Touch Down

As my plane descended into Orlando International Airport (MCO) tonight, a young boy seated behind me wondered aloud “Where are we?” “Florida” was the response his mother gave.  “This is Florida?” he asked staring out the window at the sea of lights below. To this she offered no retort, only letting her silence answer. For her, as for many, this uninterrupted chain of lights, this sprawl of roads and houses, this artifice of progress, this is Florida. Orlando is a giant of a place and daily stretches out in all directions, enveloping its neighbors in a net of pavement and electric wires. In Florida this is not unique to Orlando, though. Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Beach have long grown so close together, one can not easily tell where one ends and the other begins. People have been flocking to Florida for decades to enjoy the (sub)urban amenities offered by unchecked growth (to say nothing of the temperate climate).

This, though, is not all that Florida is and it is not the Florida I have come for. I have come to hike The Florida Trail. The trail stretches 1100 miles from the Big Cypress National Preserve, passes through the Ocala, Osceola and Apalachicola, National Forests, the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge and ends at the Gulf Islands National Sea Shore. The next three months will see me though some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the country, but will also involve walking some 300 miles of hard pavement. This is how the trail exists today, but the Florida Trail Association is working to move the entire trail onto public land and eliminate the road walks as much as possible.  I am hopeful they will achieve this goal.

As we touched down, the plane’s wheels meeting with the tarmac, offered a sudden reminder of the physics of inertia. The boy behind me noted “We’re going fast!” his mother reassured him “We were always going this fast.” She was right this time. We are always going fast, running (driving mostly) from one place to the next, our vision clouded by a haze of schedules, itineraries and priorities. An ever ticking clock drives us from one task to the next, one box to the next.  

It is not my intention here to decry this fully, but it is my intention to slow down.  To notice the natural world and experience it at its own pace, will be my daily task. I will wake with the sun and not an alarm, I will rest when I am tired, eat when my body asks, and perhaps I’ll even catch a few fish.