Andrew Holleran Excerpt
From The State with the Prettiest Name
Over the next forty years I would watch those cows, or their descendants, move further west, pushed out by the city of Jacksonville’s irresistible sprawl over the next five decades, till eventually the city, which had begun, in 1961, at a little hill overlooking what is now the Orange Park Mall, moved out to a point just east of Middleburg, so that the first cow I see when driving into Jacksonville now, if I see any, is grazing in a field not far from the intersection with Highway 16, halfway to my town.
The drive with my father went (and still goes) north of the city, through a flat landscape of pinewoods that was so monotonous and dreary it made you think of the steppes of Russia even though you had never been there. That first visit, filled as I was with northern energy, and always uncomfortable when alone with my father, I kept up a stream of chatter as long as I could; though, by the time we reached Starke, I had run out of things to say, and I found myself staring at a landscape I’d only encountered before in a course on Southern literature: pine woods and cattle, abandoned shacks, and a sign advertising Boiled Peanuts. Who would want to boil a peanut, much less eat, or advertise, such a thing? No wonder they had put the state prison there. It was a perfect setting for executions. Driving west for an hour was like taking chloroform; and by the time we trundled through Starke, which even today brings to mind “The Last Picture Show”, the wired visitor from the north who had been trying to keep up an interesting stream of talk on his way to his parents’ new home had been reduced to stunned silence, like the schoolteacher who succumbs to the mud and torpor of the little town she moved to with high hopes of raising its cultural level in the story by Chekhov.
Fifty years later, when I return to Florida, there is no one to meet me and the plane lands at a much bigger, brand new International Airport, where I rent a car to drive myself home, or hire a car with a driver to take me home in splendor, but the landscape, once I’m on I-10, has not really changed; it is still pinewoods all the way to 301, despite a few factories, and once I get on 301, it’s still old motels and signs advertising strawberries, boiled peanuts and fireworks. One of the motels is so overgrown with grass, so obviously empty, it looks like the Motel of the Mysteries. The landscape is still monotonously flat, astonishingly vacant, though I drive faster than my father, eager to get home—so eager I sometimes miss the turn-off (especially at night) and lose my temper upon realizing I am now on my way to Lake City, and cannot get off till the next exit, where I turn left and wend my way back to the southeast—past the state prison, where Ted Bundy was incarcerated, and where executions still draw candle-lit vigils, back to 301, then south through the world-famous speed traps of MacLenny and Lawtey, the old motels north of Starke, those Fifties time capsules, and then, after another turn that’s easy to miss in the middle of town, or whatever you call the middle of a town that has been eviscerated by a four lane highway (the one that used to carry people south to Miami, before they built 441, and then I-75), I turn left on Highway 100.
I stayed because I am selfish and cannot give up possessions, or because it was free rent, or because it was a small town, and its smallness was its appeal: the little post office lobby with two clerks, the little library, the tennis courts, the small stucco houses, that were not much bigger than a one bedroom apartment, the tiny car ports. There is something I love about small town life, the sense of living in miniature, or rather a human scale.
