A “Certain” Place On The Road Map

Have you ever been looking at a map and had a name on there capture your imagination – that one certain place? I mean, just look at a map of Florida – near Panama City. Heading west on the shore road you come across Laguna Beach (isn’t that in California?), Hollywood Beach (please!), Inlet Beach (whatever), Seagrove Beach (a grove in the sea??) and then there’s Seaside. Seaside – not Seaside Beach, not Seaside Resort, not Seaside Preserve – just Seaside. Kind of distinguished-sounding but not pretentious; the kind of a place where it might be something different from the typical Florida town whose single purpose is to separate your money from your wallet. Maybe there would be real people in there, not a crowd of noisy, sunburned Yankee tourists with 6 bratty kids whining to buy just one more alligator head or one more shark tooth bolo tie. Or maybe that classic pink flamingo to put in the yard back in the Bronx.

And, maybe it would be a place that didn’t require one to recycle, use a goat to mow the lawn, ride a bike to work, have no more than 1.4 kids and buy only Fair Trade organic, vegetarian food from certified indigenous third-world people. A place that used old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs and not those “triple-tube bulbs” that look like recycled DNA and provide just enough light to enable you to tell whether you’re eating tofu or hummus. My psyche was not ready for a place where everyone had the body of a concentration camp veteran and believed that a person with a body mass index greater than 10 was a sloth, a glutton and quite probably a mass-murderer of innocent cows, pigs and chickens who are, after all, just other people. I’m sorry, but my idea of a good-looking woman is not someone whose ribs are more pronounced than the tail on a starving Florida gator.

Okay, so it was winter and there wouldn’t be that “beautiful Florida beach” sort of experience but, hey, that was okay. No one wants to look at this body anyway. I was hoping that there would be a quiet, reasonable place to have a massacred cow for dinner; maybe an eclectic bookstore or antique shop to browse in without seeing even one pink flamingo, and a little coffee shop to drink a cuppa joe made from coffee beans basically stolen from Juan Valdez before we headed back to Panama City. Sure, I was asking a lot of that “certain” place on the road map but if you’re going to dream then you ought to dream big.

We left Panama City in a light-hearted mood, certain that we would find a truly unique town in the midst of the tired, shabby and slightly depressing Florida countryside. Sometimes I have a dream in which someone dredges out the entire center of the state and leaves only the coast line; kind of a reverse atoll, I suppose. Turn it into a gigantic lake surrounded by a thin line of sand and stock it with largemouth bass and bluegill. Maybe leave an island or two with a fresh water spring and some oranges, grapefruit, watermelon and perhaps a boiled peanut stand.

It took almost an hour to reach Seaside and we had to endure all the “beach” towns along the way – Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, Wal-Marts, souvenir stands, and endless traffic with everyone thinking they had the same rights and privileges that I have. Maybe riding a bike to work wouldn’t be such a bad idea for all those other people – that would make my driving experience much more enjoyable. Wait, I forgot, those bike people think they should be allowed to share the road with cars and hold up traffic so everyone can see and admire their spandexed butts and insect-head helmets. Well, when I’m king, I’ll come up with something to fix the problem of crowded roads.

The sun was setting as we entered Seaside and the large sand dunes blocked virtually all of the beach and the water. We parked in the free municipal parking that encircled a beautifully manicured town square and crossed the road down to the quaint shops and bistros on the shore side of the sand dunes. After climbing a few wooden stairs that led over the dunes, we could finally see the beach. The sky over the Gulf was populated with dark scudding clouds and the wind was whipping the breaking waves into grey-green spindrift. Not exactly a promising initial impression of my fantasy town but even great places have bad weather now and again – I wasn’t going to give up just yet even though my spirits were sinking somewhat.

After taking a few pictures of each other standing in the gazebo-like structure that dominated the dunes and taking the mandatory few steps on the beach, we were ready for some hot food and warm drinks. Although there hadn’t been a lot of people on the streets and sidewalks when we first arrived, by the time we came back over the dunes, the town seemed to be deserted. All the shops we had passed to get to the beach were closed; shuttered tightly against the coming night. Still, all was not lost. Across the town square, there were a few shops that appeared to be open so we headed in that direction hoping to at least find a place to have some coffee.

I have to admit that the town and its buildings were delightful – a blending of Norman Rockwell’s America and Architectural Digest. Who needed big box Wal Marts and cookie cutter Burger Kings? My spirits rebounded slightly and I began to think that maybe Seaside was exactly what I had hoped it to be.

Somehow, the few people we saw in the shops seemed to be slightly out of focus; a little blurred around the edges. Maybe it was just the salt spray blown over the dunes that coated the windows and slightly refracted the light from the interior. As we got to the first little shop, the proprietor locked the door and turned the sign from “Open” to “Closed” and each succeeding store followed suit. I don’t know, maybe there was a town ordinance that required everyone to close up at the same time; maybe you had to live there to buy anything. It just seemed kind of rude. As we continued to walk, we heard laughter coming from a building that turned out to be the local theatre – the Seaside Repertory Theatre. To me, the laughter sounded hollow and kind of forced; sort of like the reception that Nancy Pelosi gets when she tells a joke in the House of Representatives. I had absolutely no desire to see or hear what they were laughing at; it might have been something that I wouldn’t have found funny. In fact, I have watched horror movies where there was exactly that sort of laughter just before someone got killed. Nope, no theatre for me.

By now, it was almost totally dark and the few lights in the town did little to dispel the darkness; in fact, it seemed to deepen it. Shadows were not just dark, they were pools of blackness so deep that had there been light in them, it would not have escaped. The wind whipped across the empty streets and between the buildings, blowing grit into our faces no matter which way we turned. I had not yet gotten scared, but it wasn’t out of the question that it would happen.

We decided to head back to the car and as we turned to go, I failed to see that there was a curb and a step down to the street. Or, more likely, some evil spirit or zombie got tired of my being in his town and gave me a shove. At any rate, I did a combination of the Texas two-step and the hop, skip and jump of track and field fame before I landed ignominiously on my face. Ignoring the blood and pain, I grabbed Eileen’s hand and made a beeline for the car. Once in the car, I felt a bit foolish about my reaction to what was probably just clumsiness on my part, so I suggested that we drive through the town to see some of the homes. Oh, big mistake.

Only about 1 in every 20 or so houses had lights and the light seemed shallow and lacking in substance. And the silence; how could you see tree branches waving in the wind but not hear any sound? The blackness even seemed to swallow our conversation. No, I don’t think we were whispering but I might be wrong. Just like in town, there were no people on the streets but we couldn’t see anyone in any of the houses, either. Where was everyone? Even the lighted houses started seeming ominous so I decided to turn around and head back to Panama City. Somehow, though, every road we went down seemed to bring us back to where we first went into the residential area but we were always heading back into the area rather than out of it. No, I don’t know how that was possible but there you go. Finally, the town lost interest in us and turned us loose. You know, after Seaside, I kind of like Burger Kings and Wal Marts now. Even sunburned tourists are okay.