I grew up in south Florida. It’s not quite like the postcard paradise of Hawaii, the cool, ashen slopes, or the sun-kissed California with the icy Pacific chill. It’s like a trip back in time – a hot, wet jungle where you swear you can feel the T-Rex breath creep in behind you. The brackish rivers teem with prehistoric oddities; skates, stingrays, and sharks. After a heavy storm, you can dig up fish bones like a barefoot paleontologist in the white sugarsand. A full loggerhead turtle was my greatest Jurassic find. Just as the summer sun sets at 8, the sky is painted black with a faultless wall of birds returning to their sandbar homes. Mosquitoes swarm. If you take a closer look, you can see them; man-sized and bloodthirsty, aloft in the billion-year-old air. We were born from the ocean. Florida rose up like a sleepy plesiosaur, breeching up after a short blip in geological time.