Shortly after moving from Massachusetts to Florida, I began to receive a distinct style of text from loved ones I'd left behind. These consisted of screenshots from social media feeds, or URL links to newspaper articles.
Florida man calls 9-1-1 after kitten denied entry to strip club.
Florida man tries to steal rack of ribs by stashing it in his pants.
Florida man chews off another man's face.
The most frequent and famous of the stories sent to me wasn't about a Florida man but a Florida woman. A twenty-something former-model-turned-meth-addict, she'd been responsible for burning down a 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree which, at the time, was considered to be the oldest of its kind and the fifth oldest tree globally.
In Greek mythology, a beautiful young boy named Cyparissus is gifted a stag by Apollo, who is god of many things, among them truth. The stag becomes the boy's beloved companion, but this love is short-lived. One hot summer day while the animal rests in the shade, Cyparissus accidentally kills the stag with his javelin. The boy is so distraught by the death of the animal at his own hands that he sobs himself into a cypress tree. In his transformation, Cyparissus is said to provide shade to those lost, and to the living who grieve their passing. In many cultures the cypress tree is a symbol of mourning. Once covering vast swaths of the country, today there are very few bald cypress trees left in the United States and even fewer that are virgin growth.
A frequent visitor to the tree, Florida Woman often concealed herself inside the ancient cypress's hollow trunk so she could get high. One night, she and a friend jumped the fence encircling it and crawled inside. The cypress's interior was dark, made darker by a setting sun and dense swampland. It was also, the woman later reported, chilly.
In another Greek myth, fire is given to man by Prometheus, a god sometimes called the supreme trickster. Florida Woman lit a match.
Though the texts I received were often accompanied by emojis of palm trees, alligators, and flamingos or the meaningless LOL, they made me uneasy. I sensed loved ones were expressing their disapproval of my decision to move here, and by extension their disapproval of me. Who knows? Maybe they were. Maybe I agreed with them. The time of those texts was early days in Florida for me and my husband J. I did not yet know what I thought.
At first officials believed lightning had struck the ancient cypress tree, which was known locally by its nickname, the Senator. But Florida Woman had a hard time keeping her own secret and confessed to friends, telling them she'd killed a tree "older than Jesus." Police later found evidence on her cellphone and laptop: she'd filmed the whole thing.
The world was unanimous in our opinion of Florida Woman, contempt for her one of the few unifying forces left in American society. Not far from where the tree had been located, a brewery held a promotional event introducing a new stout in honor of the forever lost ancient cypress, the advertisement featuring an image of Florida Woman with a wooden spike photoshopped between her teeth and a speech balloon containing the words I kill dreams.
Burn in hell, read one particularly damning Facebook post, you horror of a human.
The soundtrack to my early months in Florida was an unwelcome one: chainsaws. They were being used to cut down trees, specifically live oaks on the brick-lain street in St. Petersburg where J and I lived our first year. When left alone these trees have an average lifespan of 250 to 500 years. In Greek mythology, the Chaonian Oaks was a sacred grove and the site of the temple and oracle of Jupiter; in some versions of the myths the trees have the power of speech. The neighborhood we'd moved into was known locally as Live Oaks, though given the number of trees being removed, their liveness appeared to matter little.
The oaks were chopped at their crowns in a V to accommodate power lines; when viewed in a certain afternoon light they looked like demented clowns. An arborist explained to me that cutting the oaks in this manner compromised their health, resulting in a slow but inevitable death. Our rental property was home to two live oaks and he'd come to remove a limb that had collapsed onto the roof of the bungalow during a tropical storm. The storm had felled many trees, cluttering the streets with black, rotting branches that smelled of earth and steamed in the sun. Neighbors piled them on the curbs so cars could pass through; garbage bins along the back alleys were overflowing with their crumbling, damp flesh. The arborist suggested the entire tree be removed. Like all the oaks on our street, it was rotting slowly from the inside out.
It's only a matter of time, he said.
But the owner of the bungalow refused to have the live oak removed. There were red-bellied woodpeckers in the tree, birds that returned to their nests year after year. Our landlord could not in good conscience evict them.
I was relieved when I heard this. The oak's trunk was mere inches from the kitchen window, providing an unobstructed view of the entrance to the bird's nest, a mathematically precise circle carved into the rotting wood. Our reasons for moving to Florida—weather, family, cost of living—had rung hollow to me ever since our arrival, making me feel unsteady and imbalanced, unpredictable even to myself, and watching those birds provided me a small comfort during a time when I had few. I did not want to lose what I understood to be a ballast keeping me moored to a life I'd begun in this new place. If the woodpeckers could live here, then perhaps so too could I.
Paintings depicting the myth often show Cyparissus draped in agony across the slain stag, his face contorted in misery. But there was no report of Florida Woman keening on the ashen mound of the Senator, no mention of her emotional reaction to destroying a tree that was well underway, unfurling its branches and reaching towards Helios and his chariot at the same time Ovid wrote Metamorphoses. I wondered: Had Florida Woman confessed to burning the Senator down out of guilt? Or had she been bragging? Had she found setting fire to a 3,500-year-old tree shockingly hilarious? Humor is often used as a feeble defense against shame, a flimsy veil barely disguising self-loathing.
But it's also highly plausible that Florida Woman harbored no remorse. If this is true she'd be no different than Henry David Thoreau, who was responsible for burning down three hundred acres of some of the last remaining virgin forest in New England. Despite this, Thoreau denied feeling any guilt. "It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it," wrote the father of the modern-day environmental movement. Instead, Thoreau condemned the property owners and townspeople who shamed him, stating indignantly that "[he] had a deeper interest in the woods, knew them better and should feel their loss more" than anyone else. The only regret he expressed was for "the trivial fishing" he and a friend had conducted that preceded the fire. Taken in this light, the only difference between Florida Woman and Thoreau is in the numbers: one tree versus one thousand.
Thoreau's fire was started by a campfire, the most common cause of forest fires today. And yet in a world quite literally on fire, it is hard to find individual names attached to campfires. I know of no wineries that advertise promotional events by defaming individuals who have caused the wildfires California endures year after year, not even the executives of PG&E. But type the words Florida Woman into any search engine and you'll come up with one name and one name alone.
Americans have a preoccupation with age. We idolize youth but, on those occasions that suit us, condescendingly pat the head of longevity. In such instances, 3,500 years means more to us than 3,500 acres. What we fail to see is something the Greeks and their mythology understood all too well: the two are irrevocably intertwined. Land and time. Life and death.
A year into our move, J and I bought a house in a different neighborhood. On the property were seven laurel oaks and a longleaf pine; a maple, Mexican palm, avocado, and mango tree.
Our new neighbors were friendly but approached us like dogs, from the side, their gazes askance. They talked to us elliptically about our trees. One neighbor told me laurel oaks lived a short time, sixty, maybe seventy years at most, and were difficult to maintain. His eyes fell upon the puddles of leaves gathered in our driveway. It was late fall and the trees were shedding at a rate impossible to keep clean. When the wind blew, the leaves scurried and rattled across the pavement and out into the street or onto the edge of our neighbor's lawn. Another neighbor cautioned us against damage the trees' branches might cause to the roof of the house. But the trees had been a selling point for us. Like Cyparissus's stag, we found comfort in the shade they provided; we were able to sit outside even on the hottest days and they kept our electrical bills manageable. There was no question about their continued status on our property.
J and I were swimming against the stream of public opinion, however. Months after our move a robust live oak that lived a few blocks away from us was cut down. I had admired that tree on my morning jogs around our new neighborhood, determining my route so I could encounter it every time I went out. Starting in predawn darkness, I came upon the oak as the sun rose behind it, the morning light illuminating clumps of witchy Spanish moss dangling from its branches, the whole tree softening and blurring to sepia. One morning, believing I'd gone the wrong way, I jogged serpentines until my brain finally registered the wood chips and sawdust casting white shadows across the empty lawn of a house I no longer recognized. For several minutes I stood on the street, panting and sweating in disbelief, resisting the urge to pound on the front door and demand an explanation from the homeowner.
After that oak came a jacaranda, a towering coconut palm, a cedar. As days turned to weeks and months I began to lose count—or rather I ceased counting entirely. To do so caused a knot, a dull, lingering doubt I'd believed I'd begun to shed with the purchase of our new house, but that once more returned, settling itself in the back of my neck, taking up residence there.
In the absence of the trees, the houses that lost them looked self-conscious and naked in their barrenness and aquarium-style exposure. There was so much emptiness you could look straight through the front windows and into the interior living spaces where little appeared to happen, all the way out to the back yard. The lawns yellowed and browned and were turned once again to sand, the wind tossing up small spirals of dust that caught in your eyes.
Cyparissus's wasn't the only arboreal metamorphosis. After learning about the death of their brother Phaethon, the Heliades mourn themselves into poplars. The old peasants Baucis and Philemon are first spared death and later granted their wish of becoming an oak and linden tree by the gods Zeus and Hermes, who are recipients of the couple's hospitality.
Most of the transformations, however, are of women fleeing the unwanted advances of angry, lustful men. Pitys becomes a pine tree to escape Pan; Lotis a lotus tree to dodge Priapus; Myrrha a myrrh tree so she won't be killed by her own father who, from the Greeks' perspective, is not remotely responsible for their incestuous relationship. And then there is Daphne. Doggedly pursued by Cyparissus's own admirer, Apollo, she begs her father Peneus to save her from impending rape. After much hemming and hawing (he's grumpy because he wants a grandchild), Peneus turns Daphne into a laurel tree.
In all these myths the transformations are described as deaths. But the stories are circles, not straight lines, and the results always a rebirth. It makes sense to me the Greeks would use trees to represent the never-ending metamorphoses of the planet, the cycle of life. Changes to trees are easily observed. In Florida I was constantly noticing them: violet jacaranda, fruiting citrus, scarlet Poinciana, perfuming frangipani. Trees grow and spread, bloom and green, shed and brown. Other species do as well, humans among them, but in ways far less apparent and inspired, and not always discernible by sight alone. But this is not to say trees are invulnerable. No matter the lifespan, everything dies eventually, and some sooner than others.
After a few months of branches that fell too easily in a heavy rain, J thought it a good idea to have someone come and look at the trees on our new property. He was concerned about one of the laurel oaks, which he suspected might be dying. We were novices to this idea of land and home ownership, and our neighbors' questions and comments about the upkeep of our property made us insecure. J noted that the oak tree in question grew close to the longleaf pine and he did not want that tree to become collateral damage.
Like cypress trees, longleaf pines had once been abundant in Florida but were destroyed in the early part of the twentieth century. This was mainly due to the turpentine industry, which was big business back then, what some might call the stuff of dreams. Turpentine was an essential ingredient in sealants that protected ships from the damaging effects of salt water, but was also used to make soap, and for lighting fluid and medicinal purposes. It was and still is used today in solvents, varnishes, and cleaners; cosmetics, plastics, and pesticides.
To make turpentine, tree trunks of longleaf and slash pines were hacked, their barks stripped to tap sap that hardened into resin and was distilled. Once the trees tapped out, they were cut down for lumber. This made the business model unsustainable, though some argue it needn't have been so. If the industry had rotated plots of forest, allowing the trees to recover rather than removing the resin time and again and weakening the pines' immunity, there might be more virgin longleafs standing today.
In addition to the one on our property, J and I encountered longleaf pines when we went for walks in the local nature preserve. Their cleansing scent wafted in a dizzying cloud around us; the hiking trails were cushioned with their needles and riddled with cones The pines' bark looked like Death Valley's scorched earth or the cracked glaze of an earthenware pot. I agreed to have the trees inspected if it meant ensuring the longleaf's safety.
J hired a small company whose owner assessed all of the trees on our property. A week later, he and another man donned helmets and harnesses, fastened ropes to carabiners along their belted waists, and got to work. One man spotted from below while the other scaled the trees like a black bear. Just watching them caused me vertigo and I went inside to wait out their investigation.
Hours later, the men knocked on the front door. They'd reached their verdict. All the trees on our property required trimming, but none were of major concern. Yet. The laurel oak J had worried over had a lot of life left, and posed no threat to the longleaf pine.
Later that evening, while I was out walking the dog, a neighbor stopped to chat. He'd noticed the tree company's truck parked on the street and wondered if we'd decided to cut down our trees.
No, I said. Just a pruning.
My neighbor shook his head, echoing the words of the arborist I'd met a year earlier.
It's only a matter of time.
In Ovid's version of the myth, Apollo cautions the young Cyparissus to moderate his emotions where the stag is concerned. The god is alarmed by what he perceives to be an excessive response to the death of what was, after all, just an animal. But Cyparissus doesn't share the god's dismissal of the nonhuman. He is so inconsolable he begs Apollo to transform him so that he may live in a state of eternal grief.
It's hard to imagine desiring grief as a perpetual condition, though often when I considered all that was being lost in the world, my grief was boundless and required no godlike intervention.
One afternoon, months after our trees had been trimmed, I heard the drone of chainsaws. The sound was so close I panicked. Had some vigilante neighbor taken our tree situation into their own hands?
Through my front window I saw the noise was coming from across the street where my neighbor had hired a crew to cut down the longleaf pines in his yard. I watched as one of the trees trembled, listed, paused, and fell, its trunk draped across the road, blocking oncoming traffic, its crown landing in our front yard where it just missed hitting the oak J had wrung his hands over.
Later, I came upon the neighbor who'd had his trees removed. Had they been ill? I asked him.
No, he said. Not ill. Just messy.
The pines were constantly cluttering his lawn with their needles and cones. He couldn't stand it, it was such a pain in the ass having to clean it up all the time. My neighbor looked visibly put out, as if the trees had grown there to provoke him.
After the removal of the pines, I saw this neighbor more frequently. Usually he'd be crouched over a spot on his St. Augustine lawn, that prickly high-pile carpet of yard ubiquitous in Florida, or he'd be fiddling with the sprinkler heads needed to keep it up. St. Augustine grass is antisocial, unpleasant for bare feet and playing children and picnickers. But it is emerald green, giving a well-tended lawn the look of an exclusive golf course if you were willing to spend the money on it. No longer in the shade, herbicides, fertilizers, and sprinkler systems would need to be regularly employed in order to prevent my neighbor's lawn from browning in the sun. Though he grimaced and complained, he worked exhaustively to keep up its appearance.
I cannot know with certainty why people sent me Florida Man headlines. By my reckoning the senders were living on fault lines readying for earthquakes or in the shadow of active volcanoes or beneath the jaundiced clouds of forest fires. Some of them owned homes in areas that had experienced more flooding than I had living in Florida, and were dealing with their own absurd cast of characters. We are all at the mercy of natural and human disasters of our own making. None of us is beyond reproach.
But transformation can be threatening to those unwilling to embrace it. My choice to move to Florida and try something new may have been perceived by some as an act of disloyalty, a rebellion even. Perhaps they worried I would become my own sort of Florida Woman, and in this they may have been onto something. The more they sent texts, the more I doubled down on my commitment to stay.
On the afternoon my neighbor had his longleaf pines cut down, a member of the crew knocked on my front door.
I was wondering if you'd like us to do some work on your yard, he said, handing me his card. Covered in sawdust and sap, the rectangle of paper clung to my finger and thumb.
We just had our trees trimmed, I said.
Really? He arched a brow and pointed at the maple tree. What about that one there?
The tree was leafless, its bark peeling back and falling off in strips like old, torn wallpaper. It was clearly dying, if not dead already.
No thanks, I said. We're keeping that one for the birds.
The aspect I found most compelling about the Senator is that it lived as long as it did. It burst from the earth long before the first European explorers landed on Florida's east coast. But as soon as they did, old growth forests were imperiled. Once dominating the region, today only half a percent of total existing forest in the Southeast is old growth. So why was that 3,500-year-old cypress spared?
It turns out I'd overlooked the obvious. Put another way: behind every Florida Woman there is a Florida Man.
The Senator was named after the man who owned and eventually donated the property on which it lived. Like the tree, this man was by all accounts beloved. An upstanding citizen, he was committed to his community, serving as a state senator in the 1920s, and instrumental in building the First Baptist Church of Orlando. He held memberships in the Masons, Rotary, Knights of Columbus, and Elks clubs, and was praised for his business and financial acumen, contributing to the state's growth and providing jobs by establishing banks, a lumber company, and a citrus crate manufacturing company. He also owned several turpentine camps, including one in the area where the 3,500-year-old cypress tree lived. Between the cypresses he used for lumber and the pines for turpentine, he was arguably responsible for the destruction of thousands of old-growth trees.
In the Seminole language, cypress trees are called hatch-in-hee-haw, roughly translated as everlasting. Cypresses produce oils that make them resistant to bug infestation, disease, and dramatic shifts in climate, and when the conditions are right they live very long lives. These qualities are also what, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, made their wood so valuable. But wood is only as good as the tree it comes from. A tree with a hollow trunk provides a hiding space for animals and junkies, but from a commercial perspective it's useless.
By the time Florida Man was introduced to the Senator, the bald cypress was hollowed out. If he saw dollar signs, Florida Man may only have seen them in terms of costs—how much money he'd spend on time, labor, and machinery to cut down a tree nearly eleven stories high and, from his perspective, useless. Though I imagine if he'd chosen to cut the ancient cypress down no one would've called him a horror of a human or a killer of dreams.
Florida Man destroys old growth forest, strikes it rich.
I never received a link to that story, but it's one that most definitely would've captured my attention.
Like the rest of the world, I was initially appalled by the Florida Woman tale. What sort of person, I wondered, sets fire to a 3,500-year-old tree?
The answer came as no surprise. Reckless, desperate, troubled, Florida Woman had committed countless other misdeeds. There were other charges on her record, most of them the result of an addiction that demanded fueling. I imagine she was at times itinerant, homeless. Why else would she go through the trouble and risk visiting the tree would've required when she could've easily gotten high in the privacy of her own home? That she was someone who suffered emotionally, mentally, physically went without saying. All humans do, though arguably she suffered to a greater degree, and still more so after destroying a 3,500-year-old tree, one that provided privacy for her to pursue her addiction and its offering of sweet annihilation.
But Florida Woman was a person too, one who, when questioned by the police, said she went to the tree because she enjoyed the breeze the cypress captured in its massive hollow trunk.
When I read this detail some hard stone of contempt in me began to crumble. In my mind I saw her sitting cross-legged on the soft damp earth inside that ancient tree, her pale face tilted upward and illuminated by a trickle of moonlight, her eyes closed so she could better register the touch of wind on her skin, capturing—just as I would have done had I been in her position—a brief, beautiful moment that signaled aliveness in an existence too often bereft of it.
Lenore Myka’s award-winning work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Scholar, Southward, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, Quartz, New England Review, Five Points, and others. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, she is at work on a memoir about her adopted home, Florida. www.lenoremyka.com.
Photo by Antoine PERIER