The Fruit Lady and Fort Lauderdale
Background tune: Marinade - Dope Lemon
I left the city and moved a little further up the coast to Fort Lauderdale. The train I hopped on was a double-decker and seemed to stretch down the track for miles. Everything really is bigger in ‘merica. I’ve only ventured 45 minutes from Miami but it’s a completely different world. Much quieter, much greener, and plenty of space to think…
The weather, the food, the air, everything’s different here. Well, not exactly. It’s like being in one of those TV show storylines where the main characters travel through a multiverse of alternative realities and in each one, the mechanics of the world are the same but everything looks different. Apples and oranges are now dragon fruit and something called wax jambu. The empty silver birch trees from back home have been replaced with 30ft palm trees that seem to appear everywhere, as though new ones shoot up from the ground every night while you sleep.
Lizards are the squirrels of South Florida and they’re everywhere, sunbathing on paths and hanging out on fence posts. They’re very good at staying still until you get too close and they scurry off into the long grass or find refuge up the nearest tree. To me, lizards have always been something you see at the zoo but here they run free. I’m told Florida Scrub Lizards are the most common. Oh, and apparently iguanas are like rodents down here, infamous for eating crops and getting where they’re not wanted. There’s something amusingly surreal about watching someone shoo off an iguana with a broom as though it’s an unwanted cat.
I’m staying at an organic homestead farm owned by a woman named Cynthia. She’s a local fruit farmer and charity organiser who, in her retirement, has transformed the land around her home into a thriving jungle of chaotic green. She has a quirky, care-free sense of whimsey about her; the rare kind you only get if you’ve lived through the laid-back hippie era of the 60s.
When I arrived, I was given the grand tour and as we walked around, dodging giant leaves and exploring hidden corners of the gardens, she kept handing me random fruits and leaves that I’d never seen before, gesturing for me to eat them. My very British fear of offending her overpowered my fear of potentially being poisoned but I’m glad it did because everything tasted incredible.
She explained to me- while casually walking barefoot through the gardens- that over the years, she’s worked on a handful of local preservation projects, written a book and created a growing network of hundreds of organic farmers. Listening to her sporadic anecdotes, you can tell she’s the type of person that’s lived. She’s been there, done that, and could make a quilt from the number of t-shirts she’s bought.
I came to find out that Cynthia hasn’t always been the barefoot tropical farmer she is today. Like most of us, she had a day job once upon a time. In fact, it turns out she was a financial advisor for Morgan Stanley, which is about as corporate as it gets. But she always harboured a desire to do something a little more soothing for the soul. As soon as she could afford to retire, she gave up the suit, heels and all that shit.
Our conversation made me think about my own choices. I’ve often felt at odds with myself over how my decision to work in marketing contradicts the beliefs I once had as a wide-eyed propagator of the anti-establishment. It’s not like I’ve spent my career promoting slave labour fashion brands or working on PR campaigns for billionaire oil barons but still, I think there’s always been small a part of me that’s felt unfulfilled knowing that the end purpose of my work is to essentially convince people to buy stuff. Who knows, maybe it only bothers me because I know Bill Hicks wouldn’t approve. I digress.
I initially planned to help out with marketing Cynthia’s brand in return for getting to stay and eat for free but one of the reasons I came to the US was to escape my laptop screen (he ironically typed as he stared into his laptop screen) so I’m planning to get outside and help as much as can.
I forgot how much I enjoy working with my hands. There’s nothing more satisfying than creating something from scratch, standing back, and then giving the classic dad nod of approval. I’ve been spending the last few mornings constructing raised beds with added iguana protection and it’s been sweaty work in the Florida sun but so enjoyable. My afternoons have been spent relaxing in the pool and taking big chunks out of a book I’ve been meaning to read for over a year. It’s called Americana by Don DeLillo and, coincidentally, it’s about a guy who quits his media job to travel across the US.
I took a quick trip back towards Miami to visit the Vizcaya Estate. It’s now a public museum but the beautifully extravagant villa and its grounds were constructed in the early 20th century to house businessman and collector, James Deering. He was basically your Jeff Bezos of the 1800s and Vizcaya was his superyacht; an unnecessarily ostentatious way of showing how wealthy he was. It’s kind of fitting when you think about it, Miami is a city built on flare and flashiness after all, so it’s interesting to see how the big players did things back in the day.
Wealth shaming and jealousy aside, Vizcaya looked incredible. As we explored the inside of the villa, there seemed to be an endless number of new rooms and hidden areas to discover, each more intricately adorned with high-end artwork and priceless ornaments than the previous. Like a time capsule of wealth and refinement, everything from the hand-stitched tapestries to the solid marble detailing was perfectly preserved in its original state.
The gardens were equally as stunning, a 50-acre tropical paradise of green painted onto the beige and terracotta canvas of suburban Miami. There was plenty of colour and texture on offer so I tried to find some interesting angles with the camera. The pale blue tones of the Miami sky just seemed to compliment everything else in the composition including the cream stone structures and deep greens of the vegetation.
There’s a place called Flamingo Gardens close by to where I’m staying in Fort Lauderdale so I decided to spend an afternoon there and see if there was anything interesting to shoot. I’ve not really done much animal photography but I was really happy with how some of the shots turned out.
It was a little like shooting a gig because you have to try and capture the right moment as the subject moves around. I didn’t have to deal with poor lighting but guitarists don’t tend to fly away when you get too close so trying to get a portrait shot of these dinosaur-looking birds came with its own challenges.
I’ve decided to cut my time in Fort Lauderdale short by a few days and take a slight detour over to New Orleans. I heard there’s a music festival going on over the weekend so I’ve definitely got to go and check that out. Time for another change of pace. Let’s see what the Big Easy has in store for me.
