Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

And no, I’m not talking about time travel, except for the kind that goes on in our memories. I went to visit my cousin Frank yesterday. Frank turned 80 earlier this year. He was a high school principle, and had a great many stories to tell. Currently he lives in Mayo, Florida, in a house on the banks of the Suwannee River, the one made famous by the song. Much of the property in his neighborhood is virgin forest, as is the land across the river. I drove south from Tallahassee and through Perry, seeing the old part of the town. Next was Mayo, in Lafayette County, one of the least populated counties in Florida, which has fewer residents than many small towns. Depending on the technology of GPS I missed my turn and ended up in Branford, another tiny village of a town.
Along the way I saw many old buildings that had been around since the 1920s, or 30s at the latest. I passed a courthouse, just like the kind that so many small North Florida towns possess, like miniature domed capitals. Farmer’s fields, owned by families and not corporations, stretched out on both sides of the road, with men in tractors cutting hay or plowing fields. In many ways this was the Florida I remember when my family traveled. I was born and raised in South Florida, along the Gulf Coast, where every building was fair game for demolition, and many were simply knocked down to make room for something new. More fools they for destroying their heritage. In the northern part of the state buildings are left to stand, sometimes abandoned for years, or recycled through one use after another. What I was seeing now was America much as it looked prior to, during and after World War 2. Back when there was no TV, or it just starting with a channel or two. No GPS. Oh, there were modern buildings, a bank, Hardees, McDonalds, a new hospital. But at one point I saw a bank housed in a trailer, and many buildings with rusty tin roofs. Poor people’s housing, much as it had stood for a century, now with satellite dishes hanging from the eaves.
This was America when the world was still a hopeful place, unlike today. When Americans could do anything with their energy and ingenuity, though our English cousins, with a smaller population and industrial base were just as innovative. But we had the drive and energy and determination to do what needed to be done to win a world war and survive a depression. To go to the moon. It was a trip through time, driving across that North Florida countryside. Back to better days? In some ways. Not everything those old buildings looked on in the past was noble. Courthouses like the one I saw witnessed lynchings of men whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong skin color. Klan rallies, corrupt law enforcement. Big men bullying smaller. That was part of the fabric of life in those times, and in some places it is still here.
One day I have plans to write an alternate history that explores the world prior to World War 2, and goes beyond the war that we saw to a more horrific war, the invasion of Japan that never was. I really want to do that book to honor my mother and father, and all the other people who lived through that era. To do that I need to understand them. And part of that understanding starts with viewing the world that was around them. A world that can still be glimpsed, at least structurally, in small North Florida towns.