South Florida - Stationary Travel

This is bizarre. I resisted coming back to South Florida, a place where I lived a relatively non-mobile lifestyle over several years. Yes it is true that I was not here all of the time - I spent many months in the Caribbean and Europe even though I maintained a home here - but I lived in a building made of bricks and mortar, an average lifestyle. So to be back here while still carrying our home with us is weird. No one I know here lives anything like I do.

The RV parks - even the state and county ones - are pricier than the ritzy ones in the rest of the US south. Gas is really expensive here - I'm paying about 30 cents a gallon more than I usually do. The roads often have tolls, unannounced detours, and flying objects - my sister and I used to have a hobby trying to identify the most bizarre thing we saw flying by on the road. It's not easy to find free internet. The highways are full, and full of some of the most obnoxious drivers that I have seen in all of my international driving. It's bad enough that they always speed up when you are trying to change lanes, but to have people blocking a vehicle like an RV puts all of us in a danger that they probably can't imagine. So certain basic things now become issues that I have to pull to the front of my consciousness and therefore leave less space for the extraordinary.

Yet at the same time I feel that it is important that I am here. I am being forced to examine normalcy in a way that I didn't have to for the last few months. My commitment to magnificence definitely gets challenged when the landscape is covered with miles and miles of indistinguishable suburban housing. And when the sounds of the natural world are drowned out by the roar of freeway traffic it puts me in a place where I have to dig deep to connect to the wildlife that the signs, posted everywhere you turn, admonish you not to feed or entice. Do they mean the squirrels? Or the raccoons digging in the garbage? Sorry ma'am ranger, I didn't intend to give the little animals my organic blue corn chips but I forgot to guard them while they were on the picnic bench. Would they do the 'immediate arrest' that they threaten on the same signs? And would the squirrel and the blue jay laugh raucously and sign the report on the line left for these civilized 'wildlife?'

Sounds like I hate the place huh? But I don't. I'm just deeply challenged by living in the midst of people who are under pressure to conform. And I don't always enjoy the feeling of 'one of these things is not like the others' that rings through my head on a regular basis. I miss the scruffy clothing and grooming habits of desert people. The starting-from-scratch-every-day life that characterized many of the people that I was meeting. I find myself trying to find movies filmed in the South West and about renegades. I forget to listen to the dialogue in these films and instead am glued to the empty landscape in the background soaking in the scrub covered hillsides and the dusty highways.

Is this how the desert tortoise feels in the pet store? I just realized recently that that BS about how the turtle walks with its home is unadulterated BS. I have my home with me but my home is not just my little RV. When you live in such a small space - about 200 sq ft for the three of us - my home includes the river in the distance, the rabbit holes that I see while washing dishes, the amazing sunset behind the yuccas and the sound of the hawk overhead. Home is the open welcome of the natural world without fences, gated communities and hostile faces. I can't wait to go west again.