More stuff

When I was about 10 or so, the family went on one of our last vacations, to visit friends of my parents who had recently moved to Florida. I had been there once before, but I was too young to remember, but there are a couple of scraps of memory from my last time there, even if it was some time ago.

I remember we drove to the highest point in the state ... I think it was around 300 feet above sea level, and being from the foothills of Western Pennsylvania, I wasn't all that impressed. Unfortunately, I was just too young to be impressed by flatness. I did have an awareness of the relativity of what amazes or excites us. I'm sure Floridians were really proud of their highest point, just like I was impressed by our highest ridge, even though I knew that somewhere out west, people, both local and visitors, were impressed by real peaks on real mountains.

My brother and his family went to Florida on vacation last year. He told me about it while I was visiting recently. He told me that Florida actually has a mountain now. Hmm, I thought, if Arizona can buy a bridge that's just for show, maybe the Floridians were onto a new tourist idea too. No, he told me, it wasn't a tourist attraction, it was a literal mountain of garbage: it was big and it was long and it stunk. Apparently garbage and heat and humidity are a poor combination for tourist attractions.

Stuff. Too much stuff. Too much packaging. Too many people somewhere there were never a lot of people. Stuff we use, stuff we can't save, stuff we don't want, stuff we can no longer use at all. And in the end, it becomes a mountain where there were never mountains before. I was a bit surprised, though, when my brother told me no one was capitalizing on it in any way. How un-American is that? The highest point in the state was an attraction when I was a kid. I wonder what it is now. Probably just another memory.