issue 247

When I arrived back in Jacksonville a week ago, my friend’s mother, whom I had just traveled across the country with, asked me what that buzzing sound was. We were standing in my mom’s backyard, where I am sitting now. “I don’t know what it’s called,” was my response. Later, I realized it was the cicadas, a sound I had heard my entire life, but never really noticed. For the first time ever, I was fully immersed in a sharp, high-pitched buzzing that filled the air.

The gnats are bothering me now. It’s been a year since I’ve even heard the whisper of a bug. California doesn’t have many bugs in its severely dry, yet foggy climate. Down in Los Angeles they called it smog, but in the Bay Area, where I had been living for the past year, it was truly fog. I had even termed it the Fog Monster, for the way it rolled over the Pacific Ocean and up into the hilly terrain of the Bay. It seemed to swallow the entire city each day at five o’clock. I made the mistake once of getting stuck in Haight-Ashbury with only jeans and a tank top, attire I was more than comfortable in as a Florida girl, but I quickly changed my ways. The fog was cold, and even on the warmest day, it could make you feel like winter.

The warmth was one of the first things I had missed; moving out to California fresh out of college with a degree in creative writing, ready to conquer the world. I hadn’t thought to bring jackets, because it was, after all, the Golden State, which I now assume was coined after the gold rush, and not the amount of sunlight pouring over them. San Francisco does receive an absurdly large amount of sunny days, a fact I learned recently from a random newspaper read somewhere along my journey home- possibly Denver, perhaps Santa Fe, or maybe even New Orleans. But there is a stiffness and an edge to the Bay Area that the fog seemed to trap inside the hills.

Perhaps it’s a remnant from the Summer of Love, that free-flowing summer of drugs, alcohol, hippies and social/political turbulence. The stragglers of that era are easy to pinpoint as they hunker down inside the numerous parks across the city that they proudly call home. The city protects the homeless there, or as I tend to think, encourages them, but that wouldn’t be democratic of me to say. Perhaps it’s the economic gap, a broken bridge between people, like the collapse of the Bay Bridge after the quake of ’89. For a city so intent on freedom and love and equality, Silicon Valley, home to some of America’s wealthiest, live just beyond its borders, if not within. Or perhaps the stiffness is just California, a state so content with itself, with its beautiful landscapes and booming economy, that people there tend to think there is nowhere else to be. I, however, knew better.

I spent my life underestimating Florida. Sure, it is a huge tourist destination, but who cares? Sure, the weather is always warm, but “how annoying,” I thought. I wanted seasons. Sure, the beach is never far, but I rarely went. Sure, people wave to each other on the streets, but that’s normal.

In reality, Florida is a tourist destination for a reason. And the weather being always warm is a wonderful thing. Your joints don’t ache and you can go outside in the winter. California has its amazing coastline, but it is all cliffs and usually too cold for enjoyment. It doesn’t have the soft-sanded beach that goes on for miles in both directions that I remembered from home. It seems you could walk on Florida’s beaches forever and never reach the end. But the thing I ended up appreciating the most was the people. Floridians, and specifically Jacksonvillians, are nice people. Generally. Sure, everyone has their day, and maybe it’s the warmth that makes us too lazy to care, but we all generally have each other’s best interest in mind. I have been to many places in this world, and nowhere else have I met such pleasant people. I remember once, on my first visit to California, my little cousin stood at the end of her driveway waiting for her bus to pick her up. She made a game of waving to every car that passed, something I didn’t even realize to be a game until she came to me, laughing, and said, “The only person who would wave back was my nanny.” This, she thought, was funny. I found it disturbing.

And it’s not to say I didn’t meet a number of great people in California. People are people just like anywhere. You get to know them and you love them. But I do also believe in collective thought, and after getting mugged, standing on Embarcadero Street in the Jack London district of Oakland, just outside our apartment, everyone’s comment was, “Yeah, that sucks, but that happens. You shouldn’t go out alone at night.” Not even outside of my apartment, apparently.

The first thing I noticed were the cicadas and the lack of a need for my newly acquired edge. The fog had lifted off my shoulders and I could feel the Florida warmth again. Standing outside of my mother’s house, I saw a neighbor and I waved at him. He waved back. Same old, same old.