There was a large wooden clapboard building in the middle of that semi-rural Florida neighborhood. A single floored structure that stretched clear to the end of the property line where the trees and tropical bushes clustered at the edges of a creek. The place had few windows and those that it had were shuttered. The streets were of tightly packed sand lined with magnolias and loblolly pine and kumquat bushes, with an occasional avocado or grapefruit tree. The people who lived there were mostly black and working class with a scattering of young white refugees from the mainstream who settled there for the low rents and a laid back lifestyle where you didn't even have to lock your doors.

Most days the hall appeared empty, even abandoned, but on sundays, while we sat up high on our upstairs balcony, stoned on either Jamaican or Columbian pot, a sound of drumming came out of that place, and a sound of chanting voices. The drums drifted over the tops of the trees and the roofs of houses all around and transported the listener to another place, not here.

We lived one block over from that mysterious building which was a negro church and meeting hall that had been a refuge away from the oppressors for as long back as anyone remembered. We lived in a two storied house populated by ex-college students and stoners, rented by a guy called Twiggy, who wore the eternal smile and blond afro of a talented stoner musician who played rag time jazz piano at pizza parlors and dealt marijuana on the side. His dream was to take a catamaran sailboat up and down the Gulf coastline looking for washed up kilos thrown over the sides of incoming yachts during Coast Card busts. I worked down at the end of the alley in a little corner natural foods restaurant at the shopping center, run by a raw foods devotee who displayed an enormous smiling picture of Meher Babba on the wall over the counter. I served up sandwiches and roasted veggies and cheese melts and an occasional plate of whole wheat spaghetti.

When I said goodbye to my father in Cleveland it was still winter time in Cleveland, and everything was grey and dusky with the dirt of that polluted city. I posed for a picture against the trunk of a metallic green Cadillac with a white roof, wearing my three-quarters length leather coat and long fine wavy hair and wire rimmed glasses. My best friend, Bill Halas had gone off to Vermont and I was ready once again to seek an alternative to that industrial wasteland of the middle class which was my birth city. The Cadillac was a drive-away car and it would take me and a few other passengers who shared the gas on a blazing non-stop journey through the Smokey Mountains and south.

When we arrived in St. Petersburg it was the coldest day on record at 50 degrees with the sky blue and the trees still full of leaves. This was a city where the paper was given away free on any day that the sun didn't shine. In the house where I briefly stayed upon arrival there was always a bushel of avocados in the kitchen, picked from an abandoned orchard nearby. I got into scooping out and eating avocados with a teaspoon of honey in the middle for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The guy who rented the house made very noisy love with his girlfriend in the bedroom next to mine, and a mysterious set of events would later lead up to my meeting him several years later hiking alone on a high alpine trail on the side of a mountain in the Colorado Rockies.

My friend John and I got a house right on the beach of the Gulf of Mexico, in a sandbar community called Treasure Island, populated mostly with retirees and vacationers and a small community of fishermen and boat builders. John had dreams about building boats. he got me my first job scraping barnacles from the bottom of dredging barges in a boat yard, supervised by a guy actually called 'the Colonel' who dressed in white suits and sat at the side of the barge watching his temporary crews of hippies and drunkards. He'd lured John with promises of giving him an old boat that my friend could work on to make seaworthy. Later we learned that the boat was too infected with rot to ever sail again, but in the process of its assessment we met a guy who hired John to help with the carpentry on another, more serious boat project. A local wealthy optometrist had hired a crew to build him a large ocean worthy yacht with medical facilities that he planned to sail down to South America to give free eye examinations and use as a tax write-off.

Having no interest in carpentry I got a job working for the City of St. Petersburgh Parks Department as a grounds keeper for the many parks and canals that crisscrossed the city. I would ride around in the back of a truck all day with a crew that was mostly young black men and we would mow grass and cut bamboo and tear out the weeds on median strips. The days were filled with hard work and hilarity with jokes and stories and mock arguments that would extend the lunch breaks and long amazing arguments over who would buy the 'twinkies' on any particular day. Once and a while we would set up nets and corral the flocks of geese that would settle in the climate and the public lakes and ponds to multiply and become a nuisance. Our crew boss, who was also a minister, would then drive the captured geese around the neighborhoods to deliver to his parishioners. When I later had to quit he stiffed me on a days worth of wages.

We shared a rented bungalow right on the beach, the remains of a larger compound that had been washed away by a recent hurricane. There were three units in the remaining complex. One became a little hippie household, with John and I sharing one side, John in the downstairs bedroom and me in the loft. The other half was occupied by a young couple, he a carpenter and she a salesgirl. They had a bedroom that was entirely filled by an enormous waterbed with windows looking out at the surf. Behind the house was a bigger unit that was up on concrete pillars with a ramp to the front door instead of stairs. The president of a large and notorious motorcycle gang lived in that one. John and I watched his house when he and the gang went on 'runs', a service for which he became not only grateful but a sort of protector. Cops circled the two houses constantly because 'Pappy' and his gang were known to be involved in drug dealing and long haired young people were not to be rusted in the middle of this very conservative Florida community where 'long hairs' weren't even allowed in the tourist bars.

Pappy would regularly take his snake, a young boa constrictor that was kept in an aquarium in his living room on an altar with the gang's 'colors' on walks along the beach where he would stop to have seemingly friendly conversations with the cops. The snake winding about his waist and neck. I now suspect these conversations had to do with some sort of collaboration, for as often as drugs flowed regularly through the place and as often as we were watched there was never any serious friction with the authorities. The most beautiful girls on the beach would come to Pappy's door and hang out in the house, possibly lured by copious supplies of cocaine. When John and I found our record collection missing one day and the cops came by just to exhibit their disdain for our lifestyle, Pappy got his lieutenant, a huge Cossack with a hair lock, who was said to be an 'ex-Hell's Angel' to go out and find the thieves and bring most of the collection back. Likely it was someone in the gang who took them in the first place, but it was a nice gesture anyway. The rest of the gang members would occasionally show up for a party or tribal drinking bout. Behind the scary tribal clothing and ritual they were mostly a bunch of rather shy young men and their girlfriends that you wanted at all costs to avoid when they were on a collective drunk.

Mostly, after work, we sat out on our deck under a billowing orange parachute in the more or less constant breeze from the Gulf, drinking cheap ABC wine from the state liquor store or extremely beer from the local convenience store and philosophize about life and the future and the next passing of the waves.

Social life gravitated around the campus of Eckhard College, formerly Florida Presbyterian, where my friend John had attended before his boat building days. The scene we visited on campus revolved almost entirely around marijuana and rock and roll. One could tell from which nation the drugs on any given week came from by the behavior of the students we hung with. When it was from Jamaica there was dancing and conversation and hanging around with girls. When it was Columbian everyone was prone against walls, listening intently to their stereos and dwelling almost entirely in their heads.

There were beautiful girls everywhere. I hitch hiked with them all around the town, or went swimming with them in the ocean or in the waters that filled the inland quarries. I had crushes and fantasies but never really acted upon them, being altogether too shy and too serious and too sexually intimidated. I had lots of pretty girls as friends but carried on a long distance mostly fantasy relationship with an old acquaintance back in Cleveland, writing and sending almost daily poems and letters for which I never received a single reply.

I had an old friend from college whose father owned a motel on the beach. My friend played the saxophone and fancied himself a good enough musician to bring me along to a local black jazz hangout where he embarrassed me by 'jamming' with a band that was made up of old members of the Pharoah Sanders group. The musicians were very nice to us, even gracious, a little bit taken aback perhaps by my friend's earnest chutzpa as by our attendance and even awestruck respect while crossing racial lines in this still mostly segregated south.

John and I made an occasional trek down south and across the Everglades on 'Alligator Alley' to Miami where John's girlfriend Paula's parents lived on a sailboat at a Coconut Grove Marina. From there we sailed into the Biscayne Bay to contemplate the wide ocean and eat freshly speared crabmeat. We got a short initiation to the mysteries of the sea. On the way back we got a more unpleasant initiation to the right wing Cuban community in Miami when it took us nearly two days to hitch rides out of the city.

Later I accompanied one of the boat building crew, an ex-priest who lived on a trimaran (a three hulled sailboat) on a sailboat journey from one end of Tampa Bay to the other. He was grateful for the company and I as grateful for the voyage. I later helped him lay the foundations for a small cottage on a tiny piece of property near our house. In retrospect I suspect that he was gay and he was happy to have a young companion, if only for a short while. I remember sailing under the spectacular Tampa Bay Bridge that rose at such a steep angle and crossed such an enormous body of water.

On the deck back on our own beach I read through a large format printed collection of selections from the Alternative Press of the day, organized in terms of issues, like Civil Rights, War Protest, Imperialism, Community Organizing, the Environment. The environmental stuff was particularly disturbing, although at that time the worst case scenarios had to do with the slow rain of DDT from crop dusting of the past couple of decades and not with anything as massive as global warming. I read essays in another collection I had, called 'By Any Means Necessary' that surveyed the artistic and imaginative forms of protest and organizing that had arisen out of the anti-war, anti-capitalism movements in both Europe and the United States through the sixties. I read publications about alternative communities all over the United States. It was a period of contemplation in this bucolic landscape, after the earnest and focused and sometimes violent explosions of the late sixties. Florida was a transitional landscape, where I would decide my next move and consider the big picture going forward in the world.

It ended around the time when my father died of lung cancer and my two oldest friends came down to Florida to visit, driving an ancient near to death Volkswagen, which we then drove north overnight through the foggy hills and valleys across the Tennessee and the ghostly landscapes of southern Ohio. The engine roared in the night and early dawn like a light aircraft roaring through clouds, and we drove straight through until arriving in the industrial maze that was the home which kept calling us to return.

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The bread this week was more successful in terms of texture, but I added too much salt, which kind of collected around the raisins and probably killed off enough of the yeast that the loaves didn't rise in the pans as much as they could have.

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You can't stop the signal.

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