt emotions and physical pain in the same way as we and our household animal companions. There were far more sustainable, healthy, and compassionate avenues for sourcing protein. It seemed so many people looked at nature either indifferently or opportunistically.
We still didn’t have access to the money we had coming our way. DoorDash money only transferred to Alyssa’s bank account on Tuesdays, and you were required to apply for instant deposit, a service that should have been obvious and automatic to begin with but was instead designated an extra service they would charge us $1.99 for using and make us wait seven days to be approved for. Alyssa had rediscovered a small tin she had been hoarding gift cards in for the last year of holidays, mostly to places we didn’t go to very often. We used them to get some incredibly underwhelming takeout from Chipotle and Panera for dinner.
Outside Panera, I saw a homeless woman with all of her belongings in a shopping cart, sitting on the ground while two ducks hung out with her, almost seeming like they were comforting her since she clearly didn’t have any food to share with them. I walked over to talk to her and give her the $6 in cash I had left in my wallet. Her name was Wendy and she was very nice. I asked her what her duck friends’ names were, and she told me she called them Ducky and Lucky. We had $12 left on the Panera gift card after ordering, so I offered to buy her a vegan meal. She chose the 10-vegetable soup. The duck couple she hung out with were beautiful. The girl at the register who I asked told me the woman was out there every day.
Later that night, we went out to try and find chocolate and berries for Alyssa, in a city where anything that wasn’t a gas station was already closed by that point. Eventually, we decided to check out some dumpsters. A Dollar General really paid off with seven bottles of mandarin Jarritos soda, a bag of cinnamon and sugar Skinny Pop popcorn mini-cakes, four bags of caramel popcorn, four boxes of spaghetti, a pack of Listerine strips, two boxes of saltines, some magnetic clips, some hair clips, and an adorable life-size tarantula toy we would probably keep on our dashboard. We could have taken more, but only kept what we knew we’d use. Eventually, we were able to rack some chocolate from a 24-hour CVS. We were grateful our current hotel room had both a mini-fridge and microwave.
Creepy hands.
One fraction of Paynes Prairie.
Wendy the human and her ducks.
Shitty gift card dinner.
Alyssa is so beautiful.
Oleander caterpillars were everywhere!
Neat mural at the end of one of many ugly shopping plazas.
Successful dumpter haul for the night.
DAY FIFTY-FIVE
Tuesday, March 31st
The next morning, likely due to an oversight on their end, the hotel never changed our rooms after I groggily told the housecleaning woman we had extended our stay, so we stayed in our room with two fulls instead of moving to a single queen. Alyssa got up before me and did a few hours of DoorDash. Meanwhile, money had finally been deposited to us, so I’d booked us another stay around 5 in the morning. We drove around looking at some of the stupid shit in Gainesville that they couldn’t close because they were outdoors. It was windy in a scary Florida hurricane sorta way, threatening rain. We were caught off guard that kids from the sports part of campus were out and about, jogging, riding bikes, and heading to the gym like coronavirus wasn’t happening. Gainesville was largely a college town full of huge frat and sorority houses, and the college kids who seemed to make up a good portion of the local population were waltzing around like they were on vacation, with classes canceled but access to the facilities and their luxury apartments left over to enjoy all day long. We were surprised to not be the only ones, along with the booming homeless and beggar population in town, outside.
Outside the University of Florida Animal Sciences department building stood four silver sculptures, ambiguously titled “Some Were Quite Blind”, that at first glance looked like randomly designed poles or rocket ships. From left to right, though, they depicted the complex and bizarre penises of the boar, cat, bull, and ram. Across from there, we saw a small fenced-in field with a group of beautiful cows. We went over to say hi. They approached us curiously but cautiously, and all had tags in their ears with the numbers that represented them as the commodities they were. One was special enough to be named Gus according to their tag, written in marker above their number with a heart. To our surprise and disgust, two of them had fistulas implanted in their stomachs. It was the first time either of us had ever seen it in real life, and it was honestly horrifying. (Fistulas are basically implanted plugs that allow ease of access into the guts of the cow by human hands for the purpose of scientific research and transplanting healthy gut bacteria into sick cows. Of course, this isn’t for the benefit of the cow as a cared-for individual, but of property that produces profit.) It was really gross and sad. We also saw a historical marker commemorating the home of Gatorade, which neither of us knew was actually a reference to alligators, and a cute bronze sculpture of a gator couple named Albert and Alberta. An alleyway of graffiti had several cute fruit pieces along it.
The grocery stores in town had implemented a new and annoying security theater requirement, only allowing a small handful of people inside at once, obviously resulting in long lines outside. After seeing the outrageous line to the natural foods store, we instead ordered a huge pizza and calzone from a place called Satchel's. They were cash only, but also allowed payments through PayPal, which was convenient. The outside of their place was covered in eccentric junk art; a hubcap wind chime hanging from a tree, a fountain made of bike parts and toys, a wall of forgotten trophies, mosaics of salvaged pieces of glass and tile, an airplane resting atop outdoor seating and collections of succulents, a van sitting outside the front doors with tags and stickers all over it. It was a really neat place. More importantly, their pizza was fucking incredible. We got an 18” with Daiya and barbecue tempeh crumbles and a calzone stuffed with Daiya, mushrooms, and broccoli. The slices were nice and thin, but still crispy with thick, fluffy crust encased in crunch; the barbecue tempeh was abundant and perfect, blending perfectly with their marinara; and there was just the right amount of Daiya mozzarella. The calzone too was just flawless, nice and cheesy with fresh tasting mushrooms and appropriately burnt broccoli. The pizza box could be cut out to form a three-dimensional van you could color and decorate, and Alyssa was really looking forward to doing that.
Before I could even fully digest any food, I went out on a scheduled block of DoorDash deliveries. A torrential downpour had exploded outside and just the sprint from the hotel to the car left me entirely soaked as I rushed over to Chipotle and Blaze to pick up orders for spoiled rich college brats who wouldn’t even tip me anything. Delivering in Gainesville fucking sucked. Most of the people I was bringing food to were these college kids, most of whom lived in these large, labyrinthine, luxury apartment complexes that, with little to no helpful instructions on how to find their door out of the hundreds spread across several buildings, made each delivery a 15-minute ordeal just to find them. It was really dehumanizing catering to these kids whose lives I never had and never would, as they lived in a cloud where even their fast food magically levitated to them. A rule I’d realized was that no one who ordered Taco Bell or Chipotle ever tipped, whether in Gainesville or elsewhere. Still, I was out until after midnight and made almost $70.
Animal penises.
Sad cows. :(
Satchel's.
DAY FIFTY-SIX
Wednesday, April 1st
The next day, I had booked us to be in what we were already supposed to be in, assuming that would ensure we didn’t need to change rooms. At first the housecleaning lady again accepted my groggy proclamation of extending my stay, but another woman showed up at the door soon after to tell me we had to move because it wasn’t supposed to be ours. According to them, we had originally booked two queen-sized beds our first two nights, and were currently in a room with two queen-sized beds. Since I booked the next three nights with two full-size, we were being forced to move. I was pretty annoyed, since they were wrong as far as I could tell and we’d moved so much stuff into our temporary studio apartment. I went to the front desk to reluctantly comply while complaining aloud to them and trying to catch her and the other guy who showed up in a lie, because I was confident they were trying to pull one over us as they repeatedly placed the blame on hotels.com. In the past, I’d tried to get refunds on hotel stays and watched the hotel itself and the hotels.com website just trap you in a circle of them blaming each other or telling you only the one could deal with complaints. As it turned out, unbeknownst to us since the six-inch difference between a queen and a full is indistinguishable, we had been put in a room with two queen-size beds instead of two full-size those first two nights, despite my choice and confirmation email saying full-size. However, it wasn’t Super 8’s fault because, as they showed me with their computer, hotels.com sent them info saying I’d chosen a double-queen. Now, this time around, I’d again chosen a double-full, but Super 8 received the same information, leading them to have to move us into a real double-full. I also found out that the two people dealing with this/me weren’t even supposed to be: one was head of housecleaning and the other property management--actual managers were staying home and people were doing jobs they weren’t supposed to during their regular hours because of coronavirus and the hotel not wanting to give anyone overtime. I apologized to them both for my attitude and they forgave me, but we still needed to lug all our stuff up to a new third-floor room.
Alyssa went out for a devastating series of deliveries to college kids for two hours. I stayed back and called hotels.com to complain and tell them sending hotels different information than they send their customers was unacceptable. I was told they’d confirm everything with the hotel and send me an email within 24 hours, but they never would. I was determined to get something out of their misbehavior, but lost the energy real quick. Alyssa came back around dinner time and we went out to try and get some groceries. Of course, there were lines extending for yards at the entrance to most grocery stores, and we both rolled our eyes and refused to play along. Whole Foods seemed to be letting more people inside than others, so there wasn’t a line, and we walked in and out with a bag of food. For dinner, we had veggie pita pockets with hummus, alfalfa sprouts, cucumber, avocado, Chao cheese, and dijon, with an order of Papa John’s breadsticks on the side.
I went out for deliveries for three hours and made just under $35 between a string of orders where almost no one tipped. Neither of us had ever experienced an area that so consistently didn’t tip, and we knew these fucking kids ordering milkshakes from Steak and Shake could fucking spare a couple bucks. I filled up each night back at the hotel on caramel popcorn and mandarin cane sugar soda from the dumpster. South Park was playing on Comedy Central at almost every hour. With some more money flowing in, we’d booked another three nights at the hotel. We both felt like sell-outs and knew from our last week at a Motel 6 it wasn’t sustainable, but we were also just feeling so goddamn defeated.
DAY FIFTY-SEVEN
Thursday, April 2nd
Another soul-crushing day of stagnancy and being a serf for rich college kids, Alyssa did the first block of deliveries while I slept in and downloaded music. It was rife with more Chipotle orders without tips, but she came home with $51.90 thanks to some double-digit orders toward the end. We had another veggie pita pocket and Papa John’s breadsticks dinner, this time with Tofurky in the pitas.
I procrastinated going out for my turn of DoorDash deliveries, but eventually did, making another $50. Someone was nice enough to tip me $5 cash. Two deliveries took me far away to the outer border of Gainesville where there were blocks of actual houses instead of luxury college kid apartment complexes, and their many intense speed humps caused the bike on the back of the car to smash a tail light and one of the straps of the rack to come unclipped from the door. Driving by a church whose steeple had fallen off gave me some relief. My last order of the night was a $3 McDonald’s order. As with everywhere else, I couldn’t get the food from inside and had to go to the drive-thru where I’d sit in a slow and backed-up line of customers. DoorDash gave you a set time to pick up orders by, and as soon as I was one minute late, I got a text from the person asking, “Everything okay?” even though on their app I knew they could see I was at the fucking McDonald’s. Before I could even finish my text back, they were calling me. They would later tip me 25 cents--I would have preferred no tip at all. I decided to reject offers to extend my shift because that was enough for me.
Instead, I went back to the hotel and watched My Girl with Alyssa, which made us both cry so, so much. It was nice cuddling and watching a movie. Tragically ironic, we had found ourselves doing exactly what we’d set out to avoid by coming down to Florida to live in a camper in the woods: working every day to afford somewhere to stay, ultimately only seeing each other for dinner and having differing sleep schedules. We hated it.
Dinner.
Good.
Ugh.
To be continued...
Sunday, March 29th
I never slept and started getting things together pretty early before Alyssa’s cellphone alarm woke her up. We loaded a bunch of things into the car and camper across several trips between our room and the parking lot. It was bright and sunny out, pretty warm, and when it came down to it we were both pretty amped for another road trip.
We took the back roads and for the longest time it was just a lot of traffic through towns of corporate chains next to abandoned local ones. We pulled over at the Homosassa Springs state park parking lot to admire a huge manatee statue outside of it. The place was otherwise closed and involved an unethical “wildlife park”, anyway. After about an hour of driving, my total lack of sleep started to catch up with me, so I traded seats with Alyssa and took a nap for a half hour before we got to our next stop.
Off of the otherwise dull route 441 was a particularly beautiful pet cemetery called Garden of Love, founded in 1980 by a married couple and currently managed by a nearby veterinarian. Pulling in, we were immediately captured by how gorgeous the grounds were, with all the oak trees draped in Spanish moss, completely enveloping the entire park. An elaborate sculpture depicting an angel holding a cat as a dog looked up to her and a horse came from behind them welcomed you off to the left, bearing an engraved Lord Byron quote that was almost entirely faded away:
“In our gardens repose the remains of those that possess beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and the virtues of man without his vices: our pets.”
I don’t approve of the word “pet”, but the quote was still very powerful.
We walked along the plots, almost all of which were neat rows of small traditional gravestones with the names, birth and death dates, a short epitaph, and a picture of the decedent. They were all so heartwarming. Some had fresh flowers, toys, or chew bones left at them; others had their own sculptures or stone benches. An entire section seemed to be designated for cats. I saw a grave for a rooster named Romeo and another for a conure named Annie Fife, whose epitaph made me start crying. It was a really serene place to lay animal friends to rest and we were both just so touched. An old woman played fetch with her dog there. A couple on a motorcycle rumbled in and started walking around with cigarettes, disrupting the calm of the atmosphere.
Shortly after leaving the pet cemetery, not far from our next stop in Gainesville, we heard a light, descending whistle, like the dropping of a missile from the sky, from somewhere inside the car. Suddenly, the air conditioning jolted and got a little warmer. Next thing we knew, the battery light came on and I lost all power steering. Both freaked out, we pulled over and Alyssa started Googling. We opened the hood even though we both knew neither of us could interpret anything we might see underneath. Thankfully, the internet told us the symptoms were almost certainly a broken serpentine belt, and we could easily detect it inside. Sure enough, it was frayed, ripped, and jammed where it shouldn’t have been. We got back in the car as the 90-degree heat quickly began to make the car a burning building. The only, and closest, thing to us was a gun shop. We joked that maybe it was a sign to finally give up.
Alyssa requested roadside assistance through her Progressive insurance and I called the nearest auto mechanic that came up, who told me his workers wouldn’t be around until the next morning but that we could get the car towed there. On the phone with the tow company, we were told their trucks couldn’t accommodate our camper unless they used a separate truck for $80, and they knew as well as we did that our insurance would not cover anything involving the camper. We also got an automated text saying we needed to get alternative transportation to the garage because coronavirus precautions required we not ride in the truck with the driver. It was all really overwhelming. Alyssa cried a little, and I knew how easily her anxiety lead to her clamming up, so I pushed through my own anxiety to call them back and be very clear about our situation in a way she hadn’t been, hoping putting it all out there would inspire them to be more flexible: we lived in the camper, we couldn’t just leave it on the side of the road and have nowhere to stay, we had no money, and we couldn’t get it fixed until the following morning.
The guy, Tom, was surprised to hear we couldn’t find someone able to do it more quickly, considering how simple a fix it apparently was, and while they didn’t own enough tow trucks as a small, independent company who just had one of their four die on them, they did have mechanics on their premises. He said he’d see if one of their guys, who happened to be at the garage that day, could do it for us before sunset. We covered ourselves in sunscreen and I sought shelter under our small, purple umbrella as we anxiously waited the call back, hoping for some sort of good luck. When he called back, he told us their guy Phil would be able to do it as soon as the car was towed to their garage and it would only cost about $100. The tow truck driver who picked us up thankfully didn’t care about the coronavirus. In fact, he believed it was a conspiracy by the Illuminati, pointing out that no one seemed to personally know anyone with it but that several celebrities were suddenly getting it and a lot of suspicious authoritarian laws were being sneaked in during the chaos. We steered the conversation toward more rational radical ideas and he was a surprisingly progressive, woke, compassionate guy who wanted as little to do with this system as we did. We were caught off guard several times by some of his profoundly observant comments--all made with a youthful, deep southern dialect by a tow truck driver in dirty clothes. Never judge a book by its cover, I guess.
We were welcomed by another friendly man named Marco, who said they’d bring us to a restaurant or something had they not all been closed for indoor seating. Instead, we were lead to a back room in their garage to sit and wait in a comfy couch and recliner with a strange fan that circulated cold air from an Igloo cooler. The mechanic, Phil, assured us he’d have it done that day, and had immediately discovered a pulley or whatever had come completely apart, breaking our belt. He’d fix all the pieces for $130. It took several hours to fix because he had to hunt down the parts, and at first came back with the wrong one, but he was as kind and personable as the rest of the guys we’d met from the Spartan Roadside Rescue and Towing Company, and we were just so grateful he was taking the time so last minute to help us out. We paid for it using $75 one of Alyssa’s old professors sent her, $25 of what little remaining DoorDash money we had left, and $30 in cash from the dumpstered cabinet sale in my wallet.
We immediately went to find food because neither of us had eaten a single thing the entire day. I suggested we go to Reggae Shack Café, my go-to for food in Gainesville. While neither entirely vegan nor even vegetarian, they had the best vegan menu in the city, with traditional Jamaican flavor combinations that were both familiar and totally unique. We were gonna pay for it with a forgotten $50 gift card Alyssa had found in her stuff, but it couldn’t be used like a normal debit card, forcing us to drive around in circles trying to find somewhere she could get cash back for it. It took three goddamn stops before we found somewhere, and in the process I wound up giving a homeless guy on a bike the rest of the spare change we had in the car. We picked up our big dinner and headed over to the University of Florida to dine while watching bats.
Gainesville, and the University of Florida, is home to the world’s largest occupied bat houses. Home mostly to the Brazilian free-tailed bat, many Southeastern and Evening bats also called them home. The combined capacity of the houses was 750,000 bats, and the current population was as many as a half million. Back in 1987, one of the school’s halls had been destroyed in a fire, forcing a colony of bat residents, suddenly homeless, to relocate to the bleachers of the university’s track and soccer stadiums. Covering their new area with piss and guano, the school eventually decided to build them a new home in 1991, thankfully forgoing extermination of any kind. Several thousand bats were physically caught and moved to the new house, but they all abandoned it a day later. More than three years later, the bats decided it was actually a pretty good home, and returned. In 2009, their weight caused its collapse, but it was quickly restored. A Bat Barn was added in 2010 and a second House in 2017 to replace the old one.
At sunset, you could sit at benches or lean on the wooden fencing and watch them fly out in dense swarms to eat and exercise. I experienced it for the first time three years prior when I was last in Gainesville and knew Alyssa would find it magical. We lined the fence with our food and patiently waited along with a small audience. We got a steak sandwich (pan-seared handmade seitan sautéed in Caribbean sauce with LTO, mustard, and ketchup on a whole wheat Kaiser bun), a plate of the escoviech tofu (crispy tofu cooked in a tangy sweet-and-spicy sauce with carrots, onions, scotch bonnet peppers, thyme, and allspice berries), a plate of spicy tempeh (local organic tempeh crumbled and simmered in homemade spicy jerk and sweet Caribbean sauces), and an order of their new off-menu vegan wings with Caribbean sauce. The sandwich came with their famous seasoned dutty fries and each plate came with rice and beans, steamed cabbage, and plantains (which I hate and did not eat).
We scarfed most of it down while waiting for the bats. Soon enough, they burst out from underneath the Bat House in a steady volume for 20 minutes straight, flowing through and over the trees, across and along the road, as if they had an organized, collectively synchronized route in the sky. Their little chirps filled the air and we stood under them in childlike amazement. Altogether, they ate 2,500 pounds of bugs while we ate like 15 pounds of vegan Jamaican food.
We started driving back out to 441 to pick our camper up, which we hoped was still there. It was outside of someone’s house, so we had left a note saying our car had broken down and we’d be back to get it. I included my number just in case. We were relieved to find it still sitting there, untouched. From there, we started heading to a nearby rest area we’d planned to spend the night at. The first one was too small and populated for us, so we continued toward the next one. Less than three miles later, we thought we heard a thwap sort of sound, but weren’t sure where it came from. Then the battery light popped back on and I was back to not being able to steer smoothly. We pulled over on the side of I-75, looked under the hood with our cellphone flashlights, and there it was: the brand new serpentine belt, split apart, resting at the bottom against the hot steel, emitting the smell of melting rubber. Despite new pieces, it had broken again in only about an hour’s worth of driving. We sat there for a moment in disbelief. This scenario was even worse than the first one. I called the guy who’d fixed it and asked him what could have gone wrong. He sounded genuinely bewildered and said, “I haven’t the slightest idea.” He of course offered to fix it first thing the next morning, but that didn't help us right then and there.
Alyssa started crying again and we sat there in the dark while semi trucks zoomed by at over 70 miles per hour, no one moving over for us even though it was the law and also just the courteous and safe thing to do. I tried to move over further into the grass because of how dangerously close everyone was getting to us. Alyssa sent out another roadside request to Progressive and the same company, Spartan, called us back. It was Marco, who we’d spoken to a lot while our car was being fixed, and he’d be coming to get us this time.
We were pretty much entirely out of money. I had $18 in cash left in my wallet, $8 in my bank, and Alyssa had $11 in hers. We technically had over $500, but it all was needlessly delayed by fake digital processing delays. Since Alyssa wasn’t good at it, I made the difficult call to her father to ask for help, and he thankfully Venmo’d us enough to afford a two nights at a hotel and an Uber ride from the garage to it. Marco towed us and we had no other choice but to leave the camper on the side of the interstate, as worrisome as it was. The ride to the garage, he carried on really calming conversation, telling us about the towing monopoly in Gainesville and its corrupt, mercilessly predatory business model. In fact, the first time I’d ever experienced a towed car situation had been in Gainesville in the lot of an abandoned McDonald’s. He told us he and Tom had started the business emphasizing helping people first, and they only towed people in need. They wanted nothing to do with a business plan that profited off of literally stealing people’s cars and then holding them for ransom. The motley crew of Spartan employees were exemplary businessmen. He even drove us to our hotel afterwards.
The Super 8 was especially nice for only $50 a night. Despite the kindness of the strangers we’d encountered, and just barely but successfully getting through the day, we wanted to give the fuck up.
Giant manatee!
Such a beautiful pet cemetery... :(
Car breaking down, round one.
The best food in Gainesville.
BATS!
Car breaking down, round two.
DAY FIFTY-FOUR
Monday, March 30th
By 9:30, Phil was calling to let us know the car was fixed again. He said he wasn’t entirely sure what happened, but chalked it up to a low-quality serpentine belt. All other possible car parts that could have lead to it breaking were in good shape, according to him. He said it was free of charge. We still slept late because the day before had just wiped us out of all we had left mentally, emotionally, and physically. When we got up, we went straight to pick the camper up off the side of the interstate, both with visions in our heads of it obliterated and our belongings strewn along the side of the road. Thankfully, it had survived again.
We started heading back to our hotel and on the way passed through the Paynes Prairie wetlands. We pulled over to admire one of the views by a pier. As usual, there were a couple of people who couldn’t see the beauty--only an opportunity to pretend they were alpha predators and trick and kill fish for fun. It was always a bummer to see almost every piece of nature contaminated by humans destroying it. We walked along it to the end. There was a short streak of mushed dog shit at the beginning. One man fishing had a bucket of tiny fish in dirty brown water to use as bait. The wire fencing had bunches of discarded fishing line tangled in it. At the very end was a couple fishing, the girlfriend with a pink camo rod, with two empty styrofoam gas station soda refill cups tossed on the ground and piles of discarded tobacco from a gutted blunt wrap lying on the wooden trash can box, fence, and much of it floating in the water. I cut what fishing line I could find off the fence with scissors and threw it away, and then we both did some little graffiti tags on the trash can for fun. As I normally did around fishing areas, I wrote “FISHING IS FOR COWARDS” next to mine.
As we walked back, I guess the couple looked at our tags out of curiosity and noticed what mine said. All of the sudden, we heard the man yelling as he half-seriously walked toward us, “Hey, white boy! What’s up? Come back, bitch! With your cracka ass!” His feelings were quite hurt. I looked at him and gave him an animated shrug and then we sat in the car and laughed as we watched him desperately try to buff the words that offended him. We wondered if it was his pick-up truck that had the bright pink sexy underwear hanging from its rear-view mirror. Humans were not predators in the natural sense of the word, and only total fucking scumbags killed animals and litter. Our oceans would be empty within our lifetime and fish felt emotions and physical pain in the same way as we and our household animal companions. There were far more sustainable, healthy, and compassionate avenues for sourcing protein. It seemed so many people looked at nature either indifferently or opportunistically.
We still didn’t have access to the money we had coming our way. DoorDash money only transferred to Alyssa’s bank account on Tuesdays, and you were required to apply for instant deposit, a service that should have been obvious and automatic to begin with but was instead designated an extra service they would charge us $1.99 for using and make us wait seven days to be approved for. Alyssa had rediscovered a small tin she had been hoarding gift cards in for the last year of holidays, mostly to places we didn’t go to very often. We used them to get some incredibly underwhelming takeout from Chipotle and Panera for dinner.
Outside Panera, I saw a homeless woman with all of her belongings in a shopping cart, sitting on the ground while two ducks hung out with her, almost seeming like they were comforting her since she clearly didn’t have any food to share with them. I walked over to talk to her and give her the $6 in cash I had left in my wallet. Her name was Wendy and she was very nice. I asked her what her duck friends’ names were, and she told me she called them Ducky and Lucky. We had $12 left on the Panera gift card after ordering, so I offered to buy her a vegan meal. She chose the 10-vegetable soup. The duck couple she hung out with were beautiful. The girl at the register who I asked told me the woman was out there every day.
Later that night, we went out to try and find chocolate and berries for Alyssa, in a city where anything that wasn’t a gas station was already closed by that point. Eventually, we decided to check out some dumpsters. A Dollar General really paid off with seven bottles of mandarin Jarritos soda, a bag of cinnamon and sugar Skinny Pop popcorn mini-cakes, four bags of caramel popcorn, four boxes of spaghetti, a pack of Listerine strips, two boxes of saltines, some magnetic clips, some hair clips, and an adorable life-size tarantula toy we would probably keep on our dashboard. We could have taken more, but only kept what we knew we’d use. Eventually, we were able to rack some chocolate from a 24-hour CVS. We were grateful our current hotel room had both a mini-fridge and microwave.
Creepy hands.
One fraction of Paynes Prairie.
Wendy the human and her ducks.
Shitty gift card dinner.
Alyssa is so beautiful.
Oleander caterpillars were everywhere!
Neat mural at the end of one of many ugly shopping plazas.
Successful dumpter haul for the night.
DAY FIFTY-FIVE
Tuesday, March 31st
The next morning, likely due to an oversight on their end, the hotel never changed our rooms after I groggily told the housecleaning woman we had extended our stay, so we stayed in our room with two fulls instead of moving to a single queen. Alyssa got up before me and did a few hours of DoorDash. Meanwhile, money had finally been deposited to us, so I’d booked us another stay around 5 in the morning. We drove around looking at some of the stupid shit in Gainesville that they couldn’t close because they were outdoors. It was windy in a scary Florida hurricane sorta way, threatening rain. We were caught off guard that kids from the sports part of campus were out and about, jogging, riding bikes, and heading to the gym like coronavirus wasn’t happening. Gainesville was largely a college town full of huge frat and sorority houses, and the college kids who seemed to make up a good portion of the local population were waltzing around like they were on vacation, with classes canceled but access to the facilities and their luxury apartments left over to enjoy all day long. We were surprised to not be the only ones, along with the booming homeless and beggar population in town, outside.
Outside the University of Florida Animal Sciences department building stood four silver sculptures, ambiguously titled “Some Were Quite Blind”, that at first glance looked like randomly designed poles or rocket ships. From left to right, though, they depicted the complex and bizarre penises of the boar, cat, bull, and ram. Across from there, we saw a small fenced-in field with a group of beautiful cows. We went over to say hi. They approached us curiously but cautiously, and all had tags in their ears with the numbers that represented them as the commodities they were. One was special enough to be named Gus according to their tag, written in marker above their number with a heart. To our surprise and disgust, two of them had fistulas implanted in their stomachs. It was the first time either of us had ever seen it in real life, and it was honestly horrifying. (Fistulas are basically implanted plugs that allow ease of access into the guts of the cow by human hands for the purpose of scientific research and transplanting healthy gut bacteria into sick cows. Of course, this isn’t for the benefit of the cow as a cared-for individual, but of property that produces profit.) It was really gross and sad. We also saw a historical marker commemorating the home of Gatorade, which neither of us knew was actually a reference to alligators, and a cute bronze sculpture of a gator couple named Albert and Alberta. An alleyway of graffiti had several cute fruit pieces along it.
The grocery stores in town had implemented a new and annoying security theater requirement, only allowing a small handful of people inside at once, obviously resulting in long lines outside. After seeing the outrageous line to the natural foods store, we instead ordered a huge pizza and calzone from a place called Satchel's. They were cash only, but also allowed payments through PayPal, which was convenient. The outside of their place was covered in eccentric junk art; a hubcap wind chime hanging from a tree, a fountain made of bike parts and toys, a wall of forgotten trophies, mosaics of salvaged pieces of glass and tile, an airplane resting atop outdoor seating and collections of succulents, a van sitting outside the front doors with tags and stickers all over it. It was a really neat place. More importantly, their pizza was fucking incredible. We got an 18” with Daiya and barbecue tempeh crumbles and a calzone stuffed with Daiya, mushrooms, and broccoli. The slices were nice and thin, but still crispy with thick, fluffy crust encased in crunch; the barbecue tempeh was abundant and perfect, blending perfectly with their marinara; and there was just the right amount of Daiya mozzarella. The calzone too was just flawless, nice and cheesy with fresh tasting mushrooms and appropriately burnt broccoli. The pizza box could be cut out to form a three-dimensional van you could color and decorate, and Alyssa was really looking forward to doing that.
Before I could even fully digest any food, I went out on a scheduled block of DoorDash deliveries. A torrential downpour had exploded outside and just the sprint from the hotel to the car left me entirely soaked as I rushed over to Chipotle and Blaze to pick up orders for spoiled rich college brats who wouldn’t even tip me anything. Delivering in Gainesville fucking sucked. Most of the people I was bringing food to were these college kids, most of whom lived in these large, labyrinthine, luxury apartment complexes that, with little to no helpful instructions on how to find their door out of the hundreds spread across several buildings, made each delivery a 15-minute ordeal just to find them. It was really dehumanizing catering to these kids whose lives I never had and never would, as they lived in a cloud where even their fast food magically levitated to them. A rule I’d realized was that no one who ordered Taco Bell or Chipotle ever tipped, whether in Gainesville or elsewhere. Still, I was out until after midnight and made almost $70.
Animal penises.
Sad cows. :(
Satchel's.
DAY FIFTY-SIX
Wednesday, April 1st
The next day, I had booked us to be in what we were already supposed to be in, assuming that would ensure we didn’t need to change rooms. At first the housecleaning lady again accepted my groggy proclamation of extending my stay, but another woman showed up at the door soon after to tell me we had to move because it wasn’t supposed to be ours. According to them, we had originally booked two queen-sized beds our first two nights, and were currently in a room with two queen-sized beds. Since I booked the next three nights with two full-size, we were being forced to move. I was pretty annoyed, since they were wrong as far as I could tell and we’d moved so much stuff into our temporary studio apartment. I went to the front desk to reluctantly comply while complaining aloud to them and trying to catch her and the other guy who showed up in a lie, because I was confident they were trying to pull one over us as they repeatedly placed the blame on hotels.com. In the past, I’d tried to get refunds on hotel stays and watched the hotel itself and the hotels.com website just trap you in a circle of them blaming each other or telling you only the one could deal with complaints. As it turned out, unbeknownst to us since the six-inch difference between a queen and a full is indistinguishable, we had been put in a room with two queen-size beds instead of two full-size those first two nights, despite my choice and confirmation email saying full-size. However, it wasn’t Super 8’s fault because, as they showed me with their computer, hotels.com sent them info saying I’d chosen a double-queen. Now, this time around, I’d again chosen a double-full, but Super 8 received the same information, leading them to have to move us into a real double-full. I also found out that the two people dealing with this/me weren’t even supposed to be: one was head of housecleaning and the other property management--actual managers were staying home and people were doing jobs they weren’t supposed to during their regular hours because of coronavirus and the hotel not wanting to give anyone overtime. I apologized to them both for my attitude and they forgave me, but we still needed to lug all our stuff up to a new third-floor room.
Alyssa went out for a devastating series of deliveries to college kids for two hours. I stayed back and called hotels.com to complain and tell them sending hotels different information than they send their customers was unacceptable. I was told they’d confirm everything with the hotel and send me an email within 24 hours, but they never would. I was determined to get something out of their misbehavior, but lost the energy real quick. Alyssa came back around dinner time and we went out to try and get some groceries. Of course, there were lines extending for yards at the entrance to most grocery stores, and we both rolled our eyes and refused to play along. Whole Foods seemed to be letting more people inside than others, so there wasn’t a line, and we walked in and out with a bag of food. For dinner, we had veggie pita pockets with hummus, alfalfa sprouts, cucumber, avocado, Chao cheese, and dijon, with an order of Papa John’s breadsticks on the side.
I went out for deliveries for three hours and made just under $35 between a string of orders where almost no one tipped. Neither of us had ever experienced an area that so consistently didn’t tip, and we knew these fucking kids ordering milkshakes from Steak and Shake could fucking spare a couple bucks. I filled up each night back at the hotel on caramel popcorn and mandarin cane sugar soda from the dumpster. South Park was playing on Comedy Central at almost every hour. With some more money flowing in, we’d booked another three nights at the hotel. We both felt like sell-outs and knew from our last week at a Motel 6 it wasn’t sustainable, but we were also just feeling so goddamn defeated.
DAY FIFTY-SEVEN
Thursday, April 2nd
Another soul-crushing day of stagnancy and being a serf for rich college kids, Alyssa did the first block of deliveries while I slept in and downloaded music. It was rife with more Chipotle orders without tips, but she came home with $51.90 thanks to some double-digit orders toward the end. We had another veggie pita pocket and Papa John’s breadsticks dinner, this time with Tofurky in the pitas.
I procrastinated going out for my turn of DoorDash deliveries, but eventually did, making another $50. Someone was nice enough to tip me $5 cash. Two deliveries took me far away to the outer border of Gainesville where there were blocks of actual houses instead of luxury college kid apartment complexes, and their many intense speed humps caused the bike on the back of the car to smash a tail light and one of the straps of the rack to come unclipped from the door. Driving by a church whose steeple had fallen off gave me some relief. My last order of the night was a $3 McDonald’s order. As with everywhere else, I couldn’t get the food from inside and had to go to the drive-thru where I’d sit in a slow and backed-up line of customers. DoorDash gave you a set time to pick up orders by, and as soon as I was one minute late, I got a text from the person asking, “Everything okay?” even though on their app I knew they could see I was at the fucking McDonald’s. Before I could even finish my text back, they were calling me. They would later tip me 25 cents--I would have preferred no tip at all. I decided to reject offers to extend my shift because that was enough for me.
Instead, I went back to the hotel and watched My Girl with Alyssa, which made us both cry so, so much. It was nice cuddling and watching a movie. Tragically ironic, we had found ourselves doing exactly what we’d set out to avoid by coming down to Florida to live in a camper in the woods: working every day to afford somewhere to stay, ultimately only seeing each other for dinner and having differing sleep schedules. We hated it.
Dinner.
Good.
Ugh.
To be continued...