On a weekday, the lower Wekiva seemed deserted, and the large pre-Columbian midden that used to hold Katie’s Landing had a sense of abandonment about it. The state owns the property now, and the campers and little store and RV’s are all gone, only big magnolias and cypress with official tags on them, growing up from the crushed shell. Even the waterfront bulkhead, the last true relic of the Landing, was crumbling in on itself.

I fumbled with my kayak and got it in the water a bit before Steve, and within moments the strong rain-fed current was pushing me downstream, no paddle needed. The river had grown in size since last I saw it, becoming both deeper and wider because of our heavy rains over the last few weeks. The detritus from the swamp washes in and dilutes the clarity of the spring water at these times. And it also opens up old sloughs that were little more than troughs back in the swamp. In the days when the rainy season was guaranteed, you could also count on following those sloughs until they became branches, and then splintered off into something else entirely.

With the new water, we figured we could navigate around the back of the first big island, and we each found openings in the tall grasses and willow that allowed us to try that. I came out closer to the edge of the island where an old dock had a Biblical passage on it and a gator was growling from somewhere nearby. If given to Revelations, I would take meaning in that, but I was not, and did not. In fact, I was more interested in the blooming wildflowers, the marsh mallow bush and the tight yellow bud of the spadderdock lily.

Steve yelled to get my attention, pointing to what he thought was the white head of an eagle high above the tree line. I looked, and was even more surprised when it turned out to be a swallow tailed kite, looping and diving. We fought our way through the massive “bull hyacinths” where there was absolutely no cut except the ones our hulls each made. The first patch opened to a pool of dark, deep water, and a black crowned night heron was on a log at its edge, looking as surprised as me to see us there.

Next came some of the largest specimens of water lettuce I’ve yet seen, also in a thick floating pasture. Bartram wrote about seeing it on the St. Johns in the 18th century, so I’m going to regard it as native, even though the indigenous plant police will argue otherwise.

By the time we finally made it around the entire island, I was covered in sweat. A light breeze was picking up off the water from the confluence of the main branch, and it felt good. We paddled on, northward, only a couple of old docks and a small fish camp left, a place that’s been here for years. After that, it was all public land, although the battered sign that announced this as the “Lower Wekiva State Preserve” looked as if something had been chewing on it. We paddled past the sign, and then a dead five foot gator laying on its back with a black headed vulture balanced on its stomach, happily pecking away at lunch

We ducked back into another branch to the west, pushing over a newly fallen sweet gum log that submerged when we paddled onto it. More bull hyacinths and lettuce, and lots of dead fall. But back through the forest there was a shaft of light, likely shining onto yet another “lost” channel. It was here I stopped short. Something moved there, crashing through the water and trees. Steve heard it and said: “Bear.” I looked, and the movement was gone, but I did see a scarlet hibiscus shining as bright as a headlight on a dark country lane.

We paddled some more, and I was in awe with the way the river had changed since the last time I was on it. Moss seems thicker than ever, and muscadine grape vines trail inside the forest like huge spiderwebs. The cypress, the ones that were too small to be logged a century ago, endure with a sort of timeless aplomb, obligate knees rising up from the water and mud like tiny nuns in a pew. I think that if a tree can be said to have wisdom, then the cypress must be the greatest philosopher of all, reigning here in this tropical river swamp, its knowledge locked into the flow of its cambrus, forever linking the water and the sky.

Despite all we’ve done to it, the Wekiva has revitalized itself once again, becoming wild in its seasonal transformation and I am immensely grateful for that. Steve had once studied for the priesthood, and I still think of him as the most spiritual person I know. I can’t receive absolution from him, but our journey together, floating through the tropical forest of the Wekiva River is redemption enough for any human, if they’re willing to honor the natural sacraments.

The breeze that was welcome and light now builds, and the clouds begin to push up against each other. Thunder rolls from somewhere deep inside the horizon, and Steve suggests we turn our bows and begin the paddle back towards the midden.

Sure, I say, just a few more minutes. Then I poke my bow down another little cut to get closer to a giant leather fern, filling a nook between two large hickories. Tiny fish, excited by the coming storm, are dimpling the water, and the sky is turning dark. A little blue heron, spooked, cries loudly and from back in the hyacinths, a gator groans. Steve looks at me, and without judgment, starts paddling home.

What can any of us really know about art ? And why in the world am I trying to write about it here, when I ought to be outside playing under the sunshine and trees?

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about art lately, and how it pushes buttons for so many folks. There’s art intended to evoke a strong reaction—sometimes even a brutal one. There’s art aimed at informing the senses . There’s art that’s a vehicle for the expression or communication of emotions and ideas, period—no judgement attached.

I’ve always liked the archaic definition of art as “to assemble.” That would mean to pull together from the disparate parts. To make whole. Which Aristotle also defined as love: To make whole.

But I ramble. I thought that, as a writer, I would show, not tell. And so I have taken a few photos of stuff hanging on my walls. Individually, they each have merits; but taken wholly, they reveal more than their singular details. Not suprisingly, a lot of these “things”  have to do with some way with nature.

Although I’ve taken thousands of photos during my life, only a few of them are on the wall. This one is not because of the aesthetic, but because of it straightforward sympathy: It shows a good buddy, Dan Shaw, holding a handful of clams that one day long ago, we dug from the sandy shoals of Sebastian inlet. We had intended to use some of those for bait while surf fishing. If we didn’t catch fish, we at least had the clams to take home and steam. These clams and that moment are far gone, but by looking at the photo, I can remember that day and all the great times Dan and I had fishing and hanging out. We had a lot of laughs, and when we get together—geography has separated us—we still have fun. Dan’s a courageous guy, a person who would stand up for you in a fight. Do you know how rare that is nowadays?

This is a Mola as rendered by a Cuna (also Kuna) Indian woman in the San Blas Islands on the Caribbean coast of Panama. I was there once to write a story about water and diving and culture, and ended up riding in a cayuco with a kicker to a little coconut palm island where a small Cuna family lived. The matriarch sold me a couple of molas, cheap, since there was no middle man or transport invovled, just me and the mola, which also happened to be of fish. Then I snorkeled around their island—no one had tanks or a compressor–but it was okay, since the fringing reef was shallow. I saw a school of Caribbean reef squid, and they looked at me with human like eyes, before flying off through the water in elegant swoops. If only they had a backbone, I thought, they might be running things instead of us humans. Then again, maybe they are anyway.

This is probably as close to traditional art as I’m going to get. It’s a wonderful oil by Allison Watson, a talented and brilliant artist who lives in Jacksonville. Once she and artist Jim Draper came down with their kayaks, and I took them out to see the Blackwater Creek. It was in flood then, and we could paddle out of the river and through the swamp. Later, she and Jim went to their respective studios, and with photos taken of that day, created works of art from it all, a process I find transcendent. Do you know the energy of the soul that comes from being in the company of aritsts like that when they are contemplating their work from deep inside?

This piece did not come from that day, although it could have. It was a gift from Allison for spending my time guiding she and Jim. That’s the thing about real artists: They are whole enough, somewhere in their hearts, to communicate a truth beyond the ordinary. When sunlight hits this painting, the forest on the canvas mimics the one in real life, and the trees and water turn with the colors of the passing of the day.

This is a framed hand-drawn map of the old pirate city of Port Royal off the coast of Kingston, Jamaica. I went there once for the Discovery Channel because Port Royal had once been the shining, opulent jewel of the New World, and it was mostly because of the plunder of 17th century pirates. Then one day, an earthquake dumped the entire town into the sea. Archaeologists and even treasure salvers had been there since, and while the sunken city was off limits, we got special permission to dive because of the Discovery connection. I stumbled into a striking young archaeologist working in  dialpadated building in Port Royal, and she drew the map in preparation for a dive she offered to lead there.

Visitors have asked if this is a “treasure map”, and sometimes I tell them “yes”, because the richness of my experiences were wealthy beyond imagination. After the dives, we went to a little pub and drank Ting, a wonderful Jamaican softdrink that I can’t seem to ever find here. I learned a lot about the pirates, and came to appreciate how society has used outcasts like that to its advantages, over the centuries.Underwater, I floated over brick streets that pirates had walked, moved over the thresholds of doorways that had opened to homes and bars. I felt as if I was in a dream much of the time. Compared to all the toadyness and spineless twaddle in our modern world, there are far worst things a person can be than a pirate.

There are four snowy egrets in this artwork, and they are all doing different things against a backdrop of water and marsh, and to the aft, a hardwood swamp. The birds have exquisite details to their feathers, and most of all, they imply movement, energy, and flight. I watched as an artist who was a quadrapelegic painted this by holding a brush in his mouth. Carol Grimes, a very earnest and caring woman who helped facilitate an annual environmental award on behalf of her late husband, commissioned the painting for me as part of the award. It was a generous and heartfelt gesture, both for me as well as the artist. When he was finished with the painting, he looked at me and said: If I can do this, you can do anything. Don’t forget it. I promised him I wouldn’t, and in my darkest moments, I remember that promise, remember the way the egrets so gracefully flew out of the imagination of a man who couldn’t.

This is an oil my mom painted when she was a young woman. I looked at it on our wall back home when I was growing up all the time, but I could never figure it out. It shows a large earthen wall, steep, jutting up from the water, and a lone faceless woman, added almost as an afterthought. It has a brooding quality about it, although my mom was never one who brooded long. I think about that painting today, think about growing up where I did, with the encouragement and love I once had. I asked my mom once what the painting represented, and she just sort of blew it off, said she had copied it from a magazine photo. Yet, all my life, I think that it was so much more, a time-stop moment of her own young life when she was still a student in an art school down in Lakeland, back when her father was wealthy and the days and nights were gay and alive, and all was right with the world.

I want to tell my mom that I understand now, that the coming together of all the pieces makes it righteous for me, for those I care for. Memory, as poet Marge Piercy has told us, is the simplest form of prayer. And so that is the story of some of the stuff on my walls that I call art.

The forest below fell away into darkness, and we went down into it.

The fire break trail we hiked to get here had taken us along the edge of a broad, flat pasture occupied by a white wooden farmhouse with a tin roof, a few Palomino horses and a madly barking dog. The horses were fine looking and the dog was paranoid.

The trail of wild bahia and packed white sand was rimmed by a low field of saw palmettos and a narrow margin of small slash pines. Shiny blueberry bushes, a runt of a plant with tiny leaves, grew in the understory like well-tended bonsai. The pasture, fenced with hog wire, was just behind the pines.

It had rained last night and the imprints of animal tracks were crisp, as if a teacher had made them with a stamp for a class. The prints were mostly deer, but there was also the distinct mark of a large Florida black bear. Pad marks of its paws were so defined you could see the wrinkles in them. One of the pines had been bowed over and deeply scratched by a young male bear announcing itself. The tree had bled sap and now, amber-colored droplets of resin were frozen in mid-drip. The blueberry fruits, hard and reddish, would be ripe soon.

The trail vanished where the pasture ended; in its corner was a hunter’s deer stand. It was a durable plastic hutch propped up on metal pipes, looking like a guard tower at the edge of a penitentiary. It seemed a ridiculous human-made conceit sitting out here next to the thick subtropical forest until I looked into the dark slits. During seasonal hunts, rife barrels would be looking back out.

Unaccountably, I sensed a certain dread, maybe the fear of an animal between the time he hears a report of a rifle and feels the deep penetration of a bullet in his flank or neck or, if he’s lucky, his head. Better to go quick than to drag your wounded pelt through the woods for miles. Maybe it was my own fear, perhaps in thinking the desire to kill a deer was just a sublimated urge to shoot me, Steve, or some other shaggy, bearded granola stumbling about at the edge of the woods. It struck me that I was becoming as paranoid as the farm dog.

I thought of the bright well-tended pasture above and the dim tangle of vegetation below, thought of how it illustrated the contrasts of our landscape here in Florida. To most, the open field would be a great relief, a symbol of progress and inviolability, proof that human dominance over the rest of nature was unquestionably virtuous. That’s the way Florida had been seen for the last five hundred years by its colonists. Trees were measured in board feet, rivers and lakes in the way they could water livestock or be drained off to allow soggy land to be settled

A few have seen it otherwise, like the 18th century naturalist William Bartram who spent a lot of time in Florida mucking about in this same watershed, a bit to the east of here. Bartram saw God’s creation realized in nature, from the plants to the wildlife, and insisted that humans had no more standing in this cosmos than an Ixia or a Pitcher Plant. He reveled in the hidden and the cryptic, saw wisdom and instruction in wild places.

As for me, the pasture and all it represented was monotony, a place robbed of its hidden discovery—one giant loaf of white bread with precision-cut slices, full of tiny holes of air. And so I was glad when the path ended and we left the high plateau for the darker woods. I saw a narrow animal trail through the thick palmettos, and hoped it would lead us at least part of the way to the swamp below. I took it and Steve followed

The higher land had likely been a seabottom terrace in one of Florida’s distant incarnations, and — when the sea finishes rising in another few centuries — may yet be again. As we went, it occurred to me the slope we were following could have led a neolithic fish down into a deeper abyss.

On an oceanographic expedition once, I rode in a submersible to 3,000 feet, watching as the sealife became more primitive as we went deeper. On the bottom, we saw the proto-ancestors of modern fish, glowing and blinking bioluminescence in the perpetual darkness, weird spatulate heads and tentacles not yet bred out by the efficiency of the lighted world above. I thought of the Florida swamp that way, as a sort of Devonian epoch where ferns and mosses ruled the earth, and humans were intruders from a time not yet invented. This Devonian had trees, of course, but many were bald cypress that jutted up out of the humus, broaches of soft feather-like needles at the end of tall sticks. It was easy to think of them as giant ferns.

The animal trail ended soon enough and we had to push through a fretwork of serrated palm fronds and the spindly branches of myrtles and scrub oak. With the tangled brush and the steep descent of the slope, we had abandoned any hope of stealth and were bumbling through the woods like wounded animals. Briars of blackberry and the large thorns of the Smilax vine pulled at me, and webs of tiny crab spiders stuck to my head when I wasn’t quick enough to duck under them.

From somewhere in the swamp below, a woodpecker’s beak hit a hollow trunk again and again. I think of how an ivory-billed was last seen in Florida in the 1920’s in the upper basin of this larger watershed. It was living in the swampy bottomland of old growth hardwoods, illusive even then. Slow growing trees like cypress sustained it, especially when they matured. But hardwoods like this were also favored by the loggers, who had been very thorough in their work

I can’t imagine that place being any wilder than the one we were were entering today. The woodpecker thumping today sounded like the pileated—a look-alike cousin of the ivory-billed, and a bird adaptive enough to still exist.

We moved through the woods without talking, and when I wasn’t staggering into branches, I was snapping deadfall under my feet. I took comfort in knowing the ruckus would scare any self-respecting viper within hundreds of feet. I remember once walking soundlessly along the soft spongy bottom of a dry swamp, and almost stepping on a giant moccasin curled up on the exposed root ball of a sabal palm. Its body was as large as my forearm and its eyes were alert and agile, little windows that glowed with the light of a pre-human past. I carefully stepped around it, and it carefully allowed me to do so.

Today, with our lack of stealth, I imagined myself snake-proof. The snake least likely to flee from us was the pygmy rattler, an exquisite little reptile with an intricate crosshatch pattern on its body. It was fearless but small and its body held little venom. Every time I have seen a pygmy, a woman hiking with me has spotted it first. To me, they were all striking, vivacious women of various ages, and I vaguely wondered if female aesthetics had anything to do with the wakefulness of snakes. Were they invisible to me, or was I invisible to them?

Gators are usually back in here too. Like snakes, they are the other great dread that helps keep the wilderness of Florida free from hoards of recreational hikers, all tricked out in their sporty L.L. Bean apparel. Since the swamp was now nearly dry, the gators that usually hunt it would have moved closer to the creek edge where it would be easier to snatch fish, turtles, wading birds and smaller gators. Even if one was still around, our commotion would likely disturb it. Only once have I ever had a gator charge towards me, and then it was only trying to get away and I happened to be between it and deeper water.

I thought of the half-mad conquistadors busting along in their armor here 500 years ago, clanking like giant tincans in their fruitless search for gold and glory in the Florida swamps, sweating and cursing and nearly always lost. I figured it was a miracle they saw any animals at all.

Of course, there was simply more of everything then—wildlife, water, wetlands. Panthers were here; so were great flocks of Carolina parakeets. But how fully did they see it all ? If nature is only an inconvenience to a quest, there’s scant room for communion. If the quest is to exploit a resource, the best way to do that is to dig and drain, slice and hack. Maybe it gets mapped or drawn, but only for that utility.

Steve, more prepared than I, as usual, had on long khaki pants The pants were Velcroed just above the knees to make them short if he wanted, but of course, he wouldn’t want to today. I wore shorts because my legs moved better under them, no restraint on the knees. But the downside was obvious: Already the briars and low branches had left scratches across my exposed skin and my calves were trailing lines of bright red blood.

We knew there was a creek somewhere down here. There was also at least two springs, maybe more, and we were hoping to find at least one of them. The springs were so remote that neither were marked on the quad map. That idea was enormously appealing to me, and perhaps more than anything, the notion of it motivated me to go on walks like this.

In a real way, I could still imagine that pure wilderness existed here in Florida. And if I found it, its wisdom would tell me things that I could not otherwise know.

Steve is crossing the creek now, balancing on a downed log to do so, and I follow.

Capt. Victoria guides her boat carefully out of the canal cut into the ollitic limerock of Stock Island, headed for a rare place where ancient reefs and mangrove islands conspire to create an Other World.

I haven’t seen Victoria for three years, but her sensibilities are so closely attuned to my own that it seems that just yesterday I was standing next to her at the center console, headed out into the Gulf, anticipating most anything. We’ve done some cool things together over the years, and it’s always come back to the water, that great magical swatch of turquoise that ebbs and flows around the archipelego of the Keys.

The islands here in the Gulf backcountry mimic the “spur and groove” configuration of the Atlantic reefs, berms of limerock and mangrove with gulleys of sand between them. The leeward gulf keys are less known and far less visited than those of the windward, Atlantic shore, and that alone makes them immensely attractive to me.

With us today are Susan, a publisher of a lifestyle magazine in the Keys, Christian, an attorney specializing in maritime law, and Michelle, my friend from central Florida. Christian’s the newbie, flying here from Seattle to join the board of Reef Relief.

I too have been invited on the board, and last night, we were at a party with other Reef Relief folks, including Sir Peter Anderson, the Secretary General of the Conch Republic.   Key West is still that kind of place, where wonderful farces such as this not only are tolerated, but actually celebrated, as rich as any mythology of place ever was.

I spent Christmas eve on this strange island once, shooting pool in the Green Parrot bar with a black Rasta guy, dressed in a Santa suit, dreads and all. Then early the next morning, while all of Key West was sleeping in, I headed out for the mangroves with Victoria.

Safely out of the canal, Victoria trims the tabs of the motor and pushes the throttle forward, and we are skimming over water as transparent as air. We zoom towards the bridge carrying the Overseas Highway, and once under it, we all howl like wolves, letting our voices reverberate in the concrete tunnel. Victoria’s into having fun, no matter what she does, and that’s a quality I greatly admire. Once a very good poet traveled with Victoria into the backcountry, and then came back and wrote a poem “Rounding Ballast Key” about her and the experience.

Out of the bridge, we glide across the shallow hardbottom, aiming for a clutch of offshore mangrove keys. Victoria’s been a wilderness guide here for 34 years, and it fits her perfectly. As we approach the mangroves, she throttles back and we cruise around the edges at idle speed so as not to disturb any of the wading birds that nest here. Victoria grew up in Key West, and points out where she once had a tree house on the island, riding out here at age ten in a boat her dad built for her.

Ospreys are overhead, and I notice their plumage is much more vibrant than the ones I know back home. Our boat spooks a large southern stingray, and it swims away undulating its wings like a giant underwater bird. Rays fascinate me, and I remember spending some time once off Big Pine Key at night when the full moon was so bright that we could actually see a school of spotted eagle rays as they glided under us.

Today, we head for the “Mermaid Pool”, a little tidal creek inside one of the mangrove islands. Playing the straight man, I ask Victoria if the mermaids will be here, and smiling, she says: They’re always here when I’m there.

We are inside the Great White Heron National Wildlife Refuge, which stretches to the west and north of Key West , up into the Gulf of Mexico. There are hundreds of such islands here, from a few square yards to many, and while each is defined by the arching prop roots of the red mangroves, they all have their differences, too. Michelle and I have scuba dived a number of times off Key Largo, and Susan dives down here. She tells me she now sees the lion fish out on the local reefs, a saltwater aquarium import from the Pacific. It’s a beautiful animal, but its loaded with neuro-toxins and its sting can pack a powerful punch.

Inside the tidal creek, Victoria noses the boat into a natural hurricane hole where we tie off to a mangrove. On the bottom is the berm of limestone that was a paleo- coral reef, and today the top of it is covered with a hardbottom community of sponges and bryozoans and algaes in the form of little feathers and trees.

We slip easily over the side of her boat with our mask, snorkels and fins, taking care not to disturb the water. We know better, but Victoria tells us of folks who simply like to announce their food chain preeminence by splashing loudly into tidal creeks and onto reefs. “ How would you like it if someone splashed into your living room unannounced?” Victoria’s an amazing person, tenacious as hell but also gentle enough to care about the consequences of our visit. “We’re guests out here,” she says, smiling. “So we ought to be polite about it.”

As soon as I’m in the water, I head down a side creek under low hanging mangrove branches, a place too tight for a boat. The Spanish were here 400 years ago, and the Calusas long before them, but none had the otherworldly ability to see underwater as we do today.

It is quiet down here of course, the only sound that of the one the snapping shrimp makes as its flicks its tail in a series of repetitive clicks. I hold my breath and swim to the 15 foot bottom, past the tips of the prop roots covered with blue and red sponges, down to the old paleo reef itself. The antenna of a large spiny lobster waves at me from a burrow, and a queen angel fish flips her body sideways as if to show me her bright colors. Nearby is a mound of star coral, and I look closely at the flower-like indentations each polyp has created for itself.

I resurface and see the juvenile versions of many reef fish hiding back under the prop roots, watch as a school of mangrove snapper barrel through. I look down at the bottom and see a bright red starfish. I think of the poem Tennessee William once wrote when he lived in Key West: “I want to go under the sea in a diving-bell/And return to the surface with ominous wonders to tell.” I’ve gone under, except without a diving bell or even a tank this time, and have found myself in solution with all that is righteous and true–perhaps even ominous.

Down I go again, and this time, the underside of the earth the mangroves are growing on opens up like a large organic cave. I poke inside as far as I can and see a basket sized hole letting in a bright ray of sun, a sort of natural skylight. I weave my way through a side branch of the creek, periodically descending to see what might be hiding down in the old reef. Susan is following, while the others have taken another channel, leading who knows where.

I take my head out of the water and remove my mask. Key West is only three miles away but the raucous sounds of Duval Street might as well be on another planet. There is peace out here, just as there is back on the trails I know at home, and for this, I am thankful.

Susan and I fin back towards the others, and we climb aboard Victoria’s boat and she hoses us each down with fresh water. It is wonderfully exhilarating, and I realize the stimulation has nothing to do with the cold water. I feel myself finally breathing fully, inhaling the scent of sun-warmed mangrove and ancient paleo reef and the camraderie of a day well spent in a wild and natural place. This is the sea-driven geography and the heart-driven people that poets write of.

When I finally exhale, it is deep and gloriously free of any of the nervousness of the human-built world. I keep the memory of it close by and—with me now—it skims over the turquoise water as if skating on glass, returning on a falling tide driven low by the rise of the moon.

I slide my kayak into the dark water just after dawn on the massive Lake Jesup and paddle towards Bird Island. The shore here is mostly cattails, native bulrush and the giant exotic reed called Phragmites. Two black guys with a small kicker-powered boat and fishing rods are getting ready to launch, but otherwise the ramp here on the western shore is quiet.

Jesup is pretending to be a mirror just for now, and I take full advantage, skimming over it in my little boat. Gators are thick here—Jesup is said to have one of the densest populations in Florida—and on the flat glossy surface that is the lake, I count well over a dozen, both in front and behind my boat. The really big ones, with tar black heads, hang there much longer than their smaller brethren—much longer, really, than I would prefer them to hang.

Their heads are all that give them away, since the rest of the bodies are submerged, noggins looking like giant gnarly gravy boats—only the nose tip and the eyes exposed with a bit of a slope in between. Jesup has a reputation for edgy gators, and I’m figuring it’s because there are simply so many of them. Then again, the lake itself is almost completely cut off from the rest of the St. Johns River. Pollutants have been building here over the last 50 years, and the disruption to the endocrine system of the gators via the toxins is not a good thing.

Generally, male gators so afflicted have less testosterone, and are becoming less virle and fertile, and I’m figuring this has got to piss them off. What’s the point in being a bull gator if you can’t swagger about the lake like a car salesman in a singles bar ? Maybe like other over-compensating males who run out and buy Hummers, they just can’t help themselves. Whatever the reason, at least one boat and one kayak have been attacked here, and I’m a bit wary today. It’s the first time I’ve ever packied away a pistol in my kayak.

Bird Island on the silver gray morning Lake of Jesup

I paddle into the rising sun and under the massive two-mile long bridge that takes an expressway across the middle of the lake. Finally, I near Bird Island, with the low sun backlighting it, the island and all the water around it seems almost slate gray. It is as if someone had tinted one of those old black and white photos with silver and white, eliminating all the other colors.

As I approach the island, I see that a higher rise in its middle holds a hammock of old sabal palms. The hammock itself is surrounded by a field of scrub-like plants and reeds which cascade down to the water. To the east, I see what seems to be dozens of old pilings from a dock. When I look through my binoculars, I realize they are all wading birds, standing just offshore the islands in inches of water.

The sun rises higher in the sky and to the north of the lake, I can still see thick mist in coves and sloughs along that shore. Within a hundred feet of the edge of the island, I slow and paddle cautiously so as not to scare the thousands of birds who are living and nesting here. There are white ibis, and glossies, tricolor herons, and great blues. There are snowies and wood storks and cattle egrets. There are little gallinules with their bright red becks. Ospreys circle over head, watching for a movable breakfast. Once a mullet jumps next to my kayak. In the distance, a very large animal with a fish-like tail splashes in the water, and I have no idea what it could be. The chattering of the birds is raucous, the sort of pure avian joy usually found in rookeries.

I circle the island and then on the eastern shore, see a wide flat opening in the reeds and pull my kayak into it. In the distance is the palm hammock and I walk to it. Both John and William Bartram camped here when exploring the St. Johns in 1765; Later in 1837, a Lt. R. H. Peyton was directed to make a map of the St. Johns upstream of Lake Monroe in Sanford. Like all good Indian-fighting soldiers, Peyton ignored any local name for the lake and instead christened it for the general of his garrison, Jesup. Peyton reported many birds nesting here, including the strange spoonbilled ones with the pink plumage, the one the Seminoles called “Hololo”.

(Peyton wanted to also call this “Circle Island, since it was symmetrical, but the presence of all the wading birds—then and now—prevailed, and it was mapped as Bird.)

I walk to the hammock of palms and marvel as it rises up from the surrounding edge. There’s no scientific way to measure the life of these palms since they have no rings like other trees. Relying on archival descriptions, historians elsewhere have found such palms to be 400 and more years old. Both Petyon and the Bartrams likely spent time in this hammock, resting under the same trees.

I wonder how the landscape can communicate secrets to us; I figure this one has plenty to tell. But nothing’s firing at the moment. Am guessing that’s life—relationships fire when the time is right, and not on command. Why wouldn’t a sacred place in the landscape function the same way?

The relief here is made so by millions of shells, collected by the pre-Columbians who once camped on the island. Like most middens along Florida rivers, the primary shell is the banded mystery snail. Back at water’s edge, I had picked up a few of those snails newly shucked by the birds, and had noticed the distinct bands around the tawny knobby shell.

Around me on the little island, elderberry are coming into bloom, and marshmallow are putting out gorgeous pink hibiscus-like flowers. At the shore, water locust, gator and camphor weeds and wildflowers are thriving. No Hololo’s, but otherwise can’t complain.

Back in the kayak, I head around the windward side of the island, where most of the hard packed sand distinguishes the bottom from the muck that characterizes so much of the rest of the lake. The river bottom to the west is six to eight feet deep with muck, enough to hide Jimmy Hoffa and every hit that Tony Soprano and his family ever made..

Bird Island, geology tells us, was born of subsidence—not of the island, natch, but of all the land around it. History still has secrets here: Parts of giant ground sloths and whales have turned up in muck around the lake shore, and endemic little fish live in at least one of the springs still flowing at its edge. When the Bartrams and the soldiers came through, the St. Johns only nicked off a corner of Jesup. But it was enough to allow the ever-flowing river to circulate through the great splay of water, and then to exit, just as any good river would want to do.

Now, with berms and low bridges at SR 46 blocking most of that flow, the lake filled with nutrients from farms, septic tanks, and stormwater creeks. Today, it is not tannic like the rest of the St. Johns system, but a light green, as if it is one giant vat of pea soup.

A sign back at the ramp had warned both of amoebas (which will tend to swim up your ear canals and dissolve your brain), and algae, which can have its own toxic properties. Lake Jesup, despite all of its glorious history, is what happens when eningeers–via their exuberant road building—are allowed to run amuck (no pun). A restoration is underway, but like most eco-fixes, it could have been avoided long ago if the folks with money had listened to the folks with good common sense.

For now, there is the Lake, the island, the words of Bartram and Peyton, and the grand commotion of the nesting birds. And for now, like always, there is hope, although it is that rarefied, convoluted hope that is special to Florida.

The wind is now picking up, and the water from the west creates a great fetch. Ånd the waves on my return journey back to the ramp roll towards me with great determination. And I do what I know, I do all that I can, literally and metaphorically:

I Keep paddling.

We launch in a shallow Florida cove just before sunset, excited with the possibility of having fire rise from the water.

Clumps of turtle grass float at the surface, and black mangroves hug the shore, distinct air roots poking up under the bushes like black pencils. Bobby is in a single canoe and the rest of us—Michelle, her daughter Alex, and a few more are in kayaks. We scuttle about until everyone is ready and then we paddle out into the Haulover, an old canal that links the Mosquito Lagoon to the north with the Indian River to the south. Long legged herons and egrets hunt near the mangroves, each a study in precision.

The fire in the water we are hunting is bioluminescence, less of a burn than a dazzle of cold blue-green light. Although this happens in the night seas worldwide, it’s more realized in some places than others. In Puerto Rico, Phosphorescent Bay is named for the phenomenon. In the Galapagos, I’ve dived into Tagus Cove late at night and the bio-light there consumed me. I guess it’s been taking place in this lagoon for thousands of years, but we’ve only recently caught on.

Guides will take people to such places, but I usually like to go it alone, or with a few good friends. The risks may be a bit greater, but the surprises always seem somehow more real.

I paddle out into the deeper canal and the surface around me becomes suspiciously flat, as if something immense is moving just below. My little boat wobbles gently. Within seconds, the back of a manatee materializes a few feet away, its gray, barnacled body like a gigantic sausage.

A shaggy snout gently breaks the water, human-like eyes deeply set, each inside a starburst of wrinkles. It glances at me, inhales. From inside its massive body, the air resonates as if in a cave. Then it sinks back down. I look over at Michelle, smiling broadly, without guile.

Despite its size, the coming and going of such an animal was incredibly delicate, almost like a disassembling of molecules. It could have flipped me in a heartbeat if it had wanted. I am exhilarated, and also deeply thankful I am still upright.

We paddle north where the canal meets the Mosquito Lagoon. It is twilight and the primitive landscape is golden. Men are fishing and drinking beer on the shore, many of them fried after hours of it. A really bad country music song celebrating the glories of redneck women blares from a pick-up truck. There is a small mangrove island offshore and we paddle towards it, riding a gentle evening breeze. As we go, the gray dorsels of a pod of bottlenose dolphins slice through the water nearby.

The sun vanishes and a dark cloud bank on the horizon begins to shoot out jagged spires of lightening, soundlessly. I look back to the land, now a half mile away, and see most of the fishermen packing to leave. The music shuts off and what remains is the slosh of our hulls, the cry of wading birds, the muffled sighs of anticipation.

The lagoon is encircled by public land; like the manatee, it’s a relic of what used to be. The landscape here was protected decades ago when the government bought a massive swatch of coastline to buffer its rocket launching at the Kennedy Space Center. In a strange twist, the ambitions of the future have preserved the past. Bobby, a cardiologist by day, sometimes brings his flats boat here to fish for sea trout and reds that school over the sea grasses and sandy shoals.

The cold light remains hidden and I find myself wondering if it will actually turn on tonight at all. We have brought Cyclamen sticks and we snap and hang them around our necks to keep track of each other. This seems a simple task, but I botch it and, for the moment, the lanyard tightens on my forehead. Michelle and Alex laugh good-naturedly at this. There are few people who would appreciate the immediacy and enchantment of this moment, and I am so glad to be here with them.

We float in the lagoon, letting the gentle evening breeze push us. It is almost completely dark now. We are all silhouettes with light sticks, finer details lost to the night. Suddenly I hear Alex’s voice from somewhere nearby, as if announcing the arrival of a special guest: “It’s happening.”

I look over to where I know Michelle to be. As she moves her paddle through the water, it glows dim with turquoise and she lets out a long, low wow.

I turn in my seat, watching as my own blade draws up the cold light. I hear murmurs rise around me, voices slightly higher and full of wonder, and I realize everyone is doing a version of the same thing, creating light from water. The alchemy has taken time to cook, but now it has us in its grip.

We paddle back toward the canal, where marine life is more concentrated. The lagoon water under us is so clear we can see through it, can watch as the grasses on the bottom glow with the light. Small fish and then larger ones, down deep, are outlined in blue-green.

In the canal, sunken logs effervesce with color. Suddenly, the form of a massive alligator swims under us, odd, tiny arms from its body swishing the blue. It’s amazingly graceful, and, like the wading birds, its movements are precise.

Crabs drift along, glowing, sometimes bumping into my hull, hard calcium shells clanking oddly against plastic. Alex cups her hand in the water, and the liquid she holds sparkles as if electrified. In the distance, a dolphin arches out of the water, bringing a massive column of light with it.

I know, intellectually, that tiny, single-celled plankton called dinoflagellates do this, absorbing energy from the sun and releasing it to confuse predators at night, twisting and turning in the water. But that doesn’t explain the full magic of it to my senses.

Another cove splays from the canal and we paddle into it. It is shallow and loaded with great schools of mullet. When Bobby and others move far ahead they spook the mullet and the fish leap from the water in great explosions of energy like low-level skyrockets. Sometimes, in their jumps they whack into our boats; sometimes, into us. I look down, see a blue-green stingray move next to my hull, its wings undulating as if it is flying in the water.

Above, stars have filled the void over the cloud banks, and now a meteor traces a line through them. A collective murmur rises at once from us, an exhalation of natural awe. It seems as if the sky has split in two, no clear line left any more between it and the water around us. And now we have stopped being writers and doctors and whatever else we are and have become kids, alive only for this moment, in this place.

I drift some more and it vaguely occurs to me that stardust started it all, showering this earth with its energy so long ago, and now, many molecules later, here we are in a dark Florida lagoon, watching it happen all over again. Like the dinoflagellates, we twist and turn in the night, glowing blue-green ourselves, a theater of creation in the mangroves.

We are all quiet now, and, soaked with the energy of the stars, as fully conversant as we will ever be.

I grew up in a home on a dirt street. One day, the street would be paved and the rows of houses would become a neighborhood. But this was still the country, and things happened slowly.

There was a large corn field behind our house, and behind that, a state farmer’s market and several large packing houses. In the summertime, in my early teens, I would make a few extra bucks loading watermelons onto tractor trailers from the smaller flatbed and pick-up trucks the local farmers used to bring their crops to market.

With my neighbor Rick, we walked miles out into the countryside, zigzagging across farm fields, through isolated tracks of woods with little streams running through them, and down long winding roads under thick canopies of hardwoods. Sometimes, we would see old farm homes hidden back away in the forest; sometimes, we would pass open pastures with horses, maybe a few cows. We seldom carried water or a backpack, and had no stated intent except to explore.

I was intrigued by bugs then, and had even bought a book about them. Sometimes, I would find strange ornate bugs, like a rhino beetle, and if they were dead, I’d bring them home to put in little dioramas I made for them out of shoe boxes. Most of the birds were so common I didn’t need an ID guide. They were sparrows and robins, and sometimes cardinals and starlings. Rarely, I saw a great blue heron hidden down in a little thickly wooded creek that spilled out of a lake. In early fall, Canada and snow geese would migrate, flying over in great V formations. Their cries were haunting, even then, since they meant for me the end of warmer, boy-friendly summer weather, and the beginning of the cold season. But they were harbingers, too, marking time visually.

I knew the names of some of the fish, since we had an intimate relationship with them from the other end of a fishing line. There were striped bass, which we knew as rockfish, and hardheads, and spot and catfish. If we were in tidal creeks, there were blue crabs swimming through; sometimes there were ‘doublers’ in which the molted, soft shelled female held on tight to the larger male as they mated. Instinct for that was so strong they held fast even when we scooped them up with long-handled nets and dumped them into bushel baskets. We ate the crabs, steamed with Old Bay seasoning and dry mustard sprinkled on them, and Mom cooked the rock fish, usually with strips of bacon and with butter. For most who grew up in the country, wildlife could also mean food; it was no different for our family.

We roamed the countryside, Rick and I, because we felt a need to do so. There was nothing for certain we were ever sure we would find, but we always looked for new ways of seeing, of new things to see. Following creeks upstream was full of discovery since they always led to lakes and the lakes to more streams, each with its own wooded furrows cut into the earth. Sometimes, I carried a knife in a sheath, but I never had anything to use it for.

We lived on a peninsula, the flat slab of land that held the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a spit of Virginia, and all of the state of Delaware. We had strong territorial country prejudices, and thought of Delaware and Virginia as states not hardly worth knowing about. But that peninsula isolated them as it isolated us, almost as fully as an island. As a very young boy, I remember riding a long ferry across the choppy Chesapeake to get to Baltimore to the west, since there was yet no bay bridge. We did the same to the south, where a much longer bay-bridge tunnel system eventually spanned the great mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

The ferries had kept us safe in so many ways, had kept anyone from driving over a bridge just because they wanted to. Taking a ferry required time and money, and it was a wondrous deterrent to expediency. Later, when the bridges came—except for a few old timers—we welcomed them. We had absolutely no idea of the cultural and environmental impacts this new accessibility would eventually have on the integrity of our long-ignored shore, a place Harper’s magazine a hundred years earlier had called “the last peninsula of the Lost and the Vague.” We would become diluted, our accents washed out, our behaviors less certain, more influenced by the outside world beyond the Bay. And then the great new mass of people living in the watershed of the Bay begin to transform it.

Even as the tidewater nature of Shore living infused nearly every moment of my life, I took it for granted, expecting it to always be there. But now, with all the decades in between for perspective, I miss it terribly, and I miss the speciated and passionate people the Shore had once created. Accessibility spelled an end to most of them, just as it did to the wide open countryside. Now when I think of my life as a young boy approaching manhood, I can imagine no place finer to have lived than under the broad skies over the flat terrain carved by the tidal rivers and creeks on the lower Eastern Shore.

I think now of those geese flying south for the winter, and instead of having an image, I hear those soulful, primal sounds they left in their wake as they soared across the broad winter Shore sky. As a boy, I was wistful for all that the flight of those birds took with them when they left, and I am wistful now.

And so, I keep walking through the woods. Except not with my friend Rick, and not in an environment that is temperate. I walk now for miles in the hammocks and flatwoods, the marsh and swamp of Florida to discover new things, and to remember in my heart, the ones I once found. I walk in celebration of discovery, and in the evocation of people and place. I walk to remember.

It took a journey to Nicaragua about 15 years ago to remind me how important the great naturalist Archie Carr and his work had been to the preservation of wild places—wild places in Florida, in Nicaragua, everywhere. I was there to write a magazine story, and although I had a working understanding of ecology, it didn’t dawn on me to use a single species to help others understand concepts like animal migration, habitat protection, and the need to use science to “manage” our natural world.

Dr. Jeanne Mortimer, who had studied herpetology under Carr at UF, was working there at the time with the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. The Miskitos, known locally as the “Turtle People” because they hunted the sea turtles, were involved in a project to set up a massive marine preserve along the coast. Rather than excluding native people from such management plans, this one meant to more fully include them. Poor countries like Nicaragua have little funding to help support such high-minded strategies; when you’re hungry, a turtle is no different than a grouper or a lobster or a queen conch. It provides immediate food, and for a certain overseas market, cold cash.

“Sea turtles are very political,” Mortimer told me one day in Puerto Cabezas, pushing her matted blonde hair back from her face. It was hot and we were both sweating. We were having lunch in a little bodega with no windows, and a barefoot young man tried to sell us some green turtle eggs. The egg vendor didn’t faze Mortimer. “It’s a poor country,” she says. “People have to eat.” By night, this Puerto Cabezas was lawless and marked by gunfire. By day, I would walk the dusty dirt main street and see shop owners picking out maggots from their supplies of dry rice.

As for the “politics” of the sea turtle, the biologist explained that a species that migrated such vast distances to feed, to breed, and to nest was a working example of ecology. “Turtles depend on a multitude of geographic places to survive,” Mortimer said. Despite the turtle hunting along the Miskito Coast, it was more likely that very wealthy people elsewhere were contributing to the demise of the sea turtle by building seafront homes on beaches where the animal had historically nested, and polluting the waters in which the turtles spent most of their lives.

Fastforward to today and to an unexpected email I just received from Ray Willis. Ray’s a good ol’ Florida boy who also happens to have a doctorate in archaeology. I met Ray a few years ago at Silver Glen Springs when producing a state PBS film on the early naturalist Billy Bartram and his travels to Florida. I had earlier called the USFS office and asked if there was anyone there who could speak to the history of Florida on camera. A woman with a soft drawl told me the entire USFS archaeological staff would be glad to help me out. And then she chuckled. The entire archaeological staff turned out to be Ray.

We walked around the edge of Silver Glen Spring that day, and Ray helped me understand the lifeways of the native people who had lived there long before the Europeans arrived. Ray had always struck me as someone who cared very much about Florida, and who wanted others to understand a state that was so often misunderstood.

Ray’s new email told of a situation that was both a dilemma—and a blessing. A little Cracker-style cabin and 46 acres of land in a corner of the Ocala National Forest had been donated to the USFS last year by Dr. Tom Carr, a noted physicist in his own right and the surviving brother of Archie. The tin-roofed cabin near Lake Nicotoon was iconic: It was built by the parents of Tom and Archie when they first moved to Florida in 1938. Subsequently, three generations of Carrs had spent a great deal of time there.

Although Archie later had his own home on Wewa Pond in Micanopy, this Cracker cabin gifted him, his wife Marjorie and his children with the opportunity to deeply experience the nuances of the Florida scrub and hammocks without the filter of civilization. But now the cabin was dilapidated and in need of the sort of urgent help that the USFS could not provide. Ray wondered if a “Friends of the Carr Cabin” might be formed to rise to the moment.

Not ironically, Archie earned his doctorate in zoology from UF the year before the cabin was built. Although he later traveled widely through Latin America following his beloved sea turtles on the “windward roads” of distant shores, the little cabin in the Ocala woods could be thought of the place where the spirit and ethic of the Carr family was nurtured. Of the need for preservation, Archie once wrote: “If this difficult saving is done, it will (be done) because man is a creature who preserves things that stir him.”

And that is what this little cracker cabin in the woods needs today—for the people who were stirred by Archie’s legacy to come to its rescue.

Certainly, I can be counted among those because Archie’s writing has surely stirred me. When I was researching my book on the St. Johns River a few years ago, I sifted through hundreds of articles and research abstracts on the river and its science. Archie’s insight on the St. Johns stood out like a wild river iris in a dark swamp because it both moved and humored me. And it also did what every great teacher wants the students of the world to do—it made me think. Archie was not just a good teacher; he was a courageous man who broke away from the herd, and that’s an increasingly rare trait in our modern Florida.

And so, today, the ideals of “conservation biology” once developed by Archie and others have come home to roost. Like his wide-roaming sea turtles, they have migrated between Bartram, Silver Glen Springs, Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, Sanford, and now Nicotoon Lake in the Ocala National Forest. The little Carr cabin in the woods hasn’t moved an inch over the last 75 years, of course. But the ideas born there have been around the world uncounted times.

And like a star you wish on at night as a kid, this little dilapidated physical structure provides a steady beacon in our crazy, ever-shifting modern world —and it does so as a place where the very best part of the human spirit, caring and imagination reside.

It’s the sort of illumination that anyone who cares about our besieged natural Florida can hardly do without.

Puzzle Lake captured us again, luring us here for the weekend. Odd, but folks sometimes go to excessive lengths to keep from traveling through this stretch of the St. Johns River. And here we were actively seeking it out, preparing to revel again in its mystification. We earlier had studied a topo chart and packed a compass, but we carried no map since—really—they do little good here. Under a kayak you can feel a river, especially a slow moving blackwater one, and if you pay attention, it will show you the way.

I have known of other paddlers to navigate these more remote reaches of the river. But their necks were perpetually bent in the GPS Crouch, a condition in which the eyes look down to see digital numbers and images on a little screen and nothing more. That’s the malaise of our post-industrial age, I guess, this odd paralysis of spirit in which we actually trust technology more than our own senses.

Although we would paddle back out tomorrow, my friend Michelle and I rode deep in to Puzzle with Tree, the Vietnam vet who’s been squatting out here in his little camp on the prairie ever since the state escorted him out of his last squatting site on the Econlockhatchee. (See earlier post on Tree & Puzzle). His prairie camp—far more easily spotted than his previous home tucked away in the hammock—only lasted for a few months before the law found him. Now he was getting ready to break down his camp here, too, and we had come to watch him go.

Today, Tree is with a friend, April, a gentle-spirited woman who teaches swimming at a private school for a living. She has known tree for years, since she and her friends first stumbled across him back on the Econ. April is in a black two-piece bathing suit and is deeply tanned. Tree is in his usual uniform of cut-off’s and rubber sandals, accessorized with a floppy camo hat. He bungies our kayaks to his motor boat and into the lake we go, traveling upstream on the St. Johns from where we put in at SR 46 east of Sanford, crunching along at the speed of four mph, watching the day slowly reveals itself.

We will of course, paddle back by ourselves in the morning under the 95 F degree Florida sun, baking like clams over the coals on the simmering prairie during the five hour journey. But for now, we simply relax and enjoy the rare treat of a motorized pull, watching as the black-eyed susans and the cerulean skyflowers push out from the tops of the low, black marly banks. And do you know that the wet southern prairie warmed by the sun has a scent to it that is at once primal and sweet ?

Moorhens with white beaks run like a wind-up toys wound too tight, and red-winged blackbirds call from the maidencane and duck potato. At one corner, we come upon a flock of nearly 200 black skimmers, their pipe-like orange beaks marking them distinctively. Mullet leap into the air like large flat silver pebbles tossed into a pond, skipping two, three, even four times. We pass one lone fisherman at anchor under an umbrella, and two zooming airboats, and that’s it for river traffic.

The river here is shallow and so we ground a few times on shoals, Michelle and I helping to push off with our kayak paddles, refloating Tree’s small v-bottom metal boat in just inches of water.

About 90 minutes of this takes us to within sight of the black POW flag that Tree flies over his camp. From there, we unleash the bungies and paddle in by ourselves.

The camp of wood and fabric and tarps will come down in the morning, but for now, we set up our own tents nearby and then scout around. Tree takes April in his boat and tries to make it south to Bear Island, which is really a large midden covered with old persimmon and sugar hackberry trees. But our prolonged drought has left much of the route high and dry, and they will end up turning back before they reach it.

While Tree tries for Bear, Michelle and I walk to the top of a perfectly formed hill bulging up from the flat dry prairie behind the camp. Like Bear, it too is a midden, but here in the marsh, it is covered with grasses and sedges rather than hardwoods. The bulge rises a good 15 feet into a gentle-sloping mound and the summit gives us a superb view of the rest of the flat marsh, including a much larger midden barely a mile to the west. About ten miles to the north, we could make out the tiny bridge that was SR 46, floating on the horizon like a mirage.

Pre-Columbian Native Americans had lived here on these middens in the marsh for thousands of years, and the detritus under our feet was the residue of their lives—the ever-present banded mystery snail shells, the apple snail, animal and fish bones, and a multitude of clay pot shards.

From our catbird seat atop the mound, we looked down at the river as it carved its way in slow motion through the prairie, sun moving low in the sky and backlighting the bank of low cumulus to the west. Like the clouds over the Glades, they were pumped up by the richness of the hydrological cycle, infused with moisture from the streaks of marsh and water below. The sun moved lower and the light changed, animating the clouds as if they were all in one long procession of half-dreamed images marching soundlessly across the flat tropical floodplain.

The old naturalist Billy Bartram made it upstream to this “lake” during his first visit to Florida in 1764, and thinking he had dead-ended into the headwaters of the St. Johns, turned around. Others saw a swampy morass inside of La Florida, a place that needed to be drained and tidied up. But for Bartram, it was all a great natural cathedral—a place where we “learn wisdom and understanding in the economy of nature, and be seriously attentive to the divine monitor within.”

Later, Tree and April return and we cook meat on the grill and eat under the vast coliseum of stars that shine with all the intensity God once gave them. And I put my head back in the camp chair and feel the light that had started its own journey centuries ago, when other people slept here on these mounds and paddled on these waters. And that light was finally consumed by the black river as it moved through the black night, its passing marked only by our vague awareness of it, humans sleeping on the marsh, a few millennia apart. And that great natural cathedral surrounded us, dwarfing our tiny human egos and humbling me deeply, as it can always do.

And nothing in the whole world counted at that moment, except the way the landscape absorbed the starlight. Everything else that was man-made and rigid, domestic and socialized, seemed puny in contrast. And then later, it rained lightly on my tent, tap-tapping gently in a rhythm of tropical starlight and the prehistoric vapor of river time. And then I fell into a deep dreamless sleep.

The shells were unmistakable. They were small, not quite as large as a quarter in diameter, and bleached white by time. They were gastropods (or univalves) , which simply means they have one shell rather than two that are hinged, like the bivalves of mussels and clams.

I was standing on these shells, on an entire mound constructed largely from them. The mound rose up out of a flat floodplain hardwood swamp to 10 and 15 feet high. A back branch of the Wekiva River was nearby—the river flowed around an island here, and the “inside” branch closest to the shore was obstructed with heavy foliage at both ends. It was so well hidden that few paddlers on the main river even knew this branch existed.

If I hadn’t walked in from a trail—about an eight mile trek—it would have been easy to miss. A spur on the trail led directly to the mound here, so there was no mistaking it. There were actually two mounds, and archaeologists who earlier surveyed this site called them the “Twin Mounds.” It was primal back in here, the way good Florida swamps can be, sabal palms and bracken ferns everywhere, magnolia and cypress and water oak rising high overhead, moss and vines of wild grape woven through it all as if a set designer had been instructed to create a pre-Industrialized vignette of the natural Florida landscape.

The shells were banded mystery snails (Viviperus georgianus), and like elsewhere in the Wekiva and St. Johns River basin, they comprised most of the middens. Archaeologists who once studied this mound found 3612 bone fragments. More to the point, those faunal remains help us understand how early Floridians adapted to the local environment. They ate anything on land that didn’t move as fast as them—or their arrows—and anything from the water they could hook or trap.

Did you know there are more such midden mounds on the St. Johns than anywhere else in North America? It’s true, and it is a testament to the bounty this river once afforded the Native Americans for thousands of years. The logic is simple: In the days before mall food courts and Piggly Wigglys and 7-11’s, people hunted and gathered their own sustenance. For them, this St. Johns was one giant Piggly Wiggly with its aquatic aisles chock full of snails and fish, turtles and alligators, and its nearby woods populated with deer, beer, possum, snake, mice and rabbit. There was enough going on in nature that they could even settle for a bit, sow seeds for crops, contemplate the heavens.

The pre-Columbians who seasonally hunted and fished here called the St. Johns the “River of the Sun”. During the days marking the seasonal changes, these Timucua and Mayaca gave thanks for their river bounty, and deep in their hearts, they knew all the animals sent to them for food by the gods were blessed. The spirit of each animal, if hunted with courage and respect, would return to the neverworld and then, one day, it would materialize again in the valley of the River of the Sun, and its presence would be celebrated.

Gods were worshipped then and the belief in the pantheon of dieties that ruled the sun, the wind, the water and the animals was woven into daily life. Organized religion in our country today pales in comparison, and nature seems more an accessory than an essential force in the metaphysical cosmos of our lives. In our consumer-driven society, one is judged largely by the monetary value of their lifestyle and the mirage of perceived ideals and ethics.

It’s common among self-professsed Christians today to ask: “What would Jesus do?” If he returned, it’s my guess he’d be kicking some serious butt, booting the money-changers out of the temple, and all of their toadies along with them.

In fairness, one must also extend that question to the spiritual people who lived here for at least four thousand years before Jesus arrived, and to ask: “What would the Timucua do?

I’m guessing they would sit down at the edge of this mound on the shore of this subtropic river that is now turning green from nitrogen and diminishing in size because of our selfish squandering of water resources. And here, under the canopy of cypress and oak, they would weep. And then then would push their heart-pine log dugouts silently into the water under the full moon of night and paddle far away, paddle until they could paddle no more.