To an overseas guest, a drive through tree covered roads with awe inspiring views is a delight at any time of the year, in Autumn with spectacular leaf colours and succulent maple syrup, Winter deep in snow, white as far as the eye can see, Spring with its array of buds and blooms that takes your breath away. Then long languid days of summer sunshine just made for adventure and exploration. But to this traveller it was an explosion to the senses of sights, sounds and new experiences.

If you've never been to America, or indeed to this part of such a wide and varied country, any trip would not be complete without a visit here, even if only for one day. Be sure to see the famous covered bridges, like the one at Franconia Notch and pause to listen to the Pemigewasset dashing down between the rocks, maybe even stop for a bite to eat at the general store in the little town of Center Sandwich in New Hampshire.

The land is rocky and hilly. One shopping area is built around a large granite ledge which must have seemed too beautiful to blast away. Marblehead got its name from a case of mistaken identity. The early settlers thought the many granite ledges were marble.

A day trip to Marblehead in early spring might mean winter coats and hats like it did for us this March. The sun was brilliant, but the wind was brisk. Summer in Marblehead is hot, but a spring visit also meant easy driving and parking on the narrow streets in the historic area close to the sea. And the “townies” had plenty of time to chat with us.

While he made our lunch sandwiches, Paul, the chef/proprietor of Foodie's Feast, told us how he'd bought the place and moved here from the city 6 years ago. Foodie's is on Washington Street in the historic “old town”, nestled in among boutiques and shops. My lunch was one of the freshest and tastiest that I've ever had in a café, especially the lobster bisque. Most likely the lobster came off the boat of a local lobsterman.

We shared lobster bisque reviews with Betsy, the volunteer at the Marblehead Arts Association during our visit to look over the entries in the 2nd Annual Sculpture and Photography Contest. Marblehead residents and visitors love the arts, and the Arts Association is housed in the King Hooper Mansion, one of nearly 300 houses which have survived from the Colonial, pre-Revolutionary War period. Betsy said her favorite bisque came from The Landing, but when we told her about Foodie's she called over to order some delivered so she could compare.

Marblehead fishermen and lobstermen still make a living from their catches in the Atlantic, but it's not the wildly prosperous industry it was before the Revolutionary War when men became rich catching and exporting dried cod. In 1846, a storm sank half the fishing fleet and 65 men and boys were drowned. The fishing industry began to decline as people lost their heart for the sea and turned to shoemaking.

Walking along Front Street with the ocean nearly always in view, I could smell the sea salt on the wind. There were a few fishing boats in the harbor. But the pleasure yachts were dry docked and wrapped in white waiting for their summer season. This is what the sea means to Marblehead now. In the late 1800's two fires destroyed the shoemaking industry. The destiny of the town would again be linked to the ocean as men of wealth began to bring their yachts to the wonderful harbor.

In the summer, Marblehead Harbor is dotted with yachts. Sailing enthusiasts will find boat makers and sellers, six yacht clubs, and numerous races including the yearly race to Nova Scotia. Marblehead is often called the “yachting capital of America”, a playground of blue sea.

The nature of the appeal from the sea may have changed from 1700 to now, but appeal she certainly has. The sea has fed the folks of Marblehead, lined their pockets, satisfied their love of sailing, and enticed those of us who love the sea to come spend a few hours under her spell in this delightful historic ocean town.

Tallahassee and Live Oke and Lake City and I-10 turns right onto I-75 and the air, still thick and heavy, begins to smell of the sea but you cannot yet see the shore. You taste the hot and the stiff and the wet of the sand and the rot and the green of the kelp and you think over that rise of dunes, I'll see waves. But you don't. Not Yet. Already you remember when you swam in the sea and all in your ears and eyes and nose and mouth was the taste and feel of the rough sand and hot shells and the Ocean. And you had no skin between that silk and the raw naked bones of yourself.

This is the only taste known to my soul. This is no homecoming for me. There is never the separation from this that could contrast my return. This is my cradle. If to make a man God molded in his hand the clay of the earth than I am fashioned from the sand and the mud and the swamp water runs silent in my veins…my soul is the copper colored tinder of foxfire that children chase in the dark wet woods.

Forget the glossy brochures of pastel sand and sky and towering buildings for all this, Florida is a swamp, or if it is gentler to you, a bayou. Surely the refined defined their words “muck” and “back water” from this land. But I know, as children know by instinct, that it is a wonderful thing to have the ground yield beneath your feet and squish between you toes as you move, to be washed by the fat quite warm rain. And I can lay my hearts envy at the feet of the gray stone and the maple leaf but I cannot separate my self from this…

Let me tell you of the blunt crushing tooth of the alligator or the catfish slick and wriggling with barbs like spears set in there heavy jaws or of the roaring restless night and the great giant bird that raises his armed and armored head not so much to sing as to scream into that black air. Let me tell you there is logic in this economy of motion to coil oneself in the bright hot glare of the sun by day to be loosed like a spring in the violence of the night. To be eager forgiving slick and strong and smart, this is the very bones of me. The sound of this, the smell of it, the taste and the feel made me fearless.

When I tell people I was born and raised in Miami they treat it as a kind of illegitimacy. As if those glass and steal structures were not part of the earth itself but stolen from another planet. I say, Miami is Venice, a man made thing built atop a maze of waterways to channel the everglades back into the sea. People learned long ago that water is unstoppable. And also, all creatures of water. These things, water and those alive in it, pulse below every street, every inch of floating concrete, like blood through veins. There is something, undefeatable, untamable and eternally organic about this.

But it's the same…no matter where the story is set, there is disbelief when I tell them that the Appalachians are there own savage beauty. And there was a moment, one afternoon, when the light was the color of apricots, where each tree around me was perfectly framed by the twilight as if those trees were each, one at a time, stepping forward out of a crowd to be introduced. I was smelling the cold coming, still a long way off, but the scent was there, like the air had recently been scrubbed clean and bare by lightning. Forever after, in my memory, Moorseburg, Tennessee is crimson and orange and marigold colored mountains in the distance like mounds of oil paints on a painters pallet and a low hanging sky the solid color of a bright new dime. I lived on a houseboat there, suspended above that tea colored water and below that shiny sky.

Or I often say that New England is never so much itself as in the fall.

The white bark birch and black maple. Gray granite stone and gray granite sky.

Fat squat Adirondacks, lily of the valley and brownstone. The grand cemeteries, the cold cold marble stones in rows and rows like ripples in a slow little stream. The devotion of words carved on those stone. How reverently we hold the names in our mouths, how sacred the titles Father Mother Son. The statues marking at one time, there in New England, every person was a triumph or tragedy. Grand giant gentle angels and saints that towered over me, frozen in the sun. Huge vaults with stained glass inside to throw fractured colors across the smooth sealed lids behind the doors of iron bars. One stone twice my length and hight, a marker for a husband and wife and six children, all lived and died, laid low here, together. A tiny marble child looking up from an open book in her lap, her little finger pining her place, a word onto the page. Only a pause, it suggests, but the dates below span only six years. One person living today to one long dead is hard but when I looked across the whole span of it, where I couldn't even see the roads outside anymore all I could think is, Look! Look, how many! All of the many, many dead....

Washington and California, Northern and Southern, Vancouver, B.C…in my head live a thousand beautiful moments and if you ask me what of this place or that, you might be tugging the attached string and a story will unwind like a spool of thread thrown across the floor…

In every one there is a rent in the thread, a heartbreak,

and there is mending too, stitches of glorious gifts laid in my hands.

I can tell you those stories, if you like. If you like.

I could show you too, someday.

We'll get there, should you want to go.

But tell me - Why Florida?