It's probably no more than five miles from our hotel to Lakeland Linder Regional Airport.  I've made the trip many times.  Mostly it passes by chain restaurants, a highway, curb and gutter, holding ponds catching the runoff of developments, and other indicia of suburbia spreading out from the central Florida city.  But one small stretch of the road is still two lane and passes through old Florida, the Florida of cypress swamps and Spanish moss overhanging the road and small single-story homes.  With our windows down, the evening air floods in and the sounds of the night press in and I can smell and feel it --- the Florida before Disney came, when, as I heard one woman say today, the Orlando airport was just a tiny building, when thousands of acres of orange orchards stretched through central Florida, before even the beaches were walled in with development.  And then the moment is gone and I'm back to today, back to modern Florida, the Florida of retirement communities, the Mouse, highway upon highway, vanishing farmland, and people not from around here who are now all around here.  Hey, and I'm not even from these parts!

Now hold on a minute.  This is not another depressing lament for lost communities, lost ways of life, the destruction of place, the homogenization of culture, and so on.  Just down the road from that bit of old Florida is the annual Sun "n Fun International Fly-In, a one-week gathering of the general aviation community with an incidental (and often spectacular) air show, a virtual Aviation Nation of over 100,000 people brought together because of their love of all things having to do with flying.  We've been coming here annually for nearly a decade.  And I don't even fly (my son does).  I look at a plane from the front and say things like "It looks like a dog with a pug nose and fangs;" he looks at the same plane and tells me make, model, and specs, why he likes it, what's unique about it, and so on.  And I listen, but I don't quite get it.  Some are better looking than others, I think, but they're all planes, right?

But not knowing much about planes does give me time to notice some other things.  First, people here are bound together, whatever their backgrounds, whatever their idiosyncracies, by a single, overriding passion: flying.  And when you have that one passion, the differences over lots of other things recede and don't at the end of the day seem to matter much.  Like I don't think anybody here much cares if I'm Democrat or Republican --- certainly not like they'd care if I mistreated a plane or violated some of the standards of civility and decorum by which pilots treat each other.  Second, when there is a strong, defining passion, things largely work ---- order is maintained, even enforced by the community; people are not only civil to each other but friendly; a basic kind of civil religion prevails, made up of a star spangled banner god bless america basic goodness of all kind of mentality; and people are engaged in conversation about preserving and making better what they have.  There is a string unity in the nation, a pragmatic optimism, a sense of responsibility to each other and to their country.  And seeing all this, you can't help but have hope.  You can't help but believe that people can rise above mere self-interest and act for the good of all.

Maybe there is a sense in which old Florida --- all those very local communities where people knew each other and on the whole took care of each other --- still exist.  Not necessarily in the rural crossroads, the two-lane blacktops shaded by towering trees and Spanish moss, but here, in the Aviation Nation.  If so, maybe I need to learn something about planes after all.

(If you want to read more about Sun 'N Fun, read my son's blog here.)