First Week of February, 2009
Ridin Miami citybus thru steaming Afropuffd toenail-painted bigbootytightjeans female-n-tanktopped men slinging streets like an Angie Stone vid
Well that was the first night I got there. Man I love Miami– one of the few places I can disappear into to get some intensive writing done. Course it got cold and blustery after the first night, but I love it any way, and it could be my secret second city if I had the dollars and hadn’t just told you. 🙂 The gritty, comfortable streets and the aqua Caribe sea and South Beach tropical life all blended into one. I went to view the Everglades restoration with my friends from Operation Green Leaves, http://www.oglhaiti.com/, which is based in Miami and helps Haiti replant its devastated hillsides but also, along with a couple other orgs, helps local inner city Miami youth experience the South Florida Everglades wilderness. I also helped participate in a planning session at National Park HQs for the upcoming March for Parks which, considering the recent terrible AK-47 slaughter of innocent young people (2 teenagers killed, 7 wounded) on the corner in Liberty City (a neighborhood of Miami) while they were playing a game of street dice http://www.miamiherald.com/460/story/871201.html is def going to be welcome for all who get to come. http://www.npca.org/take_action/upcoming_events/march-for-parks.html
To experience such sweeping expanses of wilderness sawgrass prairie makes our hearts hurt out here in the Great Plains, where we’re left holding on for dear life to tiny patches of our native prairies and plains. South Florida is putting Texas to shame as far as ecological protection. Everglades National Park alone is 1.5 million acres, and that doesn’t even include Big Cypress. And now the State of Florida is working at purchasing 187,000 acres of U.S. Sugar-owned land for restoration north of the Park and south of Lake Okeechobee.
Also, right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a secret missile base was installed deep inside the Everglades, and the Park Service gave us a private tour. All around the base is 6,000 acres of former farmland that has been restored to native habitat very successfully.
View more pics in the the stand-alone slide show we’ve created in the panel to the right.
While in Miami, I also (finally) read Toni Morrison’s BELOVED, and I read it deeply and thoroughly, word by word. I think it is one of the best books in American literature. Raw, pungent, nature soaked humanity — the story of people on the land is the American Story, and Toni Morrison perfected it. I’m gon do a lil youtube vid about this.