At my favorite flea market this past weekend I bought a painting of the ocean signed by Thelma V. Howell. I went online to see if I could find out anything about her and found an obituary that might have been hers, but no connection to artistry.
On the back of the canvas it said "Rt A1A, Ormond Beach, Florida, 1977." Adding this information to a search engine didn't help me find out anything else about Thelma, but it made me curious to see what the place looked like.
On Google Maps I found a video of someone driving down Rt A1A through Ormond Beach and thought I might see what Thelma's beach looked like now. Apparently the driver had put his or her video camera, recording, on the dashboard and let one long shot play out, then edited it to soothing music. Three small pictures that could have been selling something popped up on the bottom, but the whole thing was playing in so small a window (courtesy of youtube) that I basically ignored the pictures and just went along for the virtual video drive in the upper part of the frame.
I kept looking for an opening in the buildings to catch a glimpse of the ocean. Then the drive began to mesmerize me just like when I've been a tourist and driven down unknown roads just because I was there.
My virtual driver came to a stop at a traffic light behind a car. Another car pulled up on our left, then a motorcycle. We waited. The light changed, the music surged, the other cars took off and we fell behind. Was the driver trying to give me a better view, or to make me feel relaxed to better enjoy the drive? An ambulance appeared in the lane next to us now, and it seemed to wake me up and I wondered why I was still watching this, still driving down an unknown highway watching traffic, looking at buildings, and not seeing even a glimpse of ocean.
Five hundred fifty people had already taken this virtual drive before me. How many thousands of hours of footage are flooding the Internet? How many thousands of hours are being spent watching, for so little reason, whiling away hours looking for a glimpse of something that was there once and might still be there, somewhere, maybe around the next corner?
