Welcome to Miami

Working in an emergency room has given me some expertise in time management. Not in any kind of way that’s useful in regular life; more like I’m really good at being impatient. If I know that it’s going to take a patient about 22 minutes to get a chest X-ray and abdominal CT, and I know that if I can get a central line in in 17 minutes, then I’ll have enough time to eat a banana and and ask the on-call gynecologist to come in and help me remove a creatively hidden crack pipe.

This devotion to frugally budgeting minutes occasionally translates into a benefit in my domestic life when it comes to cleaning the bathroom and cooking dinner at the same. Fortunately, life in the ER has also left me very comfortable snacking between icky experiences and made me religious about using hand sanitizer every time I leave or enter a room. One of the biggest questions of my career is whether working in an emergency room has caused a greater quantity of alcohol to cross my hands or my palate.

This morning, I had estimated 45 minutes from leaving the front door to being at our gate for our flight to Miami. This included a stop for gas. (Avg 4 minutes for Hot Spot vs a whopping 11 minutes for ingles because of that stupid left turn light). We made it in 27 minutes, which was an unprecedented record-breaking time.

Last month, another interesting aeronautical record was broken, when 5 million human beings were simultaneously airborne for the first time in earth’s history. It makes me imagine odd travel brochures for aliens headed to visit our ocean planet where at certain times they can witness the oddity of millions of hairless flying monkeys packaged into sleek, winged, aluminum tubes. I imagine for larger omnivorous aliens this is sort of like being a grizzly bear during the salmon run.

Today we made it through security with a minimum of gestapo hassle. They have installed new baggage snoopers since the last time I was here, and I kid you not, the name of the company that produces them is “Analogic”. I had to ask the TSA guy if that’s what the rubber gloves that they wear were all about and he couldn’t help but giggle. “We didn’t name it!”, he said. The universality of butt jokes is one of my favorite cultural truths. I would love to meet the marketing genius who got the name “Analogic” past the board of directors. Clearly he or she is a member of the resistance and deserves a memorial for their use of silliness to undermine the police state.

Miami Beach has an odd culture. Lots of scooters, club music, boobs, and iguanas. It feels so diverse and strange as to be liberating. It would be hard to attract much attention here. Tiff and I tried skinny dipping on the beach and if anyone noticed, they failed to care.

We parked our car and followed a woman without pants most of the way to our hotel. We were near the art deco district and most of the older buildings are locked into losing battles with native flora and the ravages of humidity. Outside our hotel, a 50s era metal sign said “Indian Creek Hotel” with broken neon lettering hanging from it and a tiny myrtle tree growing out of a broken corner. A hand painted sign on the door advertised it as the “Freehand Miami”, the name I had booked the room under.

Online, it was advertised as an “international hostel with an adjacent poolside cocktail bar”. The lobby was a bewildering mix of high massive wooden beams and art deco hanging lamps but the walls were stucco, hand-painted with various abstract designs and the furniture was a mix of patio furniture and mismatched living room left overs. The elevator was covered in finger paint up arrows and dribbles. Doors past the reception desk opened to an outdoor courtyard pool with a giant disco ball strung above it sending light swirling across the undersides of the encroaching fanned palmetto leaves. Behind that there was a carefully tended food and herb garden as well as a mysterious “Eagle Room” that never opened while we were there. The thump of latin-reggae fusion club music proved that they had clearly invested more in the sound system than the furniture and I was pretty much completely in love with the place.

*Add some latin club beats for the complete immersion*

We had come for a quick anniversary celebration, lured by some cheap nonstop tickets and the possibility of snorkeling in Biscayne national park. Biscayne is 170,00 acres of mangrove forests and reefs as well as an epitome of biodiversity.

Tiffany has grown up with the ocean and I have not. There is an unpopular and largely ignored theory about human evolution, called “The aquatic ape hypothesis” that postulates that humans were, at one point during their evolution, dwellers in wetlands and spent a great deal of their time swimming. According to proponents of this theory, this explains our lack of body hair, webbed fingers, the design of our trachea, our facial diving reflex, and buoyant breasts. I think the part about breasts was likely thrown in just to sell the whole idea to lonely guys in chat rooms. Regardless, it makes me think that, as a hairy guy, I am not descended from any particularly water-loving tribe of hominids. But, thanks to Tiff, I’m overcoming my genetic legacy one beach trip at a time.

I always like to look up the etymology of words that I can’t find a rhyme or root word for. Words like codswallop, malarkey, tuxedo, and slang fascinate me. Similarly, “snorkel”, seems linguistically unique. It turns out that it was originally a German word used to describe the air hose for a submarine. It’s closest English relatives might be snort, schnoz, or snore. I like the idea of swimming around with my nose on my head, snorting away while I look under water.

We had signed up for a tour through the park service, but being low season and in the middle of a heat wave, no one else had signed up. So it was just Tiffany and I on an 18 foot boat with our Captain and guide, Stefaun, a warmly funny dreadlocked young man from the Bahamas. He was impeccably charming and deeply knowledgable about the ecosystem that we were exploring. We slid through channels in the mangrove forest with their odd salt-filtering roots and made it far out into the ocean where the reef began.

*Does anyone else play “German Whist” or just me and Tiff?*

The reef was straight up magic. A self-performing miracle of interdependent motion. Water, light, and life, weaving a visible harmony with one another. And given my inability to remember to keep my snorkel above water, it was intermittently and very literally breath-taking. We were often surrounded by pulsating pink jellyfish but after a few accidental encounters I learned to think more of them as aquatic stinging nettles than the briny toilet plungers of death that I had originally feared.

We drifted and swam above the hypnotic swaying of purple fan coral, watching darting schools of fish, flashing silver in the filtered sunlight. Long barracudas lurked like lazy torpedos, shining and deadly looking. Large oval fish, deep violet in hue, nibbled at jelly fish, and the multi-colored parrot fish tumbled through the coral like encapsulated rainbows. It was too much to take in and our time there was over faster than I would have liked.

The plan was to go from the reef to a tidal river in the mangrove forest and do some paddle boarding. At least that was the plan right up until the boat stopped going forward and the engine quit making the vroomy noises that are required for aquatic locomotion. We dropped the anchor and Stefaun called his boss on the radio who apparently had gone to the same school of soulless blame-shifting that hospital administrators are required to attend. “We don’t have any spare boats to pick you up, you’re just going to have to fix it”, Stefaun’s boss replied. On the boat, we looked at each other in bewilderment. The “repair kit” had some pliers, a single screw driver, and a hammer. They were all fairly rusty and had been inexplicably and sloppily painted with bright yellow spray paint at some point.

We tried priming the fuel with the hand pump and gasoline shot out of the motor housing with each pump. I don’t really know boat engines, but I was confident that pumping gasoline over a coral reef was a problem. We got the cowling off of the engine and found a broken fuel line that we were able to splice using some metal wire and the pliers to make a hose clamp. The resulting hose was too short to allow the engine cover to be placed back on completely but the engine started. So, I rode home balanced on the back of the boat holding the engine cover in place so that it didn’t blow off or drown the engine in salt water. I found this at least as interesting and exciting as paddle boarding. But the park service refunded our trip all the same and we tipped Stefaun well in return. It was a good day.

We explored Miami Beach on foot and were able to source our favorite date meal of fresh oysters, truffle fries, and champagne at a nice place with the ever present club beat in the background. I lost a few card games to Tiff around the pool and we called it a night.

*Unexpected find in downtown Miami Beach*

The following day we tried snorkeling at John Pennekamp State park off of Key Largo. This was significantly more touristy with two jaded hungover guides and a 40 passenger aquatic bus-boat thing. But the snorkeling was even better than the day before despite being dropped off at the reef with a bunch of teenagers on some kind of extended field trip. I keep reading about how shark populations are blooming, but no such luck this time.

Most of the rest of our time in Miami was spent walking from one air conditioned place to the next. With temperatures and humidity in the high nineties, it was hard to get far without taking a break. Originally I had thought that the preponderance of fake hooters and electric scooters was just an local aesthetic choice but I realized that the increased surface area and breeze created by this combination could have significant value with regards to evaporative cooling.

I had brought the last book in a long series that I’ve been reading with a friend. It takes place far in the future when humans have accomplished some startling technological feats but continue to behave as “murderous horny primates” in the words of one of the characters who has become jaded by humans lack of spiritual growth. Coincidentally, the two most remarkable and thought provoking things we found wandering around Miami beach were the Holocaust Memorial and the Erotic Art museum, each a reminder of the powerful instincts that drive our species in the strangest of directions. Having the two experiences so unexpectedly juxtaposed left me a little off balance. Eros and Thanatos have some relationship beyond my understanding. How do we teach children the dangers of dividing people into “us” and “them”? Why do we continue to treat violence as entertainment and sex as a commodity? How can our species be simultaneously capable of murder and divine union? Strange thoughts for a Florida vacation but an honest reaction to some very powerful art.

While walking across town around sunset, Tiffany and I turned a corner to see a giant sculpture of a hand and forearm emerging from a circular wall. Between growing up with parents who were museum addicts and having spent more than a healthy amount of time at burning man, I am totally snobby about public art. This, however, was the sort of thing that stops you in your tracks and makes you forget where you were headed in the first place. We were drawn into it immediately. A walking path takes you around the walled portion to a narrow corridor that bridges the surrounding water. Through a long narrow hallway you enter the inner circle where the ethereal sound of singing children provides the soundtrack for this monument to atrocity. Life size statues of women, children, and frail elders merge to form the base of the massive forearm reaching into the sky. It moved us to tears. Pictures give an idea of the shape and scale of the monument, but cannot convey the pathos of being immersed in it.

It was the sort of thing that ruins desert for a good reason. Sometimes it feels impossible to keep attending to the inconsequential frivolities of day-to-day life while also acknowledging the scale of human suffering that continues to unfold. Here we are flying around on a jet plane to look at fish and eat pie (admittedly very good pie) while the world burns and people starve. Having so much power to entertain ourselves while having so little ability to change the world for the better is maddening. I’ve been seeing between 20-40 patients a shift in the ER for 20 years and the lobby is still full every time I get to work. Sometimes fighting suffering feels like trying to dig a hole in the ocean.

These thoughts and feelings were put in hard contrast the next morning when our desire to escape the heat and humidity left us in the air conditioned Museum of Erotic Art. There was a time that discussing the enjoyment of erotica would have felt taboo to me. Strangely, family movie night cured me of that for good a couple of years ago. While trying to find a “classic” movie to watch with the kids we turned to Common Sense Media, an organization that offers review of movies designed to help parents find reasonable movies for kids. It characterized “Raiders of the Lost Ark” as a “family classic” and “National Lampoons Summer Vacation” as inappropriate. Now let’s be clear, both of these movies are an excuse to live like a sea anemone for 90 minutes, immobile and snacking on whatever passes by. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” had over 100 murders, many of them creatively sensationalized. “National Lampoon” had some boobs and a joint. Tiffany and I realized that we really don’t care if our kids know about sex or marijuana at all, but none of us really need to spend our free time seeing humans dismembered. So as long as our society keeps treating violence like entertainment when it should be taboo, I will happily continue to openly and honestly enjoy sex and all the oddities of human behavior that surround it.

The Museum of Erotic Art offers a vide variety of photographs, sculptures, and oddities from all around the world and throughout history. Many are fascinating, humorous, startling, or thought provoking. Largely, it was a reminder that, despite our current prudery and taboos, sex and sexuality inform a great deal of human behavior. The number and variety of phallic artifacts and images was somewhat overwhelming and gave me some sympathy for any woman who’s ever walked through a sports bar. Sex is great, but there is definitely such a thing as too many penises.

Now, on the plane back to Asheville, looking though my journal and the photos on my phone, I am trying to find the things that I hope to bring back to my daily life so that this opportunity to travel remains more than a brief distraction. I find it hard to maintain the expansiveness and openness to new experiences that accompanies travel when faced with the need to run errands, return emails, and keep the bears out of my trash cans. But I also miss my children, my cat, and the quiet of the forest behind my house. I think, for this trip, what I hope to remember is that being a human means constantly trying to make sense of humanity, but that there are miracles just below the surface of the world if you take time to look. I also am forced to admit that the phrase “hooters on scooters” will also probably remain stuck in my head for some time.

Turkey Energy

Sorta Secret Falls, NC