I just
sat around the house reading all day, mainly on the stool in the kitchen that I always
sit at, closest to the big sink, made obvious by the big grooves worn into the
tile underneath from it sliding, and only going outside twice. I of course read the paper in the morning
with breakfast, then finished up that last article in the National
Geographic. I skipped through a few
not-worth-much magazines before getting sick of them and picking up “A Land Remembered,” which I'd been reading a
little of every night and read through about 200 pages today. The day was long, in a good way. I didn't get much sleep last night so figured
that I should take a nap and when I woke up, I was surprised at how high the
sun still was and how much of the day was still available. I'd also usually start getting tired and tell
myself to go to bed around 10p, but it's past midnight now as I write this.
The book
also contributed to my weird feelings of the day. Being taken through the rough lives of a few
generations of Florida’s first settlers and
seeing how different their life was from mine despite all of us living on the same land,
only separated by a century in time. The
first generation of MacIveys in the book came down from Georgia into the
unknown of Florida, building a place to call home out of the scrubs in north
central Florida and after some bad luck there, moving again along the Kissimmee
River for another generation. I find it
hard to imagine wondering into an endless woods with the thought that you would
be staying there permanently, not just a little exploratory hike, but to be
self sustaining. But this book put you there. As three generations of
the family are followed, there were deaths, many of them under circumstances
unknown to us and as with any good book, I cried after every family member
died, as I could not imagine the family being
able to continue with that person now missing, impossible. But, they always did.
A man
runs the cattle drives for 40 years, assembles the crew that sticks together through
everything, from outlaws to gators and becomes best of friends with his family over that time. He'll help
anyone out and during that time period he saw whites, blacks, and Indians as
all the same. He always sits at the head
of the table for dinner. His wife has
been with him through everything. She's
the cook during all of this, a fixture in the kitchen and dining table and
during the drives on the prairie, and the men surely would not be able to do what they do without her. And then they, the matriarchs, die. And what did they do? What did they accomplish? Even after everything that they went through and accomplished, my
feeling was still that they didn't have a
complete life, they missed out on something, they just lived along a river in
the middle of nowhere. The book later also followed
the third generation of the family, who lived more in my time, and
caught the land boom in South Florida and became an agriculture grower and
seller and very wealthy. And yet when he
died, I thought exactly the same thing, there was an emptiness. The only way to judge life is happiness.
I get
sad knowing that the way of life in the book is forever gone in the US and much of the world and I never
knew it and never will. I look at
satellite images nowadays on the internet over the state of Florida and its
hard to find much land at all untouched by people which makes thinking of
driving a herd of cattle from the east coast to the west coast
unimaginable. I don't know if the MacIveys, the folks that lived during this time
period and through that great change ever got sad about the change, but I feel
sad to never know that way of life. I
know that our lives nowadays are much easier maybe, but I still can't help wondering what my life would have been like to live in
those times and also feel like I'm missing out on something.
