When you travel to a tourist destination, you see what you pay for, and what those who are selling rest wish you to see: in the case of Gulf coast Florida, there are miles of sand, comfortable and maintenance-free accommodations, food at the end of a short walk and at the sliding edge of your credit card, and night clubs or golf courses or day spas or ships or shops… That's why they are here, so you can be here, too. It is a perfectly Disney establishment, where the name is here employed as an adjective. The world is peaceful, there are no cares, and all that is asked of you (for these few days) is that you… descontrair (couldn't find a better word than the Portuguese, meaning to "un-contract").

So when you choose an activity, it generally keeps you on that combed beach, facing that stormless sea. And when you eat, it is served with a smile, and the plates are magically cleared away. When you sleep, your temporary home is secure, no payments left to be made, and the morning arrives on yours, and not sidereal time.

This trip, I badly needed just this matronly care, and for several days we have walked within the gentle confines of the Tourist Zone (save for the day I lost to a work-emergency, called in from Reality on the hotline). But today, having rested just enough, and ready to wander a little more afield, we jumbled the five of us into a van and traveled north of Tampa, to a State Park on isolated Caledesi Island, and to Tarpon Springs, a tourist destination several miles further north.

To get there, we counted not on the aid of maps, but a Garmin GPS, which somehow was cosmically determined to show us places we hadn't really intended to see. If you are a tourist, you generally make a beeline from Comfortable Lodging to Interesting Place with as few turns and as little effort as possible — unwilling to invite discomfort into the small breathing space you have purchased for yourselves. If you know anything about bees, however, you know that their lines are rarely straight, and a bee-line is pretty much what we accomplished. I mistakenly missed a freeway turn and exited into north-end St. Petersburg, which was decidedly working class, and decidedly non-white.

White here does not describe a pigmentation of the skin, but generations of opportunity (or lack thereof) provided to an entire culture, combined with the sometimes subliminal, often overt oppression of a very large group of people. I saw "non-white" walking down the road. I saw lack of dollars add up to lack of trees and lack of paint or shingles. I saw lack of purchasing power add up to lack of public services, well-groomed avenues or well-paved roadways. I saw factories abutting low-rent housing, while highways and their traffic shouldered the backyard fences. With the same prickling discomfort in which I walked the favelas of Porto Alegre or Rio, or the Guaraní reserves in the south of Brazil, I noticed that the conceptual "non-white" was pretty closely aligned (after all) to the pigmentation of a person's skin, and felt myself tourist in a land where I did not speak the language, nor carry any currency that would let me in.

I remember some years back, I had taken the Paris Metro to some adventurous stop, wanting to feel the texture or color of some non-touristic arrondissement… where people really lived. Small pack over my shoulder, rude map in hand, I sailed down rail lines I imagined were laid on possibility, to find a Real Paris. I mean, the Musée du Rodin is a real Paris, as is the cathedral on La Cité with its incredible stained-glass-rose upper chamber. George & Company is (or was) real Paris, even if run by a crusty old ex-pat. Notre Dame and the Seine and the parks and the little bakeries and incredible breads on every corner were real as real can be. Even the disintegrating relationship with my partner at that time… peut-être un peu trop vrai. My guessing at poor French was real and remains so.

But there at the end of the Metro line was someone else's real Paris, not a postcard city, and that is what I wanted to see. Postcards… Anyone can buy a postcard, but there is only one picture on it (always sunny, always with color so saturated that even Heaven could not be so lush), and room on the back for just enough words to say nothing, no matter how you cramp your printing.

I stepped off the train. I walked up the stair. I stepped onto the walk. I breathed the air: dust and diesel. I looked around: rust and refuse. I few men stood at the corner looking at me. What am I doing here? I thought. There was a rundown newsstand behind me. It wasn't that the vendor watched me, too, that unnerved me: but how he looked at me. I stepped over, and with ragged French asked if there was a good place for a cup of coffee. Are you lost? No, I was just looking around. He waved his hand at me, waved back to the subway entrance. I don't think you should be here…

I don't think you should be here. I don't think you are safe here. You do not belong here. What are you doing here? So I walked back to the stairway, down to the ticket-window, over to the platform, conscious all the while of the fixed eyes of residents, eyes that (if non-threatening) wondered why in the world I would have visited their home.

Today we took the ferry over to Caledesi Island. It is a barrier island, formed and held in place by bands of mangrove trees, their fingered roots seeming to fix their nails into the sea itself. While my traveling companions took to the beach… I like the beach, but I wanted a little walk, I wanted to fill my eyes. I turned my back on this beautiful sand and surf, on the warm Gulf waters, and headed down the park's nature trail.

After walking a hundred yards, the nature I had imagined in my camera lens resolved instead into carnage. I was walking through a forest of coal and ash, where the understory had been completely cleared by fire, the palm-tops small stubs with no green fingers, and the smell of pine and bayberry replaced by cinders. What am I doing here? I figured, sooner or later, I would walk out of the burn into something that resembled a semi-tropical island. Nothing moved. No birds around, and only a few geckos had made their way back to the zone, probably wondering what they were doing there as well, or how to retrace their flitting steps.

Later, a trail sign explained that lightning would often take these dry forests (in an uncontrolled way); so the park service tries to recreate these natural burns in a manner less disruptive of its goals and its visitors. The palms and live oaks and other species on the island are highly resistant both to fire and flood, in fact, and if the burn did not occur every two or three years, according to a "natural"cycle, it was more than likely that non-native hardwoods and other plants would infiltrate, invade, and change the island ecosystem.

There was green further on. But how open would my eyes have been, had I only seen the expected? Was the green and noise and scents of the verdant land beyond sharper for the black behind me? Of course it was. I walked to the beach. I heard a dozen woodpeckers in a single grove of trees. A mosquito bit me in the calf before I discovered it and brushed it off. Two osprey left a nest together and circled the channel between bands of mangrove. A tree trunk hummed as I passed it, alive with bees. Poison ivy twined itself upward toward the light, and small and larger flowers set themselves off against the sand and razor-lines of palm. The smell of heat and dry and pine, the same as Pine County, Wisconsin in my youth, the same as places in Brazil. The sound of the sea beyond the low-lying dunes. The snuffling in the underbrush, an armadillo sniffs me out and, unimpressed, goes back to rooting out his food.

I walked alone through all of this, then alone made my way back toward the island visitors, who had gathered mostly together at the park's access to the beach. There were retirees shelling along the strand, families with more money or less, less weight or more, more reserve or less restraint, renting shade or soaking up the sun. There were pelicans flying in tight formation, low over the waves. Everyone was white. All shared a culture of contentment, at least for the day.

On the drive back home, our GPS took us even further astray, sort of lost us, in a dead-end street between highways, behind the factory, a few blocks from the school, where the neighborhood went nowhere. A big green van with Minnesota plates looked (and was) out of place, on its beeline that jiggled in a dizzying dance from one resort to another. I wanted to ask (but how do you ask) What is your life like? Instead, like a good tourist, in transit, I filled my eyes with whatever came before me, felt the real Paris swim up from the depths of memory, a gently frightening creature from the deeper places in the sea, and give me a little shake, then sink back out of sight…

A day full of wonder at what the senses bring to light.