7. A travel diversion and homogenization

Upon graduation from Durrett High School in June, 1978, among the gifts I received was a week's stay at my aunt Virginia Lee (Lewis) Sharp's place in Florida. For the record the woman I am writing of is the youngest of the five daughters of the previously mentioned Rachel Lewis, four of whom are still among the living; my maternal grandmother, Vivian Thomas "Tommie" (Lewis) Hockensmith, who died in 1976, was the eldest. Aunt Jenny, as she is known, lives in a trailer park in the tiny seaside fishing village of Bokeelia, Florida, itself perched on the north end of Pine Island, in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico off Florida's southwestern coast. There is an effort there to buy out the owners of some of the tracts and trailers which dot the island, and build thereupon high rises and hotels, as has been done to much of the rest of Florida. The effort is being highly resisted by Bokeelia's residents as well as those elsewhere on the island.

I can't say I know any of this firsthand. Florida has never much interested me. Other than a two-week visit to Jacksonville, Saint Augustine, Daytona Beach, New Smyrna Beach, and Disney World, back in the year Disney World opened when I was 12 or 13, and another visit in 1999 as a delegate to the National Amateur Baseball Federation summer meeting held in Daytona Beach Shores, I've not been back. On that first visit, my family stayed at the Blue Shores (or something like that). When I returned twenty-five years later, with the address in hand, I couldn't find the quaint little motel-on-the-sea we called home for a week. It had been replaced by a high-rise hotel, which was at the time itself being converted into condominium units. I looked at a unit, about 375 square feet going for $55,000.00. You could buy up to four combined units if you really needed space and needed to part with some change. I thought about buying an individual unit but didn't. I probably should have. But, I digress.

As one drives up and down Daytona Beach, and Daytona Beach Shores, a municipality further south along the A1A, it all begins to look the same. One high rise after another. And on the right hand side, newer and quite similar 49-room motels all controlled by two or maybe three motel chains. These motels are no different from the ones alongside I-65 at Grade Lane, Brooks, or in Shepherdsville, or any other interstate anywhere else in the Republic for that matter. They all have two double beds, a TV, a clock radio, and three pictures. Some of them now have microwaves, but only if they've been "updated." The same is true if one drives north of Daytona, up to Ormond Beach and beyond. All of our places to stay have become all alike.

I was reminded of this homogenization in an entirely different way while shopping for Christmas gifts, and then shopping again last week. I found myself in two different stores of the same chain, in two different cities - actually in two different states, one in Clarksville, Indiana, the other in Shelbyville, Kentucky. Last week I went to a third store of the same chain, this time out in Okolona, near the Jefferson Mall. As I entered, I was trying to remember where in the other store I saw the item I wanted to purchase, when I realized it was in the exact same place in this store's layout. I walked right to it. It seems the differences that separated one store from another have gone the way of those individualized motels-by-the-sea where we made our home that week in Florida back in the early 1970s. The only really unique motel I can think of are the Wigwams along US31W down in Cave City. And they are for sale. Maybe I should go visit Aunt Jenny soon in their trailer amongst the mangroves in Bokeelia.

Very, very remotely related to the homogeneity discussed above is the history of the continents and their place - or more appropriately places - on the globe over long periods of time - millions and millions of years. [Can't you just hear Carl Sagan (or JohnnyCarson doing Carl Sagan) saying that?] The link below shows the progression from 200 million years ago to 100 million years from now, of the continents, from one called Pangea, through the breakup into several, and then back into one, now called Pangea Ultima. Even the scientists are predicting the hegemony of homogeneity. And it is all starting with motels and department stores.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/science/20070109_PALEO_GRAPHIC.html