Going there always gives you a lot to think about. This time, for example, I kept thinking about the interesting fact that in 1950, the city of Pittsfield was actually bigger than the city of Orlando. It is amazing how dramatically fortunes can change, and how quickly they do so.
The biggest changes right now taking place all around is the way the housing market is collapsing. My folks live in a newer development on the edge of Ocala, in the north central part of the state, and it is today a landscape of half-completed housing developments. You see paved roads, streetlamps, road signs carved into what had been recently scrub forest, with only a smattering of houses spread around. It is like seeing the actual highwater mark of America's most recent bubble economy, the point at which it began to recede. You get the sensation of a giant project being suddenly abandoned.
While we were down there, we spent a few days by the ocean at Melbourne Beach. It was a little chilly, but Mila enjoyed playing in the sand. We stayed just a few miles south of the Kennedy Space Center, and the midcoast region there still fancies itself the "Space Coast," a touching bit of collective boosterism that tried to will the area in becoming the JFK Airport of the space age. But it is falling on hard times, with the Obama Administration backing away from the grandiose plans for the post-Space Shuttle future of manned spaceflight, and putting thousands of jobs at risk.
On Sunday night, the shuttle Endeavour was scheduled to land. A local television station provided live coverage of the event, and after watching for awhile I went out to the beach to see if I could see or hear it come in. I didn't see anything -- no lights, and the sonic booms caused by the shuttle smacking into the earth's atmosphere were heard only to the southwest. It was fascinating all the same though -- when I left my hotel room about 25 minutes before it came in, they had just explained that the shuttle had begun its "deorbit burn," somewhere high in orbit above the south Pacific near Australia. I think part of the frustration we feel about the Space Age is just how comprehensively it failed to live up to our hopes. If you want to go to Australia from here it takes more than a full day in airplanes, so secretly, isn't it annoying that after all these decades and billions of dollars we haven't been able to apply any of these things in a practical way? This is why the romance wore off, I think. But not entirely. It is hard not to be moved by images from the Hubble Space Telescope, or photos taken of earth from orbit. And it was haunting and strange to stand on a beach by the vast cold ocean and stare into the sky, waiting for a spaceship to land.
More mundane transportation issues are the first thing that strikes me about the Sun Belt. You have to get used to being in a car for every minor and major task, and you get used to the idea that it will necessarily take awhile to get from A to B. There is something deceptively easygoing about the driving too -- lots of straight lines and clean angles, and clearly marked lanes with nifty reflectors in the pavement that shine in your headlights. There are no rotaries, no one-way streets, no cramped on-ramps shorter than some driveways. It almost lulls you to sleep, and makes you think you should be moving faster than you really are.
The strangest and most natural place we visited in Florida was also one of its newest and most artificial. The town of Celebration was founded in the early 1990s as a development by Disney, and feels like it should be studied by sociologists as a case of American utopianism. Unlike the rest of Florida, the town was laid out with some principles of "New Urbanism." It has a compact, walkable center. There is mixed-use development. The houses have two stores, and sit on small lots. Everything seems, uh, quaint.
But things quickly start leaping out at you when you look closely. There are mushroom-like objects around the downtown that pump easy listening music at you. There are plates on the lampposts with the town seal on it -- and the seal is copyrighted by Disney. It was strange: I spent days grousing about strip malls, the lack of sidewalks, the social and economic dislocation of so much of what I saw, and then it was as if someone said, 'oh yeah, here you go.' And it felt very bland, and was not precisely the kind of place I'd want to live in. We can't really escape social planning, as much as we try -- here in Williamstown everyone talks about the importance of affordable housing, until real proposals butt up against someone's multimillion dollar "viewshed" -- nor can we escape human nature -- like the line of SUVs waiting in the middle of the road to pick the kids up outside the Celebration elementary school (presumably, Uncle Walt's vision of idyllic smalltown life must have involved kids walking home from school?). But the weird thing about Celebration is that you can't forget you aren't looking at an organic community, but just someone's vision of an organic community.
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