There are certainly more charismatic animals than the snail. But few have the sheer versatility to function with as much aplomb—if, indeed, a tiny mollusk clothed in calcium can be said to have such a quality. Perhaps it’s the shell that does it, allowing for at least an appearance of stoic composure.  This may be no different from  local TV news anchor shielding themselves inside a theatrical armor of suits, fancy dresses, and coifs. Unless they stumble over a word on the teleprompter, they will seem  the perfect  model of self assurance and erudition.

Chaac

There are Old World myths about snails, and perhaps the pre-Columbians on the peninsula of La Florida even had their own stories about the iconic value of the little guys.  We know the gods of the “earth people” were many, and reigned over very specific chores on their cosmic playing fields—to bring rain and hurricanes, to grow cassava and to bring fish into hand-woven fiber nets, and of course, to right some terrible wrong. God usually had their own totems, like Chaac the rain god of the Maya, which was carved into temples and sacrificial altars. Back home here on the St. Johns, we see totemic sculptures, like the owl, pelican, and otter found in the benthic mud near Hontoon Island on the St. Johns.

River gods here were often skillful predators in real life—animals that morphed into protector spirits that steathfully maneuvered the Netherworld on behalf of its clan. In this case, the diminutive and cryptic nature of the snail may have kept it from this particular high- profile utility.

Yet, we know most of the midden mounds along this river—a river that held more middens than any other in North America—were comprised mostly of snail shells. The reasoning is simple: Snails like the mystery silt snail (Viviparus georgianus) were simply easy to harvest. While I have found shards of the much larger apple snail in these mounds along with pieces of freshwater mussels,  it is the harder shell of Viviparus that weathers time the best.

Once when I was in Amazonia researching a magazine story about freshwater dolphins upstream of Iquitos,  our old clunky riverboat sometimes stopped at  villages, huts of wood and thatch atop the high muddy banks of the ever-surging Amazon. During one stop, I saw a small mango tree hung with a dozen or so of the empty shells of an apple snail—-clearly, a much larger species than the Pomacea  I see back in Florida. I asked about it, and was told it was a act of sacrament, one intended to make the tree bear an abundance of fruit.

A few years later in Florida, I was paddling on the Withloochochee River with a grad class from USF because professors there had asked me to help teach a course about the literature of rivers. That river rose up from the great Green Swamp, a complex system of seasonally-wet  flatwoods, swamps, and marshes that births three other rivers, sending each off into different directions in the SW Florida landscape. It was on that paddle that I first saw the clues of an exotic snail in the form of a splotch of brightly colored pinkish eggs on a cypress stump. This was the channeled apple snail, an exotic import that was becoming increasingly troublesome. Not only did it aggressively elbow its way into the natural Florida habitat, it upped the ante a few notches: It also ate its native brethern.

I have collected aquatic snails from the St. Johns before, and brought them back to my aquarium and to my backyard pond. Once in the pond, they usually vanish from sight, and go happily on their way, quietly realizing their snaildom . But the aquarium has that wonderful ant farm-quality about it wherein nearly everything that goes on is visible, whether it wants to be or not. I consulted a guidebook to Florida snails by the malacologist Dr. Fred Thompson and learned my snails with the small, flatten spirals of shell were called goldenhorn marisa.  Like many snails, they seemed content with their plight in life, grazing algae and whatever else they could find.

But, as with other snails—including the giant sea snail known as the queen conch—the goldenhorns had a secret that was seldom seen:  They came into the world not as pint-size miniatures of their mommas, but as eggs that hatched into free-swimming larva. Like the queen conch, the larva of the marisa evolved through several stages before finally metamophisizing as a shell-wearing snail the size of a pin head. Then they settled down to the bottom, from where they would then navigate through the rest of their lives.

In a way, that transformation was captured in an old Chinese fable that has been translated in the book “How the Snail Got Its Shell.” In ancient times long ago, the snail was not slow at all—indeed, it had no shell, and was one of the fastest animals on earth. Then one fateful day, as the butterflies, ants, and bees went about their righteous business in the rice field, the sky turned gray and pelleted the earth with heavy rain and mud. The snail, being quicker than the others, saw an empty shell and made a run for it, comfortably waiting out the storm inside. Other critters coveted the shell and the safety it provided, but the snail would not relinquish it. When the storm finally ended, the snail stayed in his shell for fear others would commandeer it.  He stayed and stayed, until finally, he and the shell were one. The world went on, with the snail in it. But now he had to drag his home around with him, and his agility and quickness were forever lost. A Faustian trade?  I’m guessing only in the snail knows for sure, and he isn’t talking—with or without a teleprompter.

Snails have other symbolic uses, too, and the one most of us here in Florida should care about is its ability to function as a barometer, an indicator species that tells us whether the water in which it lives is healthy or not. A few years ago, I followed Dr. Thompson around in the swamps of the Wekiva River basin in order to film portions of a documentary about that river. We went to Sharks Tooth Spring and Sweetgum Spring, and others that were just then being mapped. Over a course of a very few days, Thompson discovered six new species of snail. All lived in the runs of tiny springs, and each was  found no where else on earth. Thompson told me about the vulnerability of his animal of choice—that if pollution generated upland or upstream from the snail clouds its waters, the snail will suffer badly. “These guys are the first to get whacked,” Thompson said. They can’t swim away quickly like fish, or walk away like some crustaceans. “These snails are true homebodies; all live inside a 100-yard linear stream.” When pollution arrives, they must simply sit there and bear it, slowly suffocating to death.(That’s why a snail Thompson discovered years ago in Sanlando Spring in “The Springs” development can no longer be found there.

Meanwhile, back in my aquarium at home, I watch my goldenhorn marisas closely. Every once in a while, the entire lot of them—say, a dozen or so—migrate from the bottom to the top of the tank, as close to the water’s surface as they can get. That’s because there’s been a problem with the dissolved oxygen down below— maybe an electrical outage cut off the pump that helps bring O2 into the water. No matter, the little guys make a run for it—and, once I see it, I do what I can to bring some stasis back into their tiny shelled lives.

Which brings me to a report issued by Florida Dept. of Environmental Protection the other day. It identified over 80 “impaired waters” up and down the St. Johns River, including some not so very far from me in Lakes Harney and Monroe. Much of the impairment was due to the lack of dissolved oxygen —thanks to the thoughtlessness that treats our rivers as giant sumps for our fertilizers, pesticides and stormwater.

At the same time DEP was releasing its list of impaired waters, the river’s Water Management District was busy making plans to pump surface water from it. They are doing so because they’ve screwed up management of our underground aquifer so badly  it’s no longer sustainable. I have tried to ponder the wisdom of this reality, and honestly, can only come up with great, thick boulders of irony, as heavy and as intractable as the stuplyfyingly poor wisdom of the WMD and its board of mostly political appointees — some so obtuse they wouldn’t know an aquifer from an aquaduct.

Many within the development biz here see no problem with this disconnect. Indeed, most of them are directly responsible for the blight that is sweeping across our landscape right now—a plaque in which greed and not locusts ruins a legacy that is commonly shared by us all. A national magazine recently referred to this way of doing business as a giant Ponzi scheme wherein future Floridians will pay for the current sprawl and sins of our greedy water-sucking developers  and their political toadies.

another small Wekiva spring

 

 

I think if one of the pre-Columbian river gods could come back from wherever gods go when their people are no longer alive to honor them, things might be different. Maybe the playing field would be leveled, and responsibility would rain from the sky like the torrents in the old Chinese parable. Perhaps, it would be developers , magically shrunk down to match the size of their ethic, who wear shells and dwell at the bottom of Florida springs and rivers. They would drive around in bitsy BMW’s and hoard great mounds of algae, just because they could. And it would be goldenhorn marisas—and fish and other living things —who periodically visit to drop electrical prods into the water, shocking the bejesus out of all the selfish little shell-people who exist there. 

And the gods, having leveled the playing field once more, would sit back on their haunches and, certain that the natural world had regained its equilibrium, would smile. It would be a smile of great aplomb.

It’s an hour or so after dawn here on the slender spit of ground quartz and shell known as the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I am walking at a good clip with my daughter Beth, headed north on a beach that at this hour is almost deserted.

Beth during beach walk

 

Beyond the breakers, the gray dorsal of a lone bottlenose dolphin rises from the sea and then sinks back down. A squadron of brown pelicans glides single file just above where the dorsal was, tips of their wings glazing the spindrift of the waves as they go, headed south. We are careful to walk right at the water’s edge, where each incoming wave flattens out into froth before retreating, leaving the tiny bubbling holes of burrowing coquinas and tellins behind.

Later, swarms of tourists will descend from the McMansions that line the dunes here at Duck and hunch together in chairs, under umbrellas, their white skin turning as red as a steamed blue crab in the summer sun. By night, they’ll crowd the local bars and restaurants, and sometimes, let their kids set off fireworks on the beach, jolting themselves with the rush of sound and flashing light, instead of sitting quietly to absorb the wonder of it all.

But, just for now, I can pretend this is the same beach I first visited with my mom and dad and brother to surf fish years ago—can imagine that the Outer Banks itself is still retro and insular and southern, flavored more by the raw brogue of fishermen and shrimpers than the flat dialect of suburban Washington, D.C.

Our family stayed in one of several “Gregory’s Cottages” then, tromping barefoot through a low slot in the sandy ridge and sea oats with our surf rods in the morning. Some afternoons, we’d trek up to the massive 100-foot high sand dune known as “Jockey’s Ridge”, or climb the steps to the Hatteras Light House. Once, I went fishing out in the Gulf Stream for blue marlin, watching in awe as an animal four or five times my size rose up from the depths to chase our shiny teaser, the reflective sunlight drawing it up to us like some dark and forgotten dread. The mate set the hook and I fought it for a while, not really wanting to land it, grateful when on its third leap it finally threw the hook.

By evening, in our little cottage we’d cook up the spot and croakers we caught earlier in the day. Sometimes, we’d venture out on the night beach to watch the clumps of bioluminescence glowing on the sand. A few of the fishing piers that stretched out over the ocean had old southern beach amusements, nothing fancy by today’s standards, some pinball and jukes. We didn’t seem to know as much about how the world worked then, and it freed up a lot of space on the hard drive to immerse ourselves in the moment, to rejoice in the little shared joys of a place.

Today, we walk the few miles towards the research pier at Duck, where scientists study the drift of the littoral current, and how geography and climate and human-made contrivances encourage it to deposit sand, or to carry it away. The beach under us is dynamic, as alive as any single person has ever been, and—like the giant dune to the west—prone to shift and to change, as if constantly re-examining its own reason for being. If you are living on a foundation of sand, it helps to have at least a vague idea of where that sand might someday want to go.

Beth and her husband Chuck and her boys Ray and Will live away from this beach, on the other side of HW 12, the asphalt road that funnels tourists to and from this place. There, they are wisely nestled inside a maritime thicket of live oak, persimmon, cedar, myrtle, pines—all of it stunted and shaped by the wind and salt. Most of us have been conditioned to believe that a beachside view is superior to all else and insist on buying or renting a precarious wooden structure atop a dune, just yards from the sea. But those who live here year-round most often do so away from the ocean, preparing for that special moment when the sea stops being a smiley face postcard and, with a nor-easter gale behind it, turns into a raging force of nature.

This dynamic of the sea is repeated along most windward shores—-such as where I live back in Florida. But it is particularly apparent here because the Outer Banks protrudes into the Atlantic like the jaw of a punch drunk fighter, almost as if it is daring the ocean to smack it one. Indeed, the slender spit of quartz that holds Duck and Nags Head and Kitty Hawk transports us humans far beyond the barrier islands of the rest of the eastern coast. Out here, the Gulf Stream—even the continental shelf—is barely 40 miles away. Everything is churned by its dynamic: Broken shells are rounded as neat and smooth as guitar picks; jagged glass is tumbled relentlessly, its colors turned cloudy, its edges muted, safe. A broken beer bottle from years ago becomes desirable, reborn from the surf as “beach glass.”

The world around me is ephemeral, here just for the now. It is like being with a beautiful woman who is simply not the right fit—her beauty is made even more so by the knowledge it will soon end, vanishing as surely as the sand ebbs away from the shore when the new and full moons squeeze the tides ever so tightly. For now, I watch, amused, as a large starling dances along the same foam line we walk, pecking quickly at the bubbling holes for a tasty bivalve. Blackbirds usually go for terrestrial insects and worms. But finding itself on an island far at sea, this one learned to make the best of it, figuring out how to tease the mollusks from their holes in the flat surf sand.

If there is a good lesson in that, there is also one in the sub-text of the place itself: These slender islands, bracketed by estuary and ocean, are an arena where natural forces collide, day after day. They do so out in the ocean where the south-flowing, cold Labrador Current meets the warmer, north-flowing Gulf Stream. On land, winds from the northeast and the southwest do the same, colliding atop the string of islands and sound and marsh, keeping the big westerly dunes in place, torrents of air pushing waves of sand against the other.

And, the collison of traditon happens, too, the old isolated fishing culture not faring nearly as well when the affluent tourists smack up against it, relic swales of authenticity here and there, but–really—most of it diluted, displaced, caught in a rip of momentum.

And of course, the ideas of my own life collide here as well, ever shifting and dynamic as these monstrous dunes, every bit as shadowed as the cool and stunted maritime thickets of dwarf oaks and myrtles and bayberry. I look once over my shoulder at the line of whitecaps behind us, and follow Beth back up and over the dune. She has become a kind, caring and insightful adult and I’m very proud of her. Above us in the sky, two frontal systems push toward each other as banks of  clouds—just in case I’m too obtuse to know for sure that it’s all about collision and loss, transformation and growth. The only barrier islands that won’t eventually wash away are the ones ringed by bulkheads and steel—but then, they no longer have the magic of the natural pulsing that once made them so.

And in the crease between the two cloud banks above, Beth sees a shard of a rainbow, glowing just for the now like beach glass on the sand. And then, I know for sure that the most beautiful notions of all are the ones that are the most transient, the ones that you know will vanish because they must.

And instead of resisting, you smile in great appreciation—and then with a force of resolution and energy and light, you clear your mind and heart, and let it go.

Behind you, a right whale skims just below the surface of the sea a mile offshore. She has decided, just for now, to keep swimming north. She will do so not to mate, but to discover great pods of plankton simmering like chowder in the dark and blue wonderment of the sea.

I wonder about this Florida sometimes, about the difference between where things belong and where we sometimes find them.

Nature here, with rare and wonderful exception, isn’t the virgin wilderness that Ponce De Leon or the poor lost soul known as Cabeza de Vaca found 500 years ago. Nor is it what Marjory Stoneman Douglas or Archie Carr encountered earlier in the 20th century. It’s something else entirely—a place where we often have to take our wildness wherever we can get it. Sometimes, it’s neatly woven into a tapestry of a park or a preserve, close to being as much of a natural gestalt as it ever will.

Cabeza de Vaca

But, increasingly, this natural Florida greets me right smack in the middle of urbanization. When it comes to me this way, the affect is both comforting and oddly jarring, like hearing a Bach requiem in the middle of a food court of a mall. One of these hybrid visions emerged the other day when I was driving near Disney World, approaching one of those concrete cloverleafs that perpetually swirl about like streams perfectly confluxing—neither clover nor leaf nor stream. I thought of a book I am reading, “The Geography of Nowhere”, and how well it captures the delusion of efficiency and “prosperity”, and how it’s compromised and fragmented our landscape.

Still, I always search for something redemptive about this urban Florida terrain. I’ve gotten pretty good at looking beyond the theme world billboards and the giddy caricature-level roadside invitations to “Join Our Deckside Party Happy Hour ! ” (no matter that the deck is on a retention pond and the contrived Happy Hour ain’t all that happy.) It’s a behavior that pays off because I’ve seen a fascinating array of animals and plants that sometimes edge right up to the very rim of the road easements. And that is what I was doing, even as I approached a major concrete switchback on I-4 in central Florida. As I did, I saw upcoming on the right— at the edge of one of those geometrically-perfect rectangular ponds the engineers have built for us— two long-legged wading birds.

At first, I thought: cattle egret. But these guys were much too big for that. As I got closer, I thought: Great egret. But just as I did, I noticed something not so right about their heads. Finally, as I got right up next to them, at a speed of 65 mph in a domino-line of fellow motorists all busy streaming off to Someplace Else, I got a real good look at them.

They weren’t egrets at all; neither were their mottled, black heads odd—at least not for this species. . These birds were actually wood storks—what native Floridians, for reasons that make wonderful visual sense, call “Iron Heads”. There were two of them, and one was fishing with its beak down in the water, cattails all around, while the other one was just standing there looking, seeming very noble and self-contained, almost like an Old World stork. She looked as if she had seen the world begin, all the time passing by in the millenniums since then. And here she still is, carrying the genetic code of distant memory, in a place where humans—let alone cloverleafs—exist at all, it’s as a tiny blip. A wild animal that lives, for now, in the geography of nowhere.

Perhaps the wood stork, and all the others I’ve seen near or above congested Florida roads—the wild turkeys, the sandhill cranes, the bald eagles, the swallowtail kites—are simply biding their time. They’ve surely endured a lot longer than us, weathering Ice Ages and coastal reconfigurations and stealthful aborigines with chert-tipped arrows and spears. And now here they still are, grazing stoically on a roadside that once was swamp or marsh as herds of exotic, hairless mammals inside their well-insulated steel and fiberglass shells madly stampede up and down their hard-packed trails.

Do they smile silently to themselves, marking the time until our cleverness grinds to a halt? Are they quietly waiting for the day when we so-called upper mammals gallop off into the sunset with the camel and the mastodon and the giant sloth, leaving them to their apple snails and gambusia and crayfish, back in a quiet swamp or marsh that this lush Florida climate revitalizes for them ? Are they envisioning a more advanced moment when the gods smile on them again, and they can reclaim what was once theirs—just as the Yucatan jungle reclaimed the civilization of the Maya ?

Maybe these roadside birds are more than relics of Florida’s lost wilderness.

Maybe, they’re reminders of something else, too.

“When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, ‘Here is his library, but his study is out of doors…’” – Walking, Henry David Thoreau.

 

The forecast was for rain  later today, so I got some work out of the way early-on, and headed for the woods.  The plan was an hour in and maybe an hour back out, no more than five or so miles, but I never figure in the dawdling that is so integral to sauntering.  

The trail is an easy one: It splits into a little mile loop through the longleaf to the west, and to the east, splays off on a series of unmapped firebreak roads, back deep into an impressive tangle of palmetto and pine. The later is always my choice because, from these roads, smaller spurs will take you away into hammocks, one leading down to the edge of the Wekiva. Another, if you follow it long enough, will put you back closer to the edge of the St. Johns, open prairie finally giving way to a canopy of oak and bald cypress, gnarly knees like little goblins back in the swamp. 

It’s just me today; a few years ago, Shep would have joined me, his boundless sheltie enthusiasm as unbridled as Bartram’s own 18^th century expression of the wonders that La Florida would gift to our souls. The direction is easy, no compass needed, a trail I have walked before with friends and by myself.  The beginning takes me beyond a deep sinkhole, usually empty to its steep bottom when dry. I poke back through the myrtle and sweetgum to see where it is after a few weeks of heavy rainfall—as if it’s a giant rain gauge funneling down into the terrain. Today, it’s nearly two-thirds full, a good 20 feet or so inundated, duck weed floating on the surface and a small heron nagging at the edges.

The dirt road I walk is as easy as it will ever get, packed down by the rain and the tire treads of a park service vehicle of some sort.  At trail side, the tiny white morning glory (creeping morning-glory) begins to appear, as does the lizard tail, the name of the later more fully realized now in its own tint of pale white. A tiny pea-like orange bud I can’t identify pops out of the understory here and there, and then so do scads of what I take to be narrow-leaved sabatia, a five-lobbed little wildflower that revels in the moisture of the wet pinelands. It’s a flatwoods here, so everything seems to be in place, little ecological lesson of plants and landscape ready for the listening.

As the last of the hammocks fade away, I look to the west for the bald eagle nest I know will be near the top of a longleaf, and am comforted as always, when I see it there.  It’s always exciting to see a ma or pa eagle about; but,  just knowing the nest is well maintained is enough for now.  The fragrance of pine and wild soggy prairie is replaced by a strong odor of burnt plants. As I round the next bend, I see the charred remnants of a prescribed burn, the thick stalks of the saw palmettos looking like the arms of some prehistoric animal. I survey the burn and see scores of white sand piles—each marking the pitched-up earth from gopher tortoise burrows. Without the magic of the burn, all I would see would be a vast unyielding field of green.

I take a path that I know will lead me to a slough just behind the main branch of the lower Wekiva. In other hikes here, I have always been able to find a downed tree that will let me ford the little bayou. But today is different: The water is wide and deep, only a shoal of white sand from an erosional creek interrupting the blur of duckweed that sits atop the mire. I carefully pick my way along the steep banks, looking for  where I know a mama gator usually keeps her brood, but today, nothing. Farther along on the shore, I see the distinctive bleached white snail shell (Viviparious sp.) that makes up most Native American midden mounds along the larger St. Johns. It vaguely occurs to me that the Indians who once lived here would be cheered by the strong new flow of water, cheered by the animals that would use it, by the way it would open up old creeks and branches long closed by the drought. I won’t be able to make it across to the mainstem bank of the Wekiva today, but that’s alright.

I turn to go, fascinated by the way the heavy rainfall has inscribed itself in the soft earth, creating a gulley to the slough. Small isolated puddles of tannin lay here and there, tiny rivers ponds  with the red-brown blood that always leaks from the swamp. In places, it seems the white sand has not just eroded, but has actually melted, flowing layers of soil caught just for now in a freeze frame of time, perhaps to become sedimentary rock a millennia from now.

Walking from the gridlock of trees, I feel the first drops of the day’s rain. I am sweating now, and it feels good on my skin. Other than a deer track here and there, the only imprint on the packed sand is the one I left coming in; and on the way back out, I try my best to retrace those incoming steps.

I think long about those who have walked this trail with me before—all good-hearted women and men. And one little dog who could never get enough of the woods, and the scent it left for him. The visceral knowledge of having been with them all is redemptive, for I have led most of them here, over time.  I think fondly of each of them, think of how fully and how different they were able to respond to the mystery of this Florida landscape. There are stories that remain here, good ones, too, and I am grateful for that.

Like Shep, the scent is here for me, too—except it’s not one I can smell. It’s one I react to deep in my gut, projected as vivid memories that allow me to relive each journey I’ve ever taken on this trail. Ahead, two white tails barely beyond the yearling age, spook, bounding away in different directions. I back off, not wanting to scare them any more, and take a longer trail spur back. As I do, I pass a pile of osprey feathers, and wonder what other animal has been strong and swift enough to have done this—an eagle, a stealthful bobcat or coyote?

Charred palmettos

 

 

And just as I’m prepared to cut across an open pine forest  of wiregrass  and small turkey oak , I see a pile of what seems to be bones and go to it. It’s the pieces of a once-large gopher tortoise, the topical schutes pealing back from the heavier calcium, little vertebrae scattered about. I wonder at the narrative of this animal, of its beginning and its end. As I do,  I realize, once more, how the landscape brims with sacred stories it has to tell us—of its wildlife, its plants and trees, its seasons, its people—from those who once gathered snail shells and slept next to the earth, to those of us who have simply opened our hearts to it all, who cherish the way its lessons settle down on us, as real as any tonic.

It is raining harder now, and I quicken my pace, back to the beginning.  I am soaking wet, but I am sorry to go, to leave the stories behind. I promise when I get home I will write down the words for another little tale, one that the wild Florida landscape gifted me today, a yarn of time and gratitude and thankfulness.

The rains have slacked off enough to seduce me into believing it’s a good time for a long hike. Florida’s been very good at this sort of illusion for a long time, and I suppose that’s part of the fun anymore—figuring out what’s really in store out in the woods, on any given day.

I drive out to the Seminole Forest early and plan to meet my friend Bruce there by the trailhead kiosk. While I’m waiting, studying a trail map I can never quite figure, a very large man with a frame backpack loaded with overnight gear, marches  up with a walking stick, each stride almost the perfect imitation of the one that came before it. I wish him a hearty good morning, and he responds with a robotic “hel-lo”, sounding like one of those electronic voices you get when you’re trying to drag real information out of some faceless institution on the phone. Robo Voice then pivots and paces off down the trail with great purpose. I think one of the reasons I have avoided organized groups of hikers for so long is that I always fear being afflicted with some poor soul who, bereft of imagination, acts as if they’re in a magazine ad for an outdoor event.

Bruce soon arrives, as bedraggled as me, just day packs filled with snacks and water, and my lone compass, and off we go, onto a trail through a hardwood hammock. I usually drive in to the Blackwater Creek and either paddle there, or hunt for little cryptic springs that feed it along its run. Today, I figure we can take a trail most of the five or so miles in, and follow another for five or so miles back out, allowing a couple more miles for getting lost, like I often do. Bruce, a professor at a local college by day, is dependable and steady, but like me, determined not to let the tools of hiking or navigating overwhelm the joy and discovery of the experience itself.

The Florida Trail Association has blazed some new paths here since my last hike, and I’ve picked one that will loop through the edge of the pine flatwoods, and hopefully, allow  us to ascend east through the scrub and sandhills before we return to the cool hammocks. We stop at a little split in the trail, sign in at a registry inside a mailbox on a post, and head towards the low sun.  A light breezes lifts up off the land in the most amiable of ways, and cools us as we wander through the pine flatwoods under the vast Florida sky. A flatwoods is still the predominate natural system in Florida; it’s so devoid of relief that I can see miles to the edge of the horizon. Although I know a few other hikers are out here today in this 25,000 acre tract, it makes me feel good to see nothing but pines and saw palmettos, and at the edge, dark and mysterious hammocks that tumble down toward the Wekiva River. It’s times like this when I think, yea, you know, there’s still a chance.

Flatwoods seem deceptively easy to figure. But they sit atop deeper layers of clay, and they seasonally flood—in a way, they mimic the illusion of large black mangroves down in the Glades, seeming to be great forests of dry land when, in fact, they are great clumps of leaves and prop roots sunk into the mud. At first, the trails are dry here, sand packed from the rains so that animal tracks appear every so often—the split hoof of a running deer, the three-pronged imprint of a large wading bird, the S-like curves of a snake. A large industrious ant hill commandeers the middle of the trail, and we stop to admire it, large red ants moving in and out with very important  ant stuff in their jaws. Jezz, I say, they don’t even get a day off for Sunday. Yea, says Bruce, gotta satisfy the big mamma.

We go another mile, the sameness of the isolated pine and palmetto finally transcending itself, allowing a spare and elegant aesthetic, almost mystical in the way its simplicity hides a natural system that is far more complex than it seems. But few habitats are pure into themselves: Soon the flatwoods become scrubby, less wet, just a wee bit higher. Wild blueberry bushes appear in great knee-high  forests, some full of red berries just waiting for that perfect bear moment of ecstasy to be ripe and blue.  Wild rosemary, the sign of a healthy Florida scrub, appears, too, and I realize we are higher up, closer to the xeric  scrub than I realized.

After covering more ground, it’s clear we’ve descended a few tiny degrees  and the flatwoods are so wet that little creeks flow across the trail, tea-colored from the detritus that’s tinted them. I figure empheral reservoirs of wet prairies have brimmed over, sending these creeks coursing down to the hammocks and the river beyond. Finally, the path itself is full of water, and we clomp through the palmettos and gallberry along the higher banks.  This seems to work well for a while. And then ahead, we see what amounts to a large pond in the middle of the trail, so expansive that the light wind is rippling the surface with tiny waves.

Bruce and I figure the options, realizing we’ve already exhausted most of them.  We decide to cross a slough of water at the base of the path, shooting for higher land, maybe getting around the pond at some juncture. As we do, the terrain suddenly changes, open but solid, clumps of stumps and roots from the last burn studding the ground, a couple gopher tortoise burrows and some prickly pear, a few with crepe-like yellow blossoms. The new rise brings us more scrub, a relic of a great dune that once stretched across the central ridge of Florida— a remnant that is one of the most endangered natural systems still left here.  The sand, quartz rendered into tiny grains by a Pleistocene ocean, is now as white as refined sugar.  And atop it, Chapman’s oak and saw palmetto and rosemary, sand pine and sand oak   —the same plants you’ll find on a coastal dune.  Except this dune hasn’t seen a sea for a good million years or more.

 

wild vanilla

Plant diversity quickly diminishes, but the rare nature of the place makes up for it. What looks to be a large blue-tailed mole skink slides away between the wild rosemary;  dime-sized oak toads, not long from their tadpole origins, hop to safety. Up on a snag, an endemic scrub jay calls, dutiful sentinel warning his buds of this unexpected intrusion.  A gopher tortoise, its schutes as worn as a handmade monastery brick, moves slowly, never a need to rush, 200 million years of existence on its side. And these two upright mammals, new kids on the evolutionary block, stumbling across the surreality of this ancient seabottom, every clue possible to suggest a sacred antiquity.  If this Florida scrub is awe-inspiring for me, it is as inexplicable to my own brain as fire must have been to the first neo-human who stumbled on it, a concept beyond the imperfect authority of the human ego.

 

shiny blueberry

 

 

We stop under the shade of a longleaf pine, snack on muchies and drink water.  There is the sound of a redshouldered hawk in the distance; from overhead, Bruce sees a swallowtailed kite swooping in great elliptical orbits over its domain, its scissor-like tail seemingly ready to clasp itself around this exceedingly rare moment. We’ve been passing wild vanilla plants, and now that the sun is higher in the sky, the heat is sending out the scent, at once sweet and deeply hidden. On the way back, we will pass through a dwarf forest of sand pines, and the olfactory senses will be full to overflowing.  And it will be more than any mortal—numbed by the blunt trauma of our techno-heavy world—can ever hope to fully process. But we will try, smiling and inhaling, and understanding in ways that can hardly be described.

And by the time we reach the end of the trail, six hours later, we will know for sure we had the capacity to revel in the expansive freedom that nature, left to its own devices, can offer.

me & sand pine

One minute, we were on a peninsula that seemed to be doing its best to dry up. The next, we were in the midst of a real summer Florida rainfall—of the kind that used to distinguish this mythic slab of land wedged between the Atlantic and the Gulf.  And so our “seasons” arrived not like the traditional ones up north, but by the dramatic cycles of Wet and Dry.  

Winters were Dry, except for the occasional northeastern storm. Summers were Wet, drenched from the sea breezes that squalled up and moved inland. It made it easy, at least, to figure stuff out.  No need to accessorize yourself for climatic transformations. When the Wet season arrived, you bought a bunch of umbrellas—the cheap kind that would fold up real quick, and that didn’t bother you when you left them behind, as you always did.

But we’ve been working really hard to dry out our landscape over the last couple of decades. Up until the Recession, we were losing natural lands at the rate of 20 acres an hour to development. What this meant was that uplands that recharge springs, and wetlands were diced, sliced, and generally treated as if they had been put through a giant Vegamatic, of the kind Ronco used to peddle on late night TV (It slices, it dices, and it really, really works!).

Seepage spring

This sort of wholesale drainage was creating mini-climatic zones that mimic what happens on a larger scale when deserts arise from fertile land: The loss of moisture—via the soil and the foliage and any flowing creek, marsh or swamp that had the misfortune to be nearby—meant Florida’s vital hydro cycle was interrupted. (Lots of science illustrated this, and author Cynthia Barnett was very clever in processing that science and helping us to better understand it in her wonderful book “Mirage.”)

Well, I was headed for a riff on water squandering there. But instead, what I most want to celebrate right now is what I see happening around me when the Florida I love regains a measure of its  moisture-driven self. Surely, five or six days of heavy rains level the playing field once more, reminding me of the historic eco-legacy that once defined this subtropical, three-sided island.

 I had planned to hike with a friend today, but we both realized the trails in the pine flatwoods where we were headed would be the first to flood. And so, in between the impressive squalls that move through with great horizontal sheets of rainfall with them, I instead headed out to my yard.  When I do, I begin to see big changes in little things. Emerson used to tell us that Nature and Books “belong” to those who “see” them. And so it is for these details of wonder, tiny miracles best appreciated by unplugging the MP3 headphones, forgetting about the laptop, and—this is a tough one—not even opening up a book. (I’m pretty sure the old Transcendentalist wasn’t talking about “seeing” books and nature at the same time.)

What’s left are those miraculous in-the-moment images, many of them straight out of a child’s imagination.  And unlike the intellect, which can ricochet random ideas and metaphors around your noggin, the senses absorb nature—or as essayist Edward Hoagland once said—they “predate” nature. In this way, they simply allow you to be.

For me, this takes a few moments, even here. I start by checking out a large clay pot in the side yard with a night-blooming cactus in it, a cluster of green-stemmed rain lilies at its base. Like the white stone bench nearby, I brought the plants from my old farm house on Sewell Road. The cactus started as a clipping from a much larger plant; the lilies grew from seeds I gathered nearby, from inside the old concrete culvert that once was a child’s little pool.

Bringing along pieces of a place I once cared for so deeply have made the transformation here easier to bear. So now, rain-enriched, the cactus has budded with the tight white blossoms that—by midnight—open to the moon and the stars. The day lilies have done the same, turning the base of the cactus into a bright garden of crimson, and in abundance I have never before seen.

Out back, where the former sterile field of St. Augustine has been turned into a “Wildlife Habitat”, I see the coonties—the little palm-fern throw-back that is actually a cycad—were finally sending up new fiddleheads after having gone dormant from the stress of transplanting a few months ago. The climbing morning glories in the pasture with relic grasses are white, and the spiderwort are bluish. The little garden is bursting with new life—the seed-grown basil, the gourds, the lemon balm and mint. The habaneros are making a new comeback with fresh white buds, and the chili peppers were long and green, a natural imitation of red chili pepper lights I’d strung a couple years ago in the Florida room.

The magnolia, which also came here as a pup from my old house, was full of new shiny leaves, and the nearby lantana was already attracting zebra longwing butterflies. Over at the pond, the surface was alive with hyacinths (some in lavender bloom), pickerel weed (in purple blossoms), and papyrus palm. Gambusia, which a friend once brought back from the St. Johns, had multiplied from four or five to what seemed to be four or five dozen. The comet goldfish culls were realizing themselves as large fish, and a few new goldish fellows were darting about, descendents of an en-pond brood. When the rains first started last week, the night literally exploded with the sound of many happy amphibians, frogs and toads. When I move a bush of ball moss from the water,  I see it is full of the tiniest of tadpoles, barely bigger than fat little commas, and I quickly return the brood to their world.

On land, the anoles are darting about everywhere, in greater numbers than I’ve ever seen. Some are still puffing up their red chin pouches, while others are molting.  I notice they seem to like the tubes of bamboo I stick in the ground here and there, and are using them as little herp condos. Nearly everything seems enlivened by the deluge of rain, and it makes me wonder how Florida—which has lost well over half of its historic wetlands—must have once looked. Warm, wet, wildly diverse in plants and animals, this new land must have enchanted from the very first. And if its enchantment today is a relic of a more bountiful era, I’ll quietly give thanks that a portal opened—however briefly—to let me time travel to it. But after having stepped through so completely, I find myself reluctant to return.

palmetto in bloom

I’m searching for symmetry today, as I so often do when allowed to roam about freely in nature. Symmetry isn’t the half-mad early Saturday morning drivers on Interstate Four exhaling road rage in repayment for leading obsessively structured lives. Nor is the perfect geometry of human-built environments. For me, it’s the splendid visual link between what others once saw in natural systems in Florida, and what exists now.

My old spiritual bud, the naturalist Billy Bartram, found both adventure and discovery here, almost 250 years ago when venturing up the St. Johns in his little sailing “bark”, sketching plants and animals, sleeping on fine “mattresses” of Spanish moss, and becoming one with this wonderfully wild and strange new place.

I cherish Bartram’s approach—not just because he traveled all by himself on his second trip up this Florida river. But because he was guileless, forging ahead not for glory or gold, like the conquistadors before him (or the greedy manipulators of land and people who came after), but for the sublime unity of purpose, revealed in nature and place. Spirituality was woven through it all, not excised to a contained moment for one hour, just on Sunday.

 Our plan today is to enter the Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Refuge from somewhere near Spring Garden Lake, a place Audubon once drifted through on his own Florida excursion, a bit after Bartram. The lake narrows into a large creek, winds around high stands of pine flatwoods and some hammocks, empties in the enormous Lake Woodruff. Finally, it sieves about some more land—including Tick island where I had been by boat a few weeks ago—and finally joins  with Lake Dexter, which flows north within the complex St. Johns system. The names here have changed: Bartram’s “East Lake” is Woodruff; Audubon’s “Spring Garden Spring” is now Ponce DeLeon Spring. But so much else remains. After all, as Billy once noted: “This world, as a glorious apartment of the boundless palace of the sovereign Creator…is inexpressibly beautiful and equally free to the inspection and enjoyment of all of his creatures.” Birds, plants, animals, man. No single one is greater than the other in this grand equation. 

Steve is my companion today, and as always, he is intrepid. We park near a trail head, and picking one of several high and dry pathways atop berms between impoundments, head out into the wide generous landscape of wetlands under an expansive blue sky decorated with shifting banks of cumulus. It might rain today, it might not. For now, it is sunny, and by 9 am, pleasant with a nice breeze wafting across the marvelously flat Florida terrain, this mosaic of sabal palms and bulrush, sawgrass in an early and unexpected bloom, fields of pickerel weed bursting with purple rods, clutches of flags like the duck potato, little orchids in miniature at the end of stalks inside fat green spatulate leaves.

The water in the canals is low, far more so than it should be for early summer, and the wading birds are having a field day on the tiny fish concentrated in the ever-drying sloughs. Large dragonflies, organic little choppers that  consume enormous quantities of mosquitoes when hungry, are everywhere.  I notice a small dead tree, an artistic sort of snag, really, and at the tip of each leafless branch, there is a perched dragonfly, as if they have budded here, just like a new sprout. Dragonfly tree, I say out loud, and Steve smiles.

We follow a topo map in and across a “Jones Island”, likely named for an early settler who once homesteaded here. Like the nearby Tick Island, its relief is mostly from the accruing of shells, bone and sand over the centuries, a reminder of the presence of the “earth people” who once lived here. At first the landscape on both sides is open, stretching to distant sabal palm hammocks in the distant.  At the edge of a berm, Steve faces the broad wet prairie, grasses and sedges and rushes, all raging with the chlorophyll of late spring. Like so much here in this warm and wet peninsula, the revitalized green seems off the color spectrum, as if a magic surrealist had made up another color, just to emphasize the other-worldly quality of this place. The expansiveness of it all is affecting, allowing the soul the tender freedom to roam. Steve once studied in the seminary, and as well as anyone I have ever met, fully understands how natural places inform the heart. A marsh like this makes the spirit sing, says Steve, and I think, yep, it sure does.

 The morning breeze is light, perfect for a trek without shade. I begin to notice wildflowers, sometimes seven or eight species in just a few yards at the edges of the berms.  There is the star rush, a grass-like sedge that looks as if someone has dipped the leaf tips into white paint. There are fields of the yellow daisy-like flowers called tickseed, the fat puffy blossoms of the bachelor’s buttons, and a tiny forest of the pipeworts, little white puffs on the end of a tiny, straight stalks.  There are vines of white morning glories, a glorious five-petaled blossom I take to be a sky flower. There are even white blossoms on the saw palmettos. And when the land rises just a bit towards the pine flatwoods, I notice the tight little fruits on the wild blueberry are now ripe.

We walk some more, enter a spacious canopy atop firebreak roads, the swamps dry on each side from the extended drought, recent water marks on some cypress trunks revealing a sheet flow of water that was once up to  our waists. Finally, we dead-end into Spring Garden Creek, sit atop some piles of shells the Timucua left behind, and like the natives had done here for 6,000 years, we drink and we eat, and allow the solitude of mystery and water and place to settle in. Funny, I seem to feel it all the way down to the very core of myself, feel a kinship with the deep-hearted affection, love and fear and awe, that others here had felt before me.

We hike back out, through the canopied trail, back into the open marsh, much warmer now with the late Florida afternoon. Four sandhill cranes are in a mud slough below the berm, two adults foraging for worms and such, two giant chicks standing there to learn, the soft spiky down of new feathers giving them a slightly bewildered look. Another mile and we see great colonies of snowy and great white egrets, and nearby, a flock of black-headed vultures

with a lone roseate spoonbill, a bird so   rare here it’s not even on the bird check-list   for the refuge.  The roseate is young, almost all white, not having eaten enough of the carotene-enriched crustaceans to yet turn it pink. Oddly, all of the vultures seem to be eyeing the white roseate, and Steve suggests it may be injured, that the carrion-eaters are waiting for it to die.

This distresses me, as I want to believe it’s just resting. I figure the vultures are simply waiting for everything to die, just a matter of time before the nearby peninsula cooters kick off, a gator goes belly up, a stray ornithologist bites the dust—It’s simply in their nature. And soon, I am rewarded with this when the young roseate takes to the air, joining a few of his buds atop a bare patch of peat and marl.

Out we go over the long, narrow berms, sweating now from the sun, but exhaling in all that is good about the world around us, refreshed not just in the solace of the twelve mile walk, but in the symmetry of all I have seen. Bartram’s sovereign Creator smiled on us today, and I give thanks in my heart, embedding this day in that sweet memory place I once knew as a little boy, sitting in a pew with my family in church. The stained glass windows seemed as if they glowed then with a sort of luminosity. And here, now, on this Florida marsh, the water and land and endless sky does likewise, another mystic bridge of symmetry quietly weaving its way through time.

All that’s needed is a Bach prelude, and if I listen closely enough, I think I can hear the faintest strains of one, rising from the soft murmur of the marsh.

Sometimes  you  don’t even have to leave home to have an adventure. You simply clean out your dive gear, and then, the remembering begins.  

Long Island in the Whitsundays

This is a little story I once wrote about a spur of the moment night dive we put together out on the Whitsunday Islands on the midsection of the Great Barrier Reef.  Like all real travel  experiences, this one has become portable, willing to be conjured at a moment’s notice.  Scuba gear was used to transport me—but it’s no different than using a kayak or a good pair of hiking boots. They’re all tools, stuff to allow you access to a moment that allows you access to the heart of a rare story.

The tale is posted on one of my favorite adventure-travel sites:

http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-stories/journey_through_the_earth/

It was so hot by 2 pm today that, out in my backyard,  the leaves on the nightshade—a hearty native with flowers like tiny white chandeliers—were beginning to curl.  The vine of the miniature gourd, usually stout and robust, wasn’t doing too well, either. Elsewhere in the enfenced semi-tame wilderness, things looked okay, if a bit quiet. The only thing moving were the anoles, the dark exotic bruisers from some Antillean island beating up on the smaller green natives, Lilliputian lives waged and lost on the twig of a magnolia.

I’d finished up a writing project, so I was anxious to get out and stretch my legs despite the heat. I put on my sunglasses and headed out, by foot, for downtown.  It’s a nice stroll, 1.8 miles one-way, atop sidewalks and mostly under the canopies of large trees for most of the way.  One of the reasons I wanted to live in Sanford was so I could do stuff like this, because when I was a boy growing up, that’s what I would also do—walk to town. There, I’d meet up with friends, maybe take in an afternoon matinee, especially if a good horror movie was playing. If not, we’d hang out at the drug store, drink cherry cokes, wait to see if any pretty girls might be around.  Here in Sanford, the historic downtown bears an uncanny resemblance to the little downtown of my own, so am figuring nostalgia still plays big in figuring out lots to do with my life.

The walk in today was a good one, and here in east central Florida in late Spring, the air was full of the smell of blossoms and newly cut grass. After a few blocks, I started to glisten, even with a light breeze blowing up Park Avenue from the river. I also begin to open my senses more fully to the experience, figuring the intellect had already done enough damage for the day. Homes were all across the board, from nice Victorians to the Craftsman models of  the 1930’s, to a few cottages from the last half century or so, not unlike my own. Most were well kept, neat little gardens here and there growing a mix of natives and exotics, shampoo gingers hanging with lush rouge -faced blooms and the crepe-like flowers of the turks cap—sometimes called “sleeping hibiscus” because it never quite opens—appearing and disappearing as I went. 

There were white picket fences and gardens with brick walkways and, next to one time-stuck residence, a vintage Texaco gas pump, the kind with the rounded glass light imprinted with the classic Texaco star logo. Passed  two parks, one for kids with neat wooden boxes and stilts and ladders and labyrinthic stuff, a design architects once took from actual drawings children had made of what they would like a  playground  to look like, if they were in charge. And now, at least in this park, they are.

At First Street, which is what the main street is called, I walk a few blocks under awnings for the shade. As I do, I can’t help remember once walking down another sunny street with treasure hunter Mel Fisher in Key West on one hot summer afternoon. Mel  was a pistol, a true American original, finally discovering the long-lost galleon Atocha, long after everyone else had given up. “Let’s walk on the shady side of the street”,   Mel suggested, and I agreed, even though it was only a couple blocks to his favorite bar. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The late Mel Fisher, with Atocha treasure

 

I had been diving earlier that week with some archaeologists off of Islamorada, and wanted to ask Mel about the way his treasure divers might sometimes destroy the providence of a shipwreck. Mel, always a good sport, a lover of good rum and pretty women, was up for the banter, and the afternoon would forever enrich my memory, taking my quest for a magazine story as far as I could take it, as usual. And why write about treasure and the reality of its history if you hadn’t seen it, underwater, hadn’t walked on the shady side of the street in Key West with Mel Fisher, hadn’t seen the look of wistfulness in the eyes of the young women divers who had just found a handful of emeralds, buried all these centuries, embedded in the calcium of the coral.

And so, I left the shady awnings of Sanford, crossed over where the old clock marked the edge of Magnolia Square, and went into Maya Books and Music, a cool store owned by my friend Yvette, who is sitting barefoot on the floor, pricing a bunch of books a customer just brought in for trade. Yvette, astonishing literate, is the antidote to every soul-sucking corporate bookstore ever invented. She diligently handles every book that comes in, reading the ones she likes the best, and then puts them into niches categorized by type—art, maritime history, women’s, nature, children’s, and so on. Some books, with nicks and bruises, go into a box marked “free”. Others simply offer themselves to you, little treasures in the stacks; when a customer asks for a title, Yvette doesn’t check the inventory on a computer; instead, she scrolls through her mind, and provides an answer, just like real people used to do in real towns, not so terribly long ago.

 Yvette knows the book selling biz, knows the modern realities of the new McBook world that cuisinarts the integrity of knowledge and homogenizes culture. Still, she keeps on keeping on, every bit as courageous and optimistic and Quixotic as the treasure salvers of the Keys. I sit in a comfy chair covered with a Mexican shawl of some sort,  gratefully inhaling the bottle of water I’ve been offered. Yvette, who sometimes uses a worldly edge to hide a warm heart, tells of growing up as a book worm—and when being made to play outside, took her favorite books with her and read them up in the protective crook of a tree.

 Refreshed, I say goodbye, and head back up the street for home, walking a carefully chosen path that takes me past old memories and new scents, always eager for the little moments which, unexpectedly,  reveal more than I could have ever imagined.  It’s later now, but still a scorcher, and whenever I get a chance, I slip into the shade just like Mel would do, smiling now at the lavish spendor of the human senses, wondering what the next few steps will bring.

I opened my backyard to my neighbors last week. The occasion was Earth Day, which sported a bunch of activities everywhere. It was particularly notable in Sanford, since in the past the Orwellian spinmeisters wouldn’t even allow the term “Earth Day” to be used—instead, hiding inside cliches like “Spring Fest”, et. al.

pond being built

Just up the street, there’s a large open green space that our neighborhood park committee had saved from, first, being turned into a garish, concrete-covered public safety complex—and then later, from being chipped away in commercial sales that would benefit the city. And so on Earth Day, the nearby “18th Street Park” hosted hundreds of folks curious about all manner of nature.

A national magazine asked me to write about how I felt about Earth Day a few years ago. I took the reactive stance: Like Christmas, where people force themselves to be kind and giving for a few days, Earth Day was also in danger of being a token celebration. One where you professed your greenness for a day or so, and then went back to exhaling, burning, and otherwise generating large amounts of carbon.

I’m over that now, and figure that if folks are going to plant a tree they otherwise would not have planted, well, that’s a good thing.

Likewise for my backyard, which has gradually been turned into an enfenced sanctuary where almost anything can happen, just like out in the woods or on the river. I agreed to be part of a tour of neighborhood gardens, as long as I could describe my space as the “un-garden”, and so I did. Prior to the tour, I worked hard to knock out a few projects that I’ve been thinking of for a while: With neighbor Dennis Sneed, I retrieved several hundred bricks—many of which were big, solid, and old—from a guy’s backyard. After I paid him for the blocks, he tossed into several hundred pounds of slab like stone, and Dennis graciously helped me load that, too.

The stone turned into a dandy patio for my old outdoor table and chairs from Sewell Road, thanks to my friend Yvette, who helped me set the stone in the ground. I mulched some of the paths, and creating a new one leading to the neat old birdbath I brought with me from Sewell Road as well; I carefully scrapped it and painted it white, and then found the statue of the naked little boy holding a duck, and put it in the dip of the bowl. I dug around in the garage and pulled out several long pieces of lathing, neat old wood once used inside of shipping containers. They, too, had made the trip from the old Sewell farmhouse with me, and I had always looked forward to finding a way to use them. Finally, it dawned on me that, if cleaned, sanded, and varnished, the rich golden-brown grain would pop out, and—if properly cut—would make a dandy trellis.

A small sprig of a passion flower I once brought back from the woods had, by now, turned into a stunning vine, and was busy crawling its way up some bamboo reeds, bursting with its wonderful purple flowers, a blossom so ornate it seems more like a dream shard than a real native plant. The vine and the new trellis were a perfect match.

Elsewhere, I spiffed up the pond with its flowing water fountain, and culled out some of the floating hyacinths. When I did, I noticed at least four massive tadpoles lumbering about. They were laid by bullfrogs, herps that somehow found their way inside the fence to the pond. Maybe they heard or smelled the running water; maybe, a southern leopard frog who had earlier graduated from the pond whispered the knowledge of it to them.

My friend Julie brought me by some neat little grasses that bloomed with bright red flowers, and a “walking African iris” that added some more color. The confederate jasmine was in full bloom; as were the blue flowers of the spiderwort, a plant that came into its own after I stopped cutting the ridiculous St. Augustine grass. Lantana was popping out new blossoms, as were the white morning glories, all realizing themselves in a place that had once been given over to a coifed lawn. And so, the butterflies were starting to come, the queen and tiger swallowtails, the zebra longwings, even a couple of monarchs. *

Karina Veaudry, a friend who is a landscape architect, created a striking design for the yard; although I didn’t have time to integrate it before the ‘tour’, I at least learned from some of her great ideas about native plants.

And finally, Sharon Muldoon, a plein air artist came out during that Saturday, and sitting in the corner near the citrus tree, turned out several wonderful pastels capturing the moment and time. In all, it was a great show of community spirit, of the sort you used to see in small towns all across the country, back before corporations and corrupt politicians begin wedging upcale, walled subdivisions into an otherwise stunning Florida countryside. Neighboorness is what it’s all about, a life quality you can’t pull off the shelf, a behavior that can only evolve naturally, custom made for each real life circumstance. It’s about caring, the antithesis of sprawl and the isolation it breeds.

And so the enfenced sanctuary seemed a happy space—I could no longer call it a “yard”. I finished it off by erecting a small sign from the National Wildlife Federation that had certified this space as an official “wildlife habitat” for its availability of food and shelter for critters. And I asked Mike Barr at Keep Seminole Beautiful if he had some packets of wildflower seeds I might hand out to folks traipsing through. He generously provided about 100 packets of black-eyed susan, and folks really seemed to enjoy getting them when they came to visit. The wildflowers were sort of iconic: it was more than the aesthetic, having to do with simply letting things be—scant water, no chemicals, etc. It was a native that was here before we arrived, and would be here after we’re gone.

I let the little family of black racers know it might be a good day to lay low, since even most wildflower fanciers might not get the snake thing. But, when I assembled an inventory of plants and animals that lived or visited the space, I added them to the list since it would be unfair not to. In all, the space was relaxing; the water flowing, the cardinals and Carolina wrens hiding in the foliage like holiday ornaments, the butterflies drifting through like large shards of parade confetti. *

Shep is buried out here, near the pond, his tiny grave marked with a perfect stick, of the sort he loved to chase. I hope his spirit enjoys this little world within a world as much as I do.