Maybe I Collect States

Somehow I managed to put off reading The Orchid Thief to the last handful of states left on the Slackers’ list. Intentionally too, because I thought this was yet another Southern novel about vaporous women. When I went to the library and picked up the remaining six or seven titles, I started with South Dakota, put it down, and skimmed the back cover for Susan Orlean’s book. Wow! It’s “true crime.” I finished it in less than two days.

Orlean comes to Florida to do a follow-up story on three men arrested for stealing endangered, protected orchids from the swamps. The man behind this caper is John Larouche who believes that by having two Seminole Indians as partners in crime, he is covered from prosecution, or at least assured of being acquitted. While that incident is the “pseudobulb” germinating her book, Orlean devotes more of it to trying to understand the impulse to collect, the history of dubious land speculation and development, and the effect of a flat, inhospitable, vegetative landscape on the behavior of its indigenous and transplanted residents.

Much more than many of the Slackers’ state books, in the The Orchid Thief, Florida is a main character. Her description of the fear and fascination of black water sink holes with poisonous snakes, alligators and swarming insects is far removed from a visit to Busch Gardens. Her interpretation of the urges of rare plant collectors leads her to more universal insights into the conflicting human needs to do something to set oneself apart while still belonging to a community doing the same thing, even if it means not being a member in good standing. She cleverly weaves these two themes together: "I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone ... I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size."

The Orchard Thief reminded me of The Billionaire’s Vinegar and the history of Dupont’s creating Winterthur, and strangely enough, about the great Mormon migration. I recently read a short article on the Internet that reported that research scientists have discovered that compulsive collecting and hoarding is genetic. Whether spending thousands of dollars to discover and own a new variety of orchid or to bid on a rare bottle of wine, these collectors are purchasing status -- as the items themselves are destined to remain in atmospherically corrected homes and displayed or shared selectively, only by invitation. There is nothing public about their collections, other than the notoriety they garner from successfully beating other obsessive – compulsives in this game of acquisition.

Winterthur is a public garden. Dupont collected just as single-mindedly but to create something beyond his immediate personal space. He is cultivating landscape, but one that does not need to be tamed or risk reverting to the wild.

Maybe because vacationers from the North rarely venture into the still wild interior of Florida, it is difficult to think of it in terms beyond sandy beaches and groomed golf courses. Orlean compares its threatening rawness against the wide open spaces of the West, concluding Florida is just as much, if not more, omninous: "The pioneers out west were crossing wide plains and mountain ranges that were too open and endless for one set of eyes to take in ... The pioneer-adventurers in south Florida were traveling inward, into a place as dark and dense as steel wool, a place that already held an overabundance of living things ... To explore such a place you had to vanish into it ... it might be easier to endure loneliness than to endure the idea that you might disappear."

Orlean does all she can not to be tempted to become a collector herself. She describes orchids as beautiful deformities, often looking like scary people or threatening animals. But still she hunts for the elusive ghost orchid. She similarly describes Larouche as an attractive yet toothless, hyperactive, and undependable man, but nevertheless someone she needs to track and discover. The people in her book and the setting are more like Tim Burton's view of Florida than it is like Disneyland, images that are so burned in your mind, you don't need postcards.