Time Zone: Eastern
Today's Weather: in the 80ºs, sunny
Length of Trip: 4 days/3 nights
Next stop: Tampa, FL
At the conclusion of the tour of this “Oldest House” in the oldest town in the United States of America, when the guide asked if we had any further questions, the only query I could think of was, “How many cats might you estimate have peed on the house during the 300-plus years it’s been standing here?”
Personally I couldn’t even hazard a guess. Six hundred sounded reasonable until I considered that that was only two cats peeing on the house per year. Then again, were there even cats present to mark their territory during the first hundred or so years of the house’s life? A tour guide at a historic house might be just the person to ask such a question, but I felt too ridiculous saying something like, “Can you tell me what type of domestic cats might have been around when this house was first built?” It would have been hard to admit what had prompted the question. I would have had to pretend I was interested in the relative value of the rat racks.
For instance, looking at the maps from the 1600s and 1700s, we found ourselves puzzling at the cartoonish winged whales and snake-like fish monsters the cartographers had so imaginatively included in what were otherwise the most official and scientific maps of the area at that time. Then we walked out of the museum and opened up the glossy pamphlet we’d been given at the Visitor’s Center to use our own illustrated map of St. Augustine, so accurately drawn beneath a cartoonishly smiling sun, the buildings dwarfed by gigantic frolicking dolphins out in the curlicue waves of the bay. Plus c’est la meme chose, indeed.
We’d taken an extra night on our drive from New York to Tampa specifically so that we could stop in one old place and one new place. Personally speaking, St. Augustine is actually the “new place” seeing as it’s a town both Jonathan and I have never visited. The “old place,” where we’d stopped the night before, is only a little chronologically younger than St. Augustine, but to both Jonathan and I that city is an old friend named Charleston, SC. For Charleston we’d had ambitious intentions: to drive by every last one of our favorite buildings, to have dinner in at least three different restaurants, and to attend Easter Sunday service in a handful of the city’s most beautiful churches. How we were going to fit this into a stop not longer than 20 hours was not something either of us felt was a concern.
The benefit of Charleston being something of a bust is that we got on the road for St. Augustine early and therefore spent a glorious 21 hours exploring in the fashion "life on the road" eternally promises and only sometimes delivers. We walked through the touristy, non-corporate shops, gorged ourselves on tapas and sangria, fawned over a Venetian-inspired Presbyterian Church, and lingered in an empty piano bar, chatting with the bartender about the local music scene.
It was our third hour spent in ocean-front buildings older than the country in which they stand. I was getting used to the smell.
Wandering among the cannon and inspecting all the crumbling things, I was struck by one small exhibit expressing the dire importance of preserving the graffiti left on the walls of the fort by Colonial and American soldiers. This topic churned up similar thoughts as what had passed through my head at the Oldest House when I had learned that, upon becoming a National Historic Monument, a tower added during the 1800s had been demolished in order to restore the house to what was termed “a more historically accurate condition.”
In the late Victorian photos I could see this tower, a whimsical column of stone reminiscent of fairytales. It was unmistakably of an era not my own as much or even more than anything else still left standing around the house. I found myself deeply regretting its loss and a little angry with the historical preservationists of the late Victorian time. In attempting to restore the past they’d managed to rob the future.
I’ve always thought that people who carve their names into things are descending into a most primitive form of narcissism, the human equivalent of marking your territory with bodily fluids. And so I stood looking at the sallyport of the Castillo, now under plexiglass after 150 years of service, and I couldn’t help feeling that LW, who ever he was, didn’t deserve all the effort that was going into the preservation of his initials carved on the historic, decaying wooden door.
It made me both angry and sad, because even though LW had won the graffiti lottery and managed to put his mark on something that was carried far beyond the term of his natural life, he still had failed to leave any personal touch with his carvings. Congratulations, you got your initials into the future. But not your thoughts or feelings, not your spirit, not even your name. If your statement was meant to be “I was here,” I’m not quite certain but I think you failed.
And meanwhile, down the street in a house equally as old, the cats and other creatures who’ve marked it go uncounted, their existence even more erased than the fairytale tower that was torn down. At least we know that tower and LW were, however briefly, present. All that remains of the cats is a smell that might not even be cats after all.
Miles Driven with RV: 5603.3 miles
Days Lived in RV: 77 days
Camps Overnighted in RV: 13 RV parks, 1 Walmart, 1 Casino Parking Lot
States Camped in RV: 10 (TX, AL, TN, IN, KY, IL, NC, WV, MD, SC, FL)