“War”

Central Florida is a little bit crazy. It’s not Panhandle crazy, but it’s damn close. They say the farther north you go, the more southern it gets. Trouble is, I didn’t have to go too far north for things to stop making a whole lot of sense. I think it was the age that did it to me. I thought I had felt the age of a lot of places. I’ve walked the Grand Canyon, touched the Colorado River as it wears away another layer of rock, and breathed the red Arizona dust as it drifted past a browning cactus hundreds of years in the making. But took a cellphone picture of that Cactus. I’ve stood at the peak of a ski mountain in the Rockies in a blizzard and felt the elemental rhythm of a minor blizzard as it whipped around a little coffee shop at the top of a mountain that they told me had formed millions of years ago. Then I texted my wife. I probably told her to leave me alone. Who doesn’t enjoy feeling like they went back in time a century, two centuries, free to escape the illusion at any moment? Maybe that’s just the writer in me. I enjoy a bit of fantasy. It’s refreshing.

Deland, Florida is a little different. It’s aged charm is as refreshing as a blast of shotgun pellets to the leg as you step onto private property. There are stories. The feeling of age, of the past, is more visceral there. It’s in the sparse farmland. It’s in the pastures populated with a few cows and the occasional rough-looking black bull laying under a pine. They have Civil War reenactments everywhere. They have their own battles to reenact in Florida. It takes some truly single-minded and dedicated amatuer historians to butcher a Seminole war reenactment and have fun doing it. I was in Deland for one of these events. I sat with a friend in front of a violent little stage. Quaint in the worse sense of the word. Rural Florida doesn’t do quaint well.

A tiny, knotty, natural deep brown picket fence separated the old, white-bearded men and the scattered families sitting on colorful striped beach towels with picnic baskets from the little clearing where the fighting would be staged. It was backed by tall pines, branchless except for the very top, packed tightly enough to form a solid backdrop. The Seminoles filtered in from a thin, red clay path on the left, wearing the tall red and yellow feathered headdresses of the popular imagination and carrying rifles. The federal troops came from the right, uniform in their navy blue but following a Confederate flag. The crowd cheered. Where was the respect? I wondered. I asked the man next to me, sitting on the ground on a spread out newspaper, about the flag. “This is Deland, son,” was all he could muster. Dee-land, he called it. I was angry, quickly. Out came my gun, again. My shots mixed with the musket blanks in the humid air. I didn’t shoot at anyone, of course. Just shots into the air. I had to say something. What was I to do? The flag was just uncivilized, disrespectful, even. The arrest was unnecessary, really.

My friends at school always kidded, calling me a hick because I was from Tampa, not Glencoe, Winnetka, or Westchester. Not me, I thought. These were the real hicks, sitting here at this scene. How could they be so intolerant, so stuck to their ugly heritage? I can tell you I’ve never been so violent anywhere else. Well behaved, always. Hell, I went to the University of Chicago. My friend eventually graduated from Virginia. That took discipline. More at Chicago than UVA, but that’s besides the point. Maybe it was the look of those pines. Probably, I just got a little upset by those damn Confederate flags. How uncivilized. Must have been that Deland air.