will Florida’s rats remember me back?
love letter to a swamp
We left when the world shut down. We quibbled about leaving; we’d planned to get married that year, and wouldn’t it be difficult to tie up all the details while living nowhere in particular? But we didn’t quibble for long. We gave notice to the landlord of our Bernal Heights apartment, who I’d begged to sublet to us because I loved the way it sat above the clouds, a converted attic where I could watch the fog roll in from a safe distance. We packed most of our belongings into a basement storage unit on the border of the Mission and Potrero Hill, not knowing when we might see them again. We went to the first place that made sense: the West Coast of Florida.
We boarded a plane, touched down, and immediately bought our first car; Florida wasn’t going to make it easy to live without one. As our Kia Soul hummed across the Sunshine Skyway, I felt somehow at large; escaped from the grubby, comfortable density of the streets of San Francisco, I was a free agent in my personal air-conditioned box. June stretched ahead of us like sheet cake, flat and hot.
Everyone was avoiding each other. Florida was already developing a smear on its reputation from progressives, its fuck-you attitudes about masking and vaccination to thank for that. But even in Florida, there was a spook in the air. We didn’t know anyone nearby us to begin with, but even if we did, human connection was scarce that summer. But what Florida lacked in connection with other humans, it made up for in connection with the land.
limestone, I love you
We went to IKEA and bought the cheapest table we could find; see, we said, desk! Like the Bernal Heights attic, our home on Coquina Key seemed to float above the earth, this time in startling proximity to open water. We positioned the desk to look directly at it, and I lost myself daily staring out across the bay.
I’d become attached to running in recent years: weaving interlocking boxes across the East Village in Manhattan, ignoring the crosswalk signs; forcing my way up the steep ascent of Bernal Heights Hill, thighs burning; dodging Bird scooters and sleeping bodies in the early hours of morning on the Venice Boardwalk. Now, as on Manhattan, I still lived on an island—but this one the size of an oversized parking lot, with long rows of parking spots to match.
There was literally nowhere to run, save looping the same sidewalks laid between identical condos; the same stretch, over and over and over again. So a routine took shape: getting in the Soul and driving to nearby Boyd Hill, a bird sanctuary, to shake off the days on foot. I ducked in and out of shade on the narrow trails that hugged the edge of the preserve as I ran, palm fronds cracking under my feet. The heat was so debilitating I regularly failed to hold in my pee; it’s like my body was so focused on staying upright that all non-critical functioning was just like, screw it. Afterwards, I felt euphoric.
During the day, I communicated exclusively through screens. The moon became my only regular visitor beyond the imagined walls of blurring Zoom conversations, and I relied on its arrival each night to anchor me to the physical world. I became familiar with the tides in order to track its progression, and Mike and I invented our own names for its evolving shapes: toenail moon. Rugby moon.
Tracking the tides had other benefits, too: it meant we knew when the bay would fill with water at the same time as sunrise, or drain just enough at sunset to locate the sandbar, peeking above the lip of sea. During these convergences, we steered the paddleboard to the sandbar and stood ankle-deep in shoal grass, bonnethead sharks the length of your forearm circling placidly nearby.
In the absence of humans, the land became my tether. I camped with rats. I watched as miniscule alligators, fresh from their eggs, wriggled between mossy rocks in the shallows of Lake Maggiore. I inhaled the acidic breach of red tide, the space behind my nostrils stinging. I sped along the highways that carved an artificial path through the swampland between Pinellas County and Bradenton, a Taco Bell at the highway entrance the last sign of humans for miles. The one human within my orbit was Mike, who came to life in new ways against the backdrop of his upbringing.
In the high heat of August, we drove East toward the Wekiwa River in search of relief. We passed over the Floridan Aquifer, thick beds of limestone for miles beneath. This limestone is rife with tiny holes, honeycombed with caverns and chimneys; ideal for conducting water. Together, these underground channels carry rivers to the land surface, driving emerald water directly through the earth’s soft crust. We drove for hours, spoke to no one. I dunked my body; let myself be swallowed. The water filled me to my cells.
an unexpected ache
I’ve known desolate landscapes before. The lonesome treelines of the Rocky Mountains, oranging against the winter sky; the rusted-out barns that endlessly mark the roads of Central New York. But Florida’s wilderness felt nothing like that. Its no-man’s-land was alive, teeming quietly with a subliminal, physiological pulse.
In the months that followed, we left Florida—but not for long. We roadtripped our way back West, only to return less than a year later to mark our territory. We bought our own small piece of the land. I grew a baby, and then another, bringing each of them home to Florida in the first months of their lives, so that they, too, could lay claim to its strange magic.
Last week, two hurricanes hit our stretch of Florida’s coastline in a matter of days. We confirmed the safety of those we love. We waited for news of our house: submerged in water? Roof blown off? I worried for the impact on our bank account; of course I did. But I was surprised to discover a grief for the land itself, a sadness for a landscape I never knew I’d love so much—even though it made me pee my pants.
Did you know the earth could cast a grip on us like this? That land could shake us like humanity does? Is this how our transient bodies are remembered, by forging a connection with that deathless thing underfoot that will, despite its evolutions, remember us back?
I know our planet is resilient. I know St. Pete is, too. Our people are ok; our house is ok. But experiencing its injury, this place of mine, at the hands of unpredictable disaster, made me hurt. The good kind of hurt, though—the kind that reminds you to hug your people. But to worship your land, too.
Thanks for reading! Provisions coming next week with a hot tip on how to stay sane while meal-planning (THESE are the topics we live for, amirite?).
🐊, Becca