Epiphany in the Bayou

From the moment I stepped off the plane in the U.S., ill omens were running 3-1 against good. The ubiquitous airport CNN monitors were reporting breathlessly from the scenes of devastation in Panama City, Florida, where Hurricane Earl had made landfall the previous day. It's the kind of telechatter that you hear and file away, unless you happen to be holding a ticket for the epicenter of the destruction, as I was. The British, having daily experience with appallingly depressing weather, hadn't considered a hurricane in my homeland to be front page news. With an hour left before my flight, it sounded like we would be landing on one of the few pimples in the Florida landscape not covered with several inches of brackish water.

I've always felt sorry for people whose homes and lives are irrevocably shredded by a catastrophe with a discordantly effete name like "Hurricane Earl" or "Hurricane Harvey". It would be more respectful to people who have watched all their possessions launched into the sky and picked over by camera crews if we named the agent of destruction "Hurricane Mongo" or "Tropical Storm Bonecrusher". Hurricanes should be named after professional wrestlers, not just average wimpy people. In a few hasty phone calls, I learned that the beach house where I was headed was still standing, although the actual beach separating it from the water's edge had diminished considerably. The beachfront was so reduced, in fact, that one could stand on the porch facing the ocean and, with some effort, spit directly into the surf.

In Panama City, things weren't nearly as awful as I'd expected. Virtually all the awfulness of the place had nothing to do with the hurricane at all. The rental car company, noting I was a single dude coming to Florida for Labor Day weekend, helpfully took the initiative and upgraded me to an enormous white "sports" car that looked like a soap bubble with an airfoil. It was the kind of car that screams out to locals "Kill me, steal all my belongings, and stuff my body in the trunk!" I set out in the soakingly humid night through the town's strip malls and gas stations.

After having such a lovely time in England, I was feeling a little conflicted about America. We do a lot of things very well here -- like toilets -- but traveling also has a way of pointing out the deficiencies in our great nation. For example, Americans are morbidly obese compared to much of the planet. We live in towns that look pre-armageddoned, as if we were so certain of the inevitability of nuclear war in the 1950's that we built towns that wouldn't change all that much in the event of a devastating war. Compared to the glorious small urban spaces and pedestrian focus of England, Panama City's endless series of sodium-lit parking lots was vomitously ugly.

Another benefit of travel is the way it makes you feel a little different and special when you return home. Rolling past the urban blight, I was feeling a healthy dollop of smug Pride at how much more cultivated I was than my fellow brutish mall-culture Americans. I exited the city's sprawl and piloted my giant soap bubble out into... a swamp.

I found myself on the longest, straightest, loneliest, creepiest stretch of roadway in the entire world. From left to right, the entire scene consisted of: low scrubby indistinct trees, a giant ditch full of water, a narrow band of highway in headlights, a giant ditch full of water, and low scrubby indistinct trees. It was aggressively hypnotic. Disquieting sounds began to filter into the car -- first swampy peeps and twitters, and then more ominous groans and burblings. This was not good. The road went on forever, and I found myself going faster and faster to get to the end of the experience as soon as possible. This was bad country. Even if I didn't fall asleep at the wheel and end up a delivery pizza for the creatures beebling and growling out there, then I was certain to be killed by the grizzled denizens of the next town.

This is America, I thought. This brief contact with the wild country was kicking my Pride in the groin. Not once as I had hiked over the cliffs and high moors of England did I have such a powerful sense of the land being alive, breathing, a monstrous host on which I was one of a hundred infestations. The unaesthetic but vast expanses of a strip mall parking lot seemed cheery and benevolent in comparison. It occurred to me that this nation may be founded on the principle of fear of the dark, the compulsive paving of anything arousing a threatening sense of mystery. Easy to ridicule, until the mystery is bubbling and growling and licking its tiny teeth in the stinking, soggy earth all around you. I stepped on the gas pedal, and my sporty soap bubble obeyed my will, zipping furiously through the gassy night. Vive le mall, I thought, cranking the a/c and leaving little streamers of cold swirling in my wake.