The long black strip known as SR 46 is an asphalt blur as it rolls across two northeast Florida counties, only dipping conspicuously when it approaches the river valley. I have entertained myself by reading bumper stickers on the vehicles that appear and disappear in front of me. From a battered pick-up: “Barrel Racer, Cowboy Chaser”. And from a large American sedan: “Beer: Helping White Men Dance Since 1942″.

I thankfully exit the volley of traffic at the entrance to the Seminole State Forest, driving in past the self-pay kiosk and pick up Steve, who is ready to unlock the combo on the cattle gate across the dirt road, as soon as I give him the number. I have most recently finished writing a new book, and Steve has finished teaching a grad course on Bartram. It has been months since we have hiked together, and when Steve walks to the lock, he claps his hands, as if in gracious applause of an impending performance.

Trail through the Scrub

We drive in beyond the open gate, no hunting season for a couple weeks, but some trees still hung with the bright plastic flagging near-sighted hunters use to find their way in and out of the thick subtropical forest. The road takes us through the uplands—dry scrub and even sandhills, a stunted forest of saw palmetto and myrtle and oak, just tall enough so the rare scrub jays can flit low, calling to each other in their ancient songs.

The terrain drops gradually near the Blackwater, taller oak and even cypress back along the shore, and then up again to the valley slope on the other side of the creek. We park near Shark’s Tooth Spring, and shouldering our packs, walk a narrow trail up into the sandy scrub. The slope rises dramatically, and muscles on the back of my calves I hardly ever use on the Florida flatlands begin to come awake.

Ahead, we see a pair of scrub jays, the blue on their backs far more vivid than other jays, not unlike the color of deeper springs I have seen before. A third joins them, and instead of fleeing, they prance about in the low trees, spooking a few other birds, including a yellow-bellied thrasher and a catbird. They always seem gregarious and friendly, but I realize that’s my own human-mammal precept. The low altitude of the stunted forest here keeps them from flying to higher branches—but, more to the point, they evolved without the sort of predators that might make them want to.

The dry scrub, sand as white and fine as that of a Gulf beach, projects a very unique look, not unlike a rolling desert with a patina of green. The diversity of plants and animals is far less than in the swamp down at the base of the slope. But what’s here is special, sometimes even endemic, like the jays.

"Rock Cub" Spring

The northern edge of the Lake Wales Ridge trails through this forest, allowing us a look at one of the most endangered natural systems in our country. Author John McPhee, who has taught me so much about the joys of detailed observation, was one of the first non-Floridians to celebrate the values of the scrub in his book “Oranges”. Thirty and forty years earlier, author M. K. Rawlings described the feeling of this scrub in several novels. (In her incarnation, it was harsh and unforgiving to settlers who homesteaded it, more a man-against-uncaring-force-of-nature reality than an ecological lesson.)

We are walking across what is mapped as “Sulphur Island”, an ancient shoal from a distant prehistoric sea, a relic of a couple of square miles that first pushed up from the blue and then, with other islands, coalesced into The Ridge. A study once characterized Sulphur Island as “sandhill karst” hiding the uplifted limestone of the Floridan Aquifer below.

Our upward jaunt is just a warm-up, a prelude to our plans to follow the sloping terrain downward, all the way to the bottom of the hardwood swamp below. There, with the wetlands nearly dry from drought, we hope to trace the more defined creeks, maybe find some new springs that otherwise would be drowned by the swamp. It is the “sandhill karst” that makes this so: While some water seeping out of the springs has been in the limestone for decades—longer, even—the porous scrubland is excellent recharge that allows new rains to quickly revitalize the springs of the swamp.

A couple more miles takes Steve and I across the last of the white sand, and down a steep slope to the edge of the soggy landscape. There is a spring here we have visited for several years, one not on a trail, but which can be found by carefully watching the landmarks—all of which change over time:  A tall gray snag; a berm of white sand; a blue blaze on a pine raked by the strong claw of a black bear until it bleeds golden sap. Isobars, the lines on the topo map that marks the rise and fall in the land, squeeze up tightly here. Which means the next 30-40 feet are at an angle remarkable for this part of Florida—an angle steep enough to send you in a good foot-first tumble if you try to rush it, as I once did.

Berry-rich Bear scat

The perspective from the top is always one I cherish, though: Standing right at the edge of the steep drop, I look out across the flat swamp below, watch as the shafts of sunlight dance on the fine silica in the run of the spring, prisms of silver and white inside the wondrous jungle of green—geology as alive as the organic walls that surround it.

At the bottom, we circle the large natural limestone boulder that—to me—has always looked like a small bear dipping his head to drink of the clear water that swirls around his paws. In honor of this, we call it variously “Stone Cub” or “Rock Cub” spring. The state of Florida, which only recently charted this spring, reached deep into its prosaic imagination, and named it “Boulder”.

From Rock Cub, we move through the swamp bottom, scrambling up to an old trail that’s tiered mid-slope to give us an easier go. We joke, as usual, about Steve’s reliance on maps and gadgetry, and my paleolithic insistence on paying attention to the way the landscape unfolds around us for clues. Either way, we’ve really only have been lost a couple of times really good, and never for more than a few hours.

We talk about what we see and have seen, the scrub jays, the flow of the little spring, the new pile of bluish nuts that is fresh bear scat, the way we are so fortunate to have such a place like this, ever so close to bumper-to-bumper traffic and deadening sprawl. We speak of naturalist Bartram, as we usually do, and wonder—as one of Steve’s students recently asked—why he never mentions the very-prevalent sweet gum tree, and only once lists it in an inventory of plants.

Steve’s new grad course is “The Song of Creation from Walt Whitman to Ernesto Cardenal”, and will rely on the energy of Whitman’s own keystone epic to help explain how others have woven their own stories into a mystic celebration of self, of nature, of transcendence of geography and time.  I have only started reading Cardenal, a Nicaraguan priest who once studied under Thomas Merton—an activist not content to simply write lyrics when his own country was being trundled by powerful bullies. Whitman, the true democratic poet of nature and spirit,  once wrote: “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable”.  A century later, Cardenal and others said the same, men and women with enough true courage to jostle the stasis of  their time. And, what is the point of deep feeling if you can’t take it beyond the elitism of poetry, music, art ?

Walt Whitman, 1854

All this resonates so deeply with me, especially now that we’re inside a prehistoric terrain, a moist bottomland that—having resisted burns—reasserts itself to us, to anyone who cares to fully absorb it. Steve, not content to rely on his academic credentials or his classroom “performances”, knows the value of “feeling” the wildness of a place, and is not afraid to express it.

I sympathize with it all because I too am not a bit tamed— nor always translatable. And I take great joy in that because the landscape now surrounding me is likewise situated: To fully know the worth of the complex scrub, the karst, the swamp is to appreciate what can not always be translated—but which certainly can be deeply felt. It is the senses that do that.

And onward we go, next locating another spring, one marked by the upland plateau of an open field rimmed by piney woods. This one is not on a trail, either. It is one that—because of the elegant sweetgum trunk that arches out from one edge—we once named “Sweetgum.” (The state, as rich in imagination as a shelf of auto parts at Wal-Mart, then charted it as “Mud.”)

"Sweetgum Spring"

From Sweetgum, we move carefully along the northern shore, stepping on fallen branches and stumps to keep from sinking into the green and soggy morass that was, until just recently, covered with water. I’m heartened to see so many of the rare Needle Palms growing in great clutches, to see the many ways mosses and lichens colonize the snags and the trunks.

There is a creek running through here that transports the outflows from several small springs, and it is called Sulphur Run. (In turn, it confluxes with the Blackwater, and then later the Wekiva and the St. Johns.) Reports have hinted that Sulphur Run—which can, during high water, be formidable—simply flows out of a swamp. Given the karst limestone that holds sway over this landscape, though, I have always believed it arose from a spring, or series of springs.

Needle Palm

And so, we stumble along in this mostly dark swamp, down here for almost three hours now. When light does penetrate, it filters through the canopy,  flashing on the quartz and fossil shards in the spring runs. If the upland scrub—bright and airy—is a natural atrium, then this is the monastery, cool and sacred, cypress knees a choir that seems ready to burst into a Gregorian chant at any moment.

Suddenly, the creek we follow unexpectedly changes course and flows upstream instead of down! Somehow, a branch has sluiced away, and that means the two-pronged juncture of its leaving  may lead to a new spring.

We agree to split up and each follow one of the prongs of the run, and to meet back here in five minutes. And off we go, the soft organic animal that is the swamp swallowing up any sound of movement before we are barely  a hundred feet apart.

Sabal Palm Trunk Springs

And then finally, when I am back in so far that I have lost track of which direction will lead me home with any certainty, I see it. It is small but deep, and water is magically rising up to it, surging from under a toppled sabal palm trunk. It is a spring, one not yet mapped. I shout out to Steve with excitment, but am not sure if he hears me or not.  There is yet another flowing rill nearby, and I’m compelled to follow it. I do, and within minutes, I find a second new spring—this one rising up from a dark hole in the floor of the swamp, augmented with a nearby seep flavored with the pungent scent of white, sulfur-rendering bacteria.

Steve and I soon regroup, and we more closely examine the new “vents”. Steve takes a GPS reading, and we then name each: “Sabal Trunk Spring”, and —for the very last upstream spring with the sulfur smell—”Sulphur Run Head Spring.”  They are modest vats of transparent water upwelling from the rock and humus, creating runs alive with gambusia and killifish, flowing ever onward, towards an eventual rendezvous with the sea itself. It is the same sea that once accrued the limestone, porous rock that enfolds the hydrology piping each cryptic vein of water to the surface, guiding it from the darkness to the light.

"Headspring"

It is understandable that others have figured the swamp itself was the headwaters of this run. Its inundation—except for just now—has hidden its secrets very well, indeed.

And I smile broadly at the primeval greenscape of vines and palms and ferns around me, smile in great appreciation and Thanksgiving— for the companionship of a true friend, for the tacit desire to go beyond the safe and ordinary, for the gift of never having sought comfort in being tamed or translatable, simply because we are told to be so.

And finally, I wish a silent but ineffably earnest Thanksgiving for all—especially those deep hearted souls who are always out there, seeking the next clear spring hidden away in the emotional landscape of myth— never worrying how well the search translates, just sure that in some way, it always will.

I have been scuba diving for years now, and the mysteries of the sea that have come to most captivate me are not the large sharks or the sea turtles or even the giant rays that glide through the water like prehistoric birds. Instead, it is the tiny coral polyp and the great castles of limerock it builds for itself.  

It is for this reason I often go into the ocean at twilight, just as the polyp—looking like a tiny anemone—emerges from its scup in the star and brain and elkhorn coral to feed. It does so by capturing plankton, specks of plants and animals that ride oceanic currents.

Once a year, by late summer, these same corals will also bulge with great promise in the full blackness of the night. That promise is realized as an annual spawn in which eggs—or packets of eggs and sperm—push up from each polyp until they pulse at the surface.

And then, when nature plays a secret chord, the eggs and packets burst at once from the reef, as if fired by a volley of tiny militia. The sea around me will be filled with new life, and these tiny miracles and all they portend will float away with the current until the precise moment when the egg transforms to animal and forever sinks to the bottom, where a new reef will be born.

Corals have been building reefs like this for nearly 400 million years. But, as usual, us land mammals are just now catching on. It wasn’t until the early 18th century that a French scientist discovered  coral wasn’t a plant at all—nor was it a rock, as some believed. Indeed, it was a very complex animal that  was so delicate it could be distressed by a change of a few degrees, or by a few milligrams of toxins.

It is great irony that just as we are now learning about our corals,  we are also in jeopardy of losing them: Reefs in the Florida Keys and offshore Southeast Florida have been declining in health over the last 20 to 30 years because of human impacts–from nutrient loading to ship groundings to overfishing.

There is, of course, some good news in that we’re also learning to repopulate ailing reefs with grafts of live coral. And with a new awareness of how upland pollutants find their way downstream to the shallow reefs, we are trying to improve the water quality that sustains the coral animals.

This knowledge is critical since the reefs here underpin an economy that—according to a Florida Fish & Wildlife Commission study—results in $4.3 billion a year in tourism and fisheries. Other benefits, such as creating an underwater limerock berm that keeps our islands from washing away, are difficult to compute, but are no less real.

As for context, it helps to know our reefs occupy less than one half of one percent of our oceans here on this “Blue Planet.” Yet, they nurture the great majority of animals which must spend time there feeding, breeding, resting and hiding.

In Florida,  coral reefs and the currents that affect them have been woven into written maritme history from the very first: Explorer Juan Ponce DeLeon paid close attention since they affected navigation—and could also provide food. DeLeon also “discovered” a strong current that surged out of the Gulf of Mexico and, after confluxing with other powerful oceanic drifts, became the “Gulf Stream.” This Stream could be used to carry galleons and corsairs up the Florida coast, and sent them back to the Old World. As a diver, I sometimes rode this current myself on “drift dives” off W. Palm Beach, twitching my fins in its three knot current to steer, not needing to do much else.

The icon of Key West literary history, Ernest Hemingway, once wrote of taking his boat out into ”the great blue river” to fish for marlin and swordfish. “Papa” may not have seen a coral reef in its annual nocturnal spawn, but I’m guessing he understood the sways of the currents and tides very well. He surely saw the way both the terrestrial keys—as well as the reefs—were sliced into “spur and grove” formations because the upstream currents had surged through them for so long. The knowledge of that was unmistakable, etched deeply into the dry limerock and offshore corals.

And now, there are those politicians and oil industry shills who would allow near-shore oil drilling in the Gulf and the Florida Straits. They argue new sources of domestic crude will make Florida more prosperous, and of course, keep us “nationally secure.” This is a terrifically bogus argument since it doesn’t even begin to tell the full story. All the modern technology in the world won’t keep destructive storms from plummeting rigs or tankers. Nor will it resolve routine mishaps that will spill crude into the water. The potential for disaster is great—with a reality that can economically devastate  Florida. In this scenario, we would become less stable, and our vital natural maritime system would crumble.  ”National security”—which in the Big Oil-Lewis Carroll Delusion that squanders more finite fossil fuel—would be rendered less, because our domestic economy would be trashed.

The great blue river of a current will wash—as it always has—across the Florida Keys, and northward, along the southern Florida coast. It will be strong and sure, and no slick political rhetoric will dilute its energy. Whatever enters this current will be transported by it—including crude oil. Our complex reef system, already under great stress, will suffer yet a new insult, one it’s unlikely to survive.

To argue an economic case *for* drilling requires a full telling of the larger truth. It’s a truth that explorers and scientists and writers have known for centuries: What is upstream always flows down.

Well, I’m guessing you probably knew this if you’ve ever dipped a toe into a real life Florida spring.  It’s more than just the Windex-colored water that flows out of the folds in our subtropical landscape. It’s something else entirely, and figuring exactly *what* else sometimes requires the capacity to flip up the visors, so you can more fully look, feel, reflect.

I’ve been hunting for springs in Florida for years now, following in the footsteps of every one who came here looking for the liquid magic they represent. Sometimes, I hunted them as small limestone seeps back in the woods; sometimes, as a scuba diver descending into the bowels of the larger, first magnitude springs.

Not so long ago, I met Margaret Tolbert, an artist who engages in the aesthetic version of what I’ve always done. Real artists are rare–especially when they must live in a world that’s run by folks who mostly see art as a thing to sell, to buy, or to fit inside of a fancy frame that matches the fabric of the couch it will hang over.

Art, in its most ancient way, means to assemble, to bring together. It is, as Aristotle defined love–wholeness, or the pursuit thereof.  And so now, thanks to Mallory O’Connor, an art historian from Gainesville and a quite excellent writer, we have a series entitled “Liquid Muse.”  The muse in this case is the St. Johns–the same one I paddled last Sunday morning. And it is all the parts of that river experience, from the bold and forthright to the sublime and deeply textured.

But, like a spring, I burble on…

As part of the “Liquid Muse” series, both Margaret and I gave a presentation at the Florida Museum of Art up in DeLand recently. The co-program went so well that we are planning to give more such programs around Florida, via the Florida Humanities Council and whatever other source of support we can uncover. (www.FlaHum.org).

We’ll start with me showing pretty pictures of  springs, and gabbing about the rare natural  history that brings them to life. Since I’m a writer  by trade, I’ll look for ways other writers have  been influenced by our springs here over time. And, I’ll  talk about my own experiences in and outside of springs, and how I cam to cherish them.

Margaret will more specifically explain the  genesis of her own art as it relates to springs—of  what a mystic water-driven muse looks like when seen through the filter of an artists’ eye.

The nature-influences-art story continues to unfold on Nov. 19, Thurs. when Mallory O’ Connor and I give a presentation on the art of the St. Johns right here in the historic downtown of Sanford. It’s followed by a reception at Maya Books & Music and the sale/signing of “Florida’s American Heritage River: Images from the St. Johns Region.” (The program is from 5:30-6 pm at Sanford Library’s Community Room and reception afterwards is a block away on First Street at Maya.) Nature photographer Dr. Bobby Boswell will also join us there with some of his photos from the river. It’ll be a neat time to hang out and just enjoy the art and the moment.

And of course, Maya provides its own “conceptual art”. As a thriving independent bookstore, it simply allows visitors to have a real experience of literary “discovery.” As Fr. Thomas Berry once wisely observed, a good indie bookstore is not unlike a “haunted castle” with its overflowing stacks of titles, and its chance for random discovery. As such, it’s place of “enchantment”, rather than a sterile McBook World with all the character of a giant office cubicle.

In that way, the experience is not unlike stumbling across a little spring hidden back in the woods, like this one pictured here with its shallow, transparent ether atop submerged “sand boils” that forever roil with an upwelling from the natural vents in the submerged limestone under it.

I’m devoting this space for a few days not to a walk in the woods or a paddle across the water, but as an alert to some great news: I’d written a couple times about the plans to restore the old Cracker style cabin once owned by the Archie Carr family up near the Ocala National Forest.  The dilapidated cabin is on 46 acres of land that Archie’s surviving brother, Dr. Tom Carr, donated to the U.S.F.S. to become part of the National Forest.

When archaeologist Dr. Ray Willis first told me about the cabin— and the urgent need for a proper restoration last year—I responded by suggesting our non-profit, Equinox Documentaries, Inc., actually produce a short film about the cabin.

Bob films Dr. Ray Willis at the cabin site

My partner in Equinox, Bob Giguere, and I then traveled up to the cabin in the woods on Lake Nicotoon outside Umatilla. There, I chatted with several members of the Carr family, including Dr. Tommy Carr, about how the cabin had been used by three generations of the family after the cabin was built in 1938. Bob filmed it all, and I later scripted a 12 minute short documentary. We needed a narrator, and I could think of no one better than Mimi Carr, Archie’s daughter. Mimi, who is an actress, graciously agreed, and the film was born.

A fund raiser was subsequently held at Doe Lake, a restored WPA recreation center in the Forest, and the “Friends of the Carr Cabin” begin to collect donations. Bob and I also shared the film with others at the annual Black Bear Festival. And we met Smokey the Bear, who seems to have aged very well over the years.

The cabin as rendered by Gainesville artist Eleanor Blair

A local carpenter familiar with the particular vernacular building techniques needed to faithfully rebuild the cabin then begin work on the structure. The ultimate goal is not just to restore the cabin, but also to create a nearby nature trail, with signage explaining it all.

Taken wholly, the site would function not unlike a smaller version of the Cross Creek home of author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—as a symbolic structure that helps visitors appreciate the many ways Archie Carr and his wife, the conservationist Marjorie Harris Carr, used nature to help inform their own ethics. In his lifetime, Archie traveled widely throughout Florida, Central America, and the Antilles to follow the migrations and behaviors of sea turtles. And he wrote ten wonderful books about many of his experiences. My favorite was “Windward Road.” When Archie passed away, Marjorie helped bring some of his essays together in the book “A Naturalist in Florida.”

Which brings us to today.  Our short film, “Celebrating a Forgotten Place: The Carr Family Cabin in the Florida Scrub” will be screened both at the Global Peace Film Festival this weekend, as well as the upcoming Orlando Film Festival. If you want to take a look at their mission and schedule, it can be found at www.PeaceFilmFest.org. “Cabin” screens twice on this Saturday, Sept. 26, and both Bob and I will be there to field questions about it. The first screening will be at the Orlando Science Center, and will run between 2 and 2:30 pm, including QA. It will also be screened at 3:45 pm at the Winter Park Library. (The web site of the film fest provides info on other long and short films, costs, et. al.)

The fact the cabin is being restored at all is a great testament to the vision and informed tenancity of Dr. Willis. As much anyone, Ray fully understood the significance of celebrating the work of the Carrs. They were not just our own home-grown conservationists and scientists and writers, they were very courageous folks who stepped out from the pack to share their own caring with the rest of us. Today, in an era where folks are more likely to duck and cover than to stand up for an ethic, this is a story that particularly needs to be told.

Earlier “Florida Nature” posts about the cabin and plans for it are: “Why You Should Care About a Little Cabin in the Woods”, and “Doe Lake: Sorting the Real from the Make-Believe.” If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi on Saturday. If you’re not, pick up a copy of “Windward Road” or “A Naturalist in Florida” to remind yourself of why we all should care. It goes far beyond empirical arguments, and the economic values of nature.

It was Archie, after all, who once wrote:

“You cannot argue the case for saving any wilderness on grounds of practicality alone. If this difficult saving is done, it will be because man is a creature who preserves things that stir him.”

• It was Sunday and I had the flatwoods to myself.   No wonder:  I’m guessing this may one of the most under-appreciated eco-systems in all of Florida.

Nonetheless, it’s one I’ve come to love. I beat a quick path from the grassy lot where I’ve parked, back beyond the shard of a longleaf forest, into and then out of the hardwoods of oak and maple, and finally, back to where the true natural world begins. That “quick path” usually takes about fifteen minutes and covers a half mile, maybe more. It allows me to leave the “edge” behind—those ragged places where our protected natural lands nudge up against heavily-traveled roads or busy plazas. Blue jays and starlings, which seem equipped to live almost anywhere, squawk at the edges; but the wrens and warblers sing their gentle songs deeper in.

The deeper I’m in, the more of my own “edge” I leave behind as well. By the time the very last sign of industry—the mad sound of a wood shredder from a nearby farm—-is gone, I’m starting to breath slow and easy again, just as I do when I’m underwater with a tank of air on my back.

The landscape slopes downward, gradually, until finally the flatwoods comes to me in a generous panorama of saw palmetto and slash pine and great open space, a sky as blue as a child’s storybook, fat white vapor clouds tumbling over it in slow motion. Since this is a state “preserve” rather than a park or a forest, I’m not really on a trail but am walking a fire break road, the sort of utility needed by those who would manage our public lands for us. Thus, there is no trail map, and even the road itself splays off here and there—sometimes leading to another dirt road, sometimes turning into a narrow aisle through the palmettos.

Although I’ve brought a compass, I always make a point to keep my eye on the sun, adjusting the compass points for its place in the sky. The navigation here is simple: I go in to the north and come out to the south, maybe seven, eight or nine miles in between, depending. Today, the bright Florida fall sun will be enough to guide me.

I often enjoy the company of others who cherish getting off the grid as much as I do. But sometimes, when I have a few spare hours and know it will be easier to simply find my way to the woods instead of trying to roust up a bud, I’ll throw some snacks and water in my backpack and simply go. Sometimes, I come looking for a certain thing—maybe a spring hidden back in the swamp, or a little creek that goes somewhere new. Wildlife is always a surprise, and I treat it that way, whether it comes as a white-tailed deer, a pygmy rattler, a bear.

I once saw an ineffably lovely willd lily on this trail when I hiked it years ago. It was one that naturalist and artist Mark Catesby sketched and described back in the early 18th century. He rendered it with a “Wampum snake” curled about it.  The flower is now known as the pine lily— or in deference to the naturalist, “Catesby’s Lily.”  I have never seen the Catesby’s Lily anywhere but here, and then, only once. Still, I have envisioned it, and maybe it will indulge me and materialize. Certainly, a pine flatwoods at this time of the year is the right place for it to be.

I read a book once that gave some very candid and unpretentious advice about figuring out Florida’s complex natural systems. It advised:  If your shoes are muddy, you’re in a swamp.

Well, sort of. A pine flatwoods has soils under it that simply aren’t very porous, like a swamp. Rain may seep down for a while, but it only does so with the understanding it will take the first chance it can get to puddle up, or even flow like a newly-birthed creek. In the dry season, a pine flatwoods will mimic dry land. But in the wet season—even one in which we haven’t had a good rain in a week or so—water will lay on the surface. And because it doesn’t soak in really well, it will sometimes draw itself up into a broad and shallow sheet. And like it does in the Everglades, that sheet of water will flow, every so slowly, across the land.

Here in Florida—a state which has always made up its own rules—a “pine flatwoods” is the most extensive terrestrial eco-system around. Funny, but I can think of few other places that would describe a landscape with flowing water as “terrestrial”.

The deeper in the flatwoods I walk, the wilder it becomes, stretching out to cover all the great space between two tree lines, one to the east, the other to the west. There are no other footprints here on the dirt road, only tracks of animals that have been here over the last day or so—deer, wild boar, snake, raccoon, and finally, a small black bear. It’s late mid-morning, and getting warm. Most of the animals that have left their marks here are laying low, waiting for it to cool off before they go to work. A small clutch of warblers flit from the tops of one pine to another, leaving a song behind that I do not know. Another mile and a red-shouldered hawk flies out from her nearby swamp and slowly circles overhead, checking me out.

There is no rush, of course, but I like to keep up a good pace, stopping every now and then to photograph one of the wildflowers growing at the side of the path. The men and women who diligently “manage” large parcels of land like this spend most of their time carefully burning it, evoking a natural regime of lightening and fire that has helped this particular system evolve. I come onto a patch so freshly burned that it still smells charred, walking now with a blackened nether-scape on one side and a green, and wildflower-enriched prairie on the other.

Some grasses, like wiregrass and beard grasses, don’t flower unless burned in the spring and summer. Some wildflowers benefit likewise by becoming more luxuriant in their blossoming—yellow batchelor’s button, deer tongue, and white-topped aster. And, so  too, does Catesby’s Lily.

A small animal trail opens up on the left and I follow it for a while, stepping over soft new green grasses, nurtured when the slightly lower indent of the trail transported water here, not so long ago. The trail deadends into an ephemeral pond, a wet prairie, really, surrounded by palmetto and pine. The grasses and sedges here are as green as my path, and I see the sun reflecting from a patch of water towards the middle.

The pond is on the wane now, and I see that it was not here long enough to nurture fish. In fact, the frogs and toads have benefited by this. Even now, I see tiny black tadpoles dimpling the surface, pre-morhphed herps awash in a solution of utter pond bliss, no opportunistic terror of a fish to darken their days.

I have been hiking for almost two hours now, and have passed the site where I once saw the lily. There are robust wild blueberries bushes and fetterbush and plume grasses—even what looks like winged sumac. But no Lilium Catesbaei.

I reach a point I know from earlier hikes, a place where a creek used to wash over the trail, but which now is piped through a large conduit under. The landscape is lower now, and the topography of the flatwoods falls quickly away, replaced by the thick subtropical hardwood hammock that will lead me to the swamp. I think of looking for a little spring/seep I saw here once, long ago, but even an afternoon walk in the woods has some limits to it.

I stop in the shade, drink deeply from my water bottle, take a few more photos. I sit on my haunches, and pick off two ticks that are on opposite knees. Next to my foot is a giant acorn. I turn it over in my fingers, and in doing so, am struck by how the nut and its break-away stem resembles a tiny head of the Timucua that the French artist LeMoyne once drew here, some 450 years ago. The stem, of course, is the perfect topknot that the male Timucua pulled their hair into, fastening it with bone pins, incised with messages from the gods that ruled the sun, the moon, the river, and all the animals that inhabited the wild landscape of La Florida. A place with no edges.

I take another swig of water, and stand up, cupping the acorn in my hand, and turn back, following a trail that calipers the landscape in the finest of ways. There were no pine lilies, but there were wildflowers and animal tracks and tadpoles, and a totemic reminder of another time, and it all gives me great comfort.

I am headed south now, and a light breeze is picking up from the hammock and the water it cradles inside. It cools me, and pushes me along, ever so gently.

Writer Stephen Crane had to wait three months in the port city of Jacksonville, Florida to sign onto the S. S. Commodore as a working seaman at $20 a month.

By the grace of good fortune—and good technology—it took me only a week to get on that same ship. But the conditions under which we both “boarded” the Commodore were striking in their differences—not the least of which is the fact he walked on the ship when it was still above water.  Nonetheless, as I was to find, there were some commonalties.

Crane went aboard as a journalist for a New York newspaper syndicate to cover the civil war in Cuba that would soon lead to the Spanish-American War. The Commodore, a 123-foot long, sea-going “steam tug”, was carrying guns and ammunition to the Cubans who were rebelling against the Spanish government and the sugar fiefdom run by its wealthy and repressive Dons. With limited travel expenses and strange politics, Crane had to be creative about how he got there.

While his later reporting from Cuba was highlighted by the coverage of events like the charge on San Juan Hill, it was the accidental sinking of the Commodore on Jan. 2, 1897, and the subsequent night and day the young writer spent aboard a tiny wooden dinghy in the Atlantic, that left an indelible mark on American literature.

From that ordeal came “The Open Boat,” a barely fictionalized version of his experience in the form of a short story.  It marked the beginning of the literary genre of “Naturalism”— the emergence of man-against-uncaring-nature themes at the turn of the new century. If there was any question about the raw validity of the experience, the subtitle for the  story was: “A Tale Intended To Be After The Fact. Being The Experience Of Four Men Sunk From The Steamer Commodore.” In the story, Crane described himself in the third person as “the Correspondent.”

Coral & Stephen Crane

I went “aboard” the Commodore as a correspondent for a national news magazine to report on the discovery of the shipwreck, and attempts to salvage artifacts from it. Instead of merely interviewing the divers when they came ashore, I thought it might be neat to replicate at least some of the adventurous spirit that first launched Crane on his own journey by diving on the wreck site.

The waters of this part of east central Florida were well known for unpredictable underwater cross-currents, poor visibility and a healthy population of sharks. The guys I would be diving with would be armed with bang sticks and spear guns. I was armed only with an obscure and highly impractical sense of romanticism, born in some dusty, undergraduate classroom long ago and nurtured carefully ever since.

While waiting to book passage on the wood and steel steamship, Crane hung out with a fascinating young woman in the backwater port of Jacksonville. At 25, he was already well-known for “The Red Badge of Courage”  and “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets”.  Both novels were acclaimed for their gutsy realism, a tone that set Crane decidedly apart from the Victorian moralists of his day.  It was probably not surprising that Cora Taylor, the young women with whom he spent most of his time, was a character out of one of his own works. Determinedly forthright and ambitious, Cora Taylor ran “Hotel de Dream”, a popular brothel catering to rich folks like Florida railroad baron Henry Flagler.  Perhaps she was the prototype for Maggie herself.

When Crane died just three years after his experience on the Commodore —from a lingering illness exacerbated by his time in the cold Florida winter waters— he left Taylor everything he had. Which wasn’t much.  For working writers, some things never seem to change. I identified easily with healthy chunks of Crane’s predicament:  Bright, non-traditional and striking women have always fascinated me, and writing has certainly kept me, if not poor, then of modest means.

If Crane was intrigued by Ms. Taylor’s charms, he was less than appreciative of Jacksonville during his stay-over:  “The town,” wrote Crane in one of his letters, “looks like soiled pasteboard that some lunatic babies have been playing with.”  I felt those same babies had been charting the pell-mell sprawl that was fast-consuming much of Florida today. Chalk up another one for symmetry. So, it was with great anticipation that I approached the chance to visit the Commodore.  In a state surging full-speed into the future, it was also an opportunity to journey backwards to an event where real-life romance —passion, courage, chaos and all—still could be found.  

I would be diving with Don Serbousek, the dive shop owner  who first stumbled across the wreck a few years earlier without knowing it was the Commodore. Serbousek’s attraction to the wreck was easy to understand: Like most shipwrecks, it was swarming with fish, and Serbousek and his buddies enjoyed spearfishing.  Serbousek kept the wreck’s location a secret, not because he knew of its historic value, but because he simply didn’t want other divers to fish it out. Today, navigational coordinates will put them within hundreds of feet of the wreck. But what leads them directly to the site is the congregation of larger grouper, snapper and other fish. Waters at this latitude are much cooler, and the Gulf Stream farther offshore than along the southern peninsula and the Keys.

Much of the offshore seabottom here is sand with the occasional low ridge of coral or rubble. Wrecks—whether accidentally sunk, or set down purposely to serve as artificial reefs —perform much the same function as reef systems  farther south. They act as habitat, offering a secure and durable place to alight for sponges, worms, shellfish, even a few hardy species of coral. Smaller fish follow the invertebrates, and larger predators follow them. Pretty soon, you have a self-contained food chain—a virtual oasis of life, if you will— on a vast subsurface desert floor.

But the fact the wreck existed didn’t identify it as the Commodore since nothing had been found with the ship’s name on it. Indeed, it took some sleuthing by a professor of English at Jacksonville University, Elizabeth Friedmann, to put a name on it. Friedmann was writing a biography of Crane’s sweetheart Cora, whom she also found to be a fascinating and accomplished woman. During her research, Friedmann re-read archival accounts of the Commodore’s sinking, and then went back and studied “The Open Boat” more carefully. When first researching the story, I talked to Friedmann on the phone to better understand how she pieced the information together.  She told me she was an avid sport diver herself, and was attuned to the fact that if the ship had sunk, it would likely still be there on the bottom somewhere. “Where else would it go?” she said.

As for its general location, Crane had written in “The Open Boat” of finally sighting a lighthouse from the small dinghy after the Commodore had sunk: “…this time his eyes chanced on a small still thing on the edge of the swaying horizon. It was precisely like the point of a pin. It took an anxious eye to find a lighthouse so tiny.” The men knew the small thing on the edge of the swaying horizon was the lighthouse marking the Mosquito Inlet.  

Like the Commodore, the “Mosquito Inlet”  hadn’t gone anywhere, either. Indeed, it had been named so because it was once inside an entire northeastern Florida county that was also called “Mosquito.” Modern public relations spinmeisters in Florida would recoil at the idea of naming places for real-world constraints—especially unpleasant ones—but early explorers were far more honest: When the Spanish cruised this wild coast of sand and and driftwood and mangrove in the 16th century, they mapped it as “Los Mosquitos.”

(It was not unlike what they had seen and experienced on the low Atlantic shore of Central America, a portion of which today remains the “Miskito Coast” of Nicaragua.) Although Mosquito County had been renamed “Orange” in 1845 for its citrus groves, no one got around to changing the name of the inlet until the Florida land boom of the 1920’s. Dipping into its bag of worn but safe symbols, locals intent on luring yankee tourists and land buyers to Florida renamed the cut and the light “Ponce de Leon”. Despite its name change, the old brick light station remained—at 175 feet— the tallest lighthouse in all of Florida.

If the Commodore sunk 12 miles offshore the Ponce light, as Crane reported, that at least gave Friedmann a place to start.  Daytona and New Smyrna Beach are both near that inlet, so Friedmann begin to chat up local dive shop owners to see if there was any knowledge of a century-old wreck at least ten or so miles offshore. Since she knew the Commodore was loaded with munitions, she also used that as a way of describing the wreck site.

Commodore, afloat

The English professor was referred to Serbousek as the guy who would know, if anyone did. Serbousek was not only a veteran diver, he was a collector who had salvaged old wrecks for the fun of it. Even better, he had a decided fascination for unearthing the past:  He once recovered much of the skeleton of an extinct giant ground sloth, Megatherium, which had its own room in a local natural history museum.   Serbousek acknowledged he had been spearfishing a wreck of the era Friedmann described. In between spearing, he would poke about the site and, in doing so,  found clump after clump of heavily corroded  bullets and what had once been boxes of rifles.

Friedmann wondered what other cargo ship of that age would be carrying munitions like this. She studied some of the ocean-worn bullets and guns Serbousek had brought back. Then she asked the diver if he could actually see the lighthouse from the wreck site. Yea, he replied, but from way out there it looks like a little pin on the horizon.

I track down Serbousek, and drive over for a visit so we can plan a dive on the Commodore. Serbousek, tall, balding, soft-spoken, runs a combination dive shop and television repair service in Ormond Beach, not far from where Crane and his Open Boat mates washed ashore in 1897.

The business, “Diving Don’s TV and Dive Shop” looks more like something you used to routinely see in the Keys. A gigantic rusted anchor from some long-forgotten Spanish galleon is perpetually at rest in front of the shop. Inside, the place looks like a page out of True magazine, circa 1958. Fossils are everywhere, a bone of a mastodon, the giant tooth of an extinct shark, Carcharodon, even fossilized alligator scutes.  Besides the fossils, there’s also a bunch of transistors and TV repair things lying about, and in the middle of the store, a saltwater aquarium with a single occupant, a living spotted cowry as big around as my wrist.

Serbousek, who has a slightly absent-minded air, seems more like somebody’s high school math teacher than the adventurer he is. But I remember once meeting treasure hunter Mel Fisher in the Keys. Fisher had a similar lost-in-space composure, a curious disposition that represents only a fragment of the person inside. Later, when I dive with Serbousek, the math teacher façade fades and the confident explorer emerges.

Underwater map of wreck site

Since the Commodore was carrying few valuables, the reward for its salvage today is in the satisfaction of making a rare find linked to an important event in literary history. I like to think the divers are helping to write the final page of Crane’s brilliant short story, an act that Crane, the rogue adventurer, would have appreciated.

Yet, since there is no motherlode expected, as with Fisher’s Atocha, the small band of divers pay their own way, including sharing in gas expenses for the dive boat. Like Serbousek, they are all employed full time elsewhere and can dive only on their days off. During a half year’s worth of salvage work, they have recovered a dozen rifles, hundreds of lead bullets, countless pieces of brass and copper hardware, and a human foot bone. But, since there were over 14 tons of guns, munitions and medicine aboard, they have barely scratched the surface. While much of the cargo has been lost to sea-driven decay, or simply washed away, a great deal is still expected to be found as the men dig farther into the sandy bottom under the hull of the ship.

There were originally 27 men aboard the Commodore and most fled to full-sized lifeboats, except for seven who drowned during the sinking, and Crane, Capt. Edward Murphy, the ship’s cook, and oiler Billie Higgins, who were left only with a tiny ten-foot-long dinghy. As the last men to leave the ship, the dinghy, used to ferry supplies to and from the ship when it was in port, was all that was left for them.

The ship floundered because it had been leaking badly, and its pumps were unable to handle all the water that begin to pour in. After the sinking of the Commodore, newspapers—caught up in the spirited yellow journalism of the day—reported  the ship was likely sabotaged by Cuban seamen loyal to Spain. On Jan. 4, 1897, Crane’s own newspaper, The New York Press, claimed “A traitor in Spanish pay was the cause of the (ship’s) leak.”  Yet, the Commodore had been jinxed from the start, accidently crashing into shoals in the St. Johns River as it left the port of Jacksonville, grounding twice before it ever entered the Atlantic. Poor navigation caused the collisions, opening the ship’s hull to leaks.

Normally, steam-powered bilge pumps would handle a certain amount of incoming seawater, but they were said to be disabled. Were they sabotaged, or simply the result of poor maintenance? One of the heavily-corroded pumps has already been recovered, Serbousek told me, and the salvers hope to clean it by electrolysis  and restore it, and in doing so, to be able to tell if it was intentionally damaged or not.

By now, I was anxious to get “aboard” the wreck. But this was late December and the waters along this part of Florida, normally rough in winter, were made even more so by a strong wind blowing in from the north. Serbousek tells me that if the wind shifts abruptly and comes from the other direction, we’ll be afforded a brief lull that will allow us to dive. The water will still be churned with silt, but at least the seas will lay down for few hours. After we talked, I hopeful for a forecast that would give us a new southerly wind, and in two days, I got one.

Serbousek, who was also watching the weather, immediately called and told me to pack my dive gear and meet him at a coffee shop near the marina where they would launch their dive boat. It was New Year’s eve day.  If we find the site right away, he said, we might have two or three hours before the winds pick back up again. We down our coffee, Serbousek asks the waitress to fill a thermos for the trip, and then we head across the street to the marina.

Here, I meet the other divers:  Bob Wheeler, an old crony of Serbousek’s, Wheeler’s son Randy, a high school teacher, and Don Lucas, a building contractor. They’re all amicable folks, although only Randy seems to really appreciate how important the wreck really is.  Bob Wheeler and Serbousek have been diving together for years, exploring uncharted shipwrecks off the central Florida coast back when diving gear was a lot less safe, and the outcome of any dive a lot less certain than it is today. In those days, Wheeler remembers, all they used were tanks and regulators—no gauges to tell them how much air was left, or buoyancy compensators to help them neutralize their trim underwater. Tanks then had “J” valves, with little wires attached. When you ran out of air, you simply pulled the wire and it released the reserve air, good for another few minutes that could be used for an ascent. Our dive boat today is Wheeler’s 23-foot sport fisherman, which is now in the water after he hauled it here by trailer earlier this morning.

Fully loaded, we cast off, Wheeler steering his boat expertly through a channel in the local estuary, and out through Ponce Inlet, passing the old brick “Misquito Light” just to our left as we go. Today, the stormy weather has clouded the skies, and a light rain soon begins to fall. By the time we are a only mile offshore, it is so gray with drizzle and clouds that I can no longer see the land.

We bump along across a steady sheaf of building waves, Wheeler with one eye on the compass and the other on the navigational electronics. After an hour of this, we are near the wreck, identified by coordinates the divers routinely use to locate the site. But the data is not specific enough to put us precisely atop it. To do that, Wheeler turns on his fathometer, and its sonar gives us a rough bottom sketch made of thin green lines on a little screen. We slowly motor about the area, and at first, all seems flat. But, in another five minutes, the screen shows sharp points dramatically rising up, peaks that represent the highest profile of the wreck itself. I notice the depth of the wreck is 90 feet.

Lucas tosses an anchor over the side. We climb into our wet suits and gear,  and then flop over the gunnels. The sea water is cold enough to momentarily take my breathe away as it seeps into my wet suit. Our strategy is to follow the anchor rope down, one by one, and from there, fin over to the wreck nearby.

This sounded good on the boat, but now that I am underwater I see there is far more sediment and plankton in the water than I had figured. I expected maybe 20 or 30 feet of visibility, but I can barely see beyond five or six feet. When I reach the bottom, I have no idea where the wreck is, so I simply sit there, waiting on the sandy bottom, 90 feet under the surface. Soon, Serbousek materializes from the murk, thumps me on the shoulder, motions a “let’s go” with his arm, and turns and fins away, with me trailing very closely behind.

Suddenly, I am atop the wreck itself before I even realize what it is. Its presence is signaled by a large rusted metal boiler, by far the largest remaining chunk of the old steamer. I drop down to the base of it, where there is less current, and the visibility improves. The metal that is left has become enveloped with a century’s worth of the sea—sponges, barnacles, corals. Spines of black and white sea urchins protrude from crevices.  A school of Atlantic spadefish—which look like angelfish on steroids—undulate at the top of the boiler, riding the metronomic current swells back and forth in the water column.

I fin about 20 feet from the boiler, near where the gigantic prop is half buried. On earlier dives, the men have partially uncovered a six-by-eight foot section of the original planked wooden deck from under the sand,  the largest piece yet found intact. I release all the air in my buoyancy vest so that I can kneel down on the deck, a place where Crane and his fellow shipmates scrambled about before abandoning ship.

The lesson of Crane’s literary naturalism was implicit:  In man against nature conflicts, mere human muscle of the body or intellect of the mind is a conceit, an arrogance that can’t even begin to comprehend the power of nature. Most of all,  the forces of nature were not evil, but simply uncaring, a view that also informs modern Existentialism.  As Crane wrote: “It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual–nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent…”

Most of the wooden hull has already been lost to the turbulence of the sea and the appetite of wood-boring toredo worms. Cartoon images of intact ships under the ocean exist only in cartoons—or in theme parks. The only evidence of the size of the original ship is hinted by a small ridge several inches high of empty shells around the perimeter of what had once been the gunnels and hull. The shells, mostly snail-like gastropods of some sort, once attached themselves to the hull when it was still a hull. But when it disintegrated, their habitat disappeared, and so too did the animals that once lived inside the shells.

The longer I am on the bottom, the better I am able to see, as if focusing under the dim but sure light of a full moon back on land. Near what was the stern of the Commodore, one of the divers has uncovered a wooden crate from the sand. I fin over to take a look. There’s scant wood left, and the supplies inside are heavily corroded, and are now fused together in one large rectangular lump.

Serbousek is only a few feet away from the huge prop, and is exploring the bottom there by fanning the sand with rapid back and forth movements of his hand. Salvors who work such wrecks will use small rakes, larger hammers for chipping, and even, when needed, saws and crowbars. But most seem to rely on the more delicate ‘fanning’ method as the best way to scrutinize the tiny, often fragile, bits and pieces of maritime detritus. Although I am close enough to touch Serbousek’s tank, the storm of sediment created by his hand fanning has nearly fully consumed him in a brown cloud. When I try fanning the bottom myself, I create a similar predicament. Periodically, I stop and reach down into the small depression the fanning has created, and root around for something solid there. But when I find anything, I have to actually bring it up against my mask to see what it is.

The bottom seems to be covered with old bullets, their brass cartridge and gunpowder fused together by corrosion into hand-sized clumps. Every time I scoop my hand through the sand and bring it to my mask, I come up with more such bullets. As one reporter for the Jacksonville Times-Union noted after the sinking: “Old Neptune has been supplied with enough arms and ammunition to blow up the island of Cuba.” Indeed, the manifest for the Commodore showed it was carrying 203,00 rifle cartridges, over 1,000 pounds of dynamite, and 40 “bundles” of Remington rolling block rifles.

As I move away from my underwater dust storm, I see the outline of the drive shaft, which runs from the bottom of the boiler to the stern. Looking up, I can make out a number of fish hovering over the artificial reef the wreck has created. Several dozen amberjacks, each the size of a small muscular torpedo, cruise by, and queen angelfish poke about in the wreck, their normally bright blues and gold muted to green by the plankton and the depth. Suddenly, the entire site is covered with thousands of tiny silversided anchovies. They undulate in unison, turning as one, and sometimes catching the scant surface light with their silvery bodies. When they do, they reflect it back, making them seem as if they are one great organic mirror, forming and reforming here atop this old literary icon on the bottom of the sea.

Near the edge of the school, at the limits of visibility, a large dark form with sharp and distinct fins appears, and— almost in the same instant— disappears back into the murk. I think of Crane sighting a large shark from their tiny boat by night: “There was a long, loud swishing astern of the boat, and a gleaming trail of phosphorescence, like blue flame, was furrowed on the black waters. It might have been made by a monstrous knife.” And then: “The correspondence saw an enormous fin speed like a shadow through the water, hurling the crystalline stray and leaving the long glowing tail.” Earlier, Serbousek had told me about the 12-foot tiger shark that has been seen around the wreck site during earlier dives.

Artist's rendition of the ordeal from a French edition of the story

I grab the hose with my air pressure gauge on it, and check my remaining supply: Not much. I have just about enough time for a safety stop before I surface.  In truth, I had hoped we might find the ship’s whistle today, but it was a needle in a haystack possibility. Crane had written poignantly of it: “If there was ever a voice of despair and death, it was in the voice of the whistle…a song of man’s end.”

I head for the anchor line, using my hands to slowly pull myself across the bottom since the current is now too strong to fin against The entire site has been churned into a dust storm by a new underwater surge, perhaps an advance warning of the impending southerly storm front back on the surface.  Safely  on the rope, I pull myself slowly up, hand over hand. I look back one last time and see the wreck of the Commodore fade back into a ghostly underwater haze.  I make a safety stop at 20 feet to blow off nitrogen, and then break through the surface. Around me, the waves have begun to grow much larger, spitting white foam and crashing into each other, signaling the beginnings of the new weather front. Everywhere I look, it is all gray—the sea, the sky, even our own small boat. Crane, from his seat in the dinghy, experienced a similar reality, describing it as the “universal indifference…of the slate gray seas.”

As the four men from the Commodore finally came ashore in the rolling January breakers at Daytona Beach and were flung from the small boat, oiler Higgins—by far the strongest man aboard—was the only one to drown in the surf. For Crane, it reinforced the notion that even the toughest humans are no match for natural forces.

The man who helped create literary naturalism would only live another three years after his ordeal, dying at the age of 28 in Bedenweiler, Germany of a tubercular condition aggravated by the wintry day and night in the open boat. His sweetheart, Cora, was at his side.

While his short story emphasize the indifference of the natural world towards man, it also taught that bonding between humans can be strengthened by confronting that same angst together.  Crane wrote:  “When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.”

Soon, all the divers are back on the surface and safely in the boat. The sky, once a solid gray of cloud and vapor,  has become darker and it is raining now, a hard pelting rain. There is a good natured camaraderie aboard among us, and a happy sharing of new artifacts recovered—including an encrusted Remington rifle. Weaver pulls anchor and we head ashore, crashing through the waves as we go. Because of the weather, there is no lighthouse to be seen sticking on the horizon like the point of a pin today, but there has been an immense thrill in the doing, in the confrontation of life by direct experience.

As we approach Ponce inlet I finally see the brick lighthouse and by now, it is far larger than a pin. One of the divers turns to me and asks what I will write of this day. I tell him it will be an account of diving the wreck, and maybe of re-learning Crane’s message of Naturalism. He shakes his head and smiles, but I can’t figure whether it’s a smile of approval or one of bemused skepticism.

I think of how the ship’s cook was quoted in a local newspaper after his rescue in the surf, and figure I could do worse:  “These newspaper fellers have got spunk…even if they do tell such awful whoopers at times.”

A shark & me, from another dive (Courtesy Norbert Wu)

[POSTSCRIPT: After my story appeared in Newsweek, Serbousek, Friedmann and myself were invited to travel to New York City to be on the national Today Show. I declined, but the other two went on, continuing to tell the story of the Commodore to the nation. By 1998, Serbousek and the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse Association were granted an “Admiralty Arrest” for the wreck which gave them the exclusive right to salvage the site. Technical divers from the Cambrian Foundation were contracted to help salvage the Commodore and to record a detailed site plan of it. By 2001, the Ponce de Leon Lighthouse Preservation Society created an exhibit devoted to the wreck and its history.

The Commodore still rests under the sea, far enough offshore so that---if you were to be in an open boat over the site---the Mosquito Light would stick up like a point of a pin on the horizon. ]

At the mouth of Mammoth Springs—the main artesian gusher in the historic Florida tourist attraction of Silver Springs—I have only two choices.

The first choice is to go straight up, some 30 feet to the surface, where at this very moment a gaggle of tourists inside a World Famous Glass Bottom Boat is getting a classic theme-park spiel.  Within this reality, the spring beneath them is described as “a bottomless pit”, a dark hole in the earth that mysteriously spouts up millions of gallons of crystal clear water from somewhere deep and unknown.

The second choice is the bottomless pit itself.   It’s accessed by a slender horizontal gash in the limestone bottom—a doorway to a water-filled labyrinth of caverns, caves and tunnels. Like much of geology, the deeper it goes down into the rock, the older the history of the rock will become. There are stories embedded here, some from long ago in geologic time, and some from long ago in my own life.

Down here, I settle on the sand-covered limestone bottom next to the dark cave mouth, my legs and fins tucked under me. The entrance to Mammoth is about five feet high and over a hundred feet wide, creating the affect of one giant smile, Batman’s Joker incised in the rock. There’s well over 20 springs between here and the first half mile of the Silver River that seep or gush up from the limestone and dolomite, together creating a flow of 500 million gallons a day. Mammoth accounts for 45 percent of that upwelling, so the force of the water flowing out of its giant smile is mighty indeed.

Although my two choices today seem as if they are exaggerations of reality,  they frame the very real condition of Florida. Like so much else that is beneath the veneer here in this tourist-driven state, my choices are characterized by vast incongruities between what is promoted and what is actually going on. Melodramatic theme park spin often seems more real to visitors than the true nature of the place itself.  And so, I hope to more fully realize—perhaps even to reconcile—the caricatures that conspired to bring me  to the bottom of Silver Springs.

Here, I’ll accompany a small team of cave divers exploring the underground plumbing of this famous, powerful spring system. Within this mission, our goals are to watch for unusual troglodytic life forms and rare fossils, to carefully monitor the air in our tanks, and—perhaps most importantly—to time our ascents so the Glass Bottom Boats and the Lost River Voyages on their way to the giraffe and porcupine show don’t run us down.

I have vivid memories of visiting this same Silver Springs as a bright-eyed eight-year-old on a family vacation years ago. We drove the “blue highways” in the pre-Interstate days, back when Mom and Pop motels and Monkey Jungles were far more common than chain hotels and corporate theme parks.

At the Springs, my Dad, Mom, younger brother Jack and I climbed aboard a wooden glass bottom boat that floated over water as clear as our aquarium full of guppies back home.  Beneath us, beach-white sand lay on the limestone walls of the spring basin like snow. We saw bass and bream and a small alligator swimming below us, as if we were watching a science show on television. The set for the Sea Hunt TV series had  been built in one cove, some of it constructed on the spring bottom. Rhesus monkeys yelled at us from the jungle-like shore. All that was missing was Tarzan and Boy swinging on the thick muscadine grape vines. And of course, that had happened too, back in the 1930’s when several of those movies were filmed here.

And when the guide gave us an earlier version of today’s narrative, I was enthralled.  Where does all this water come from, I wondered—and is the pit really  bottomless? I yearned to find out where the darkness beneath the turquoise waters might lead me. At eight, everything unseen or forbidden was a fairyland of possibilities, a place where the imagination could gift you with stories that, otherwise, would go untold.

It was a seminal moment for me, one that later would draw me to scuba diving soon after I moved to Florida as a young adult to live. As a diver and journalist, I went on to travel to some of the most remote sites on earth to report on the local marine environment—the distant islands of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the crater-like “blue holes” in the ocean bottom just north of Cuba, the isolated coastal reefs and cliffs off Panama, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and the sink hole-like cenotes of the Dominican Republic. All those explorations were revealing, rich with adventure and crammed with subsurface images I had never seen before. My diving partners were marine biologists or archaeologists, all working on one project or another that would advance their respective science.

The places I visited were unknown to most tourists, sites where the unexpected became almost commonplace for me. But, it wasn’t until a friend who was a seasoned cave explorer invited me to join him in a mapping expedition to Silver Springs that I truly became giddy with anticipation. As we geared up for the dive, I realized I was no longer the veteran diver-writer with a portfolio of rare and offbeat experiences underwater, a guy who would try almost anything, at least once. Instead, I was an eight-year-old again. And I was finally getting to go into inside the “bottomless pit.”

Despite the fact that thousands of tourists still float in glass bottom boats every week atop Silver Springs, the caves that feed one of the world’s most powerful upwellings are what divers call a “virgin system”—largely unexplored or mapped.  Sport divers have long been barred from the spring since they would interfere with the theatrical business of spin making.  And, over the years, various owners felt the danger of even a professional dive expedition created a liability that might outweigh any benefits. A dead or injured diver was problematic on so many levels—not the least of which is that it would be difficult for the World Famous Glass Bottom Boat guides to explain in an entertaining sort of way.

View of mainspring from hotel, 1886

And, there was this:  “This is probably the largest cave-spring on land in the U.S.,” a geologist who had studied the hydrology of the spring told me when I was researching the springs before the dive. “But it’s incredibly difficult to explore since most of the original cave has collapsed, and there’s a diversion maze right beyond the entrance.” A “diversion maze” means limestone has collapsed over time, creating restrictions that are nearly impossible for most divers to pass beyond.

The point man in the push to explore Silver was Eric Hutcheson, an adventurer from nearby Ocala, Florida with a growing reputation as an artistic maker of underwater cave maps.  With explorer and cinematographer Wes Skiles from High Springs, Hutcheson had dived and mapped Nooch Nah Chinh, the extensive underwater system of caves linked by cenotes in Mexico’s Yucatan, as well as several Florida spring-cave systems. Skiles went on to be a world class photographer and filmmaker of underwater caves, and he would bring audiences  images—and messages—they would not otherwise have.

Earlier, I had accompanied Skiles and Hutcheson on a survey of Silver Glen Springs in northern Florida. With Hutcheson, I dove into a chimney-like cave in the side of a remote limestone island in the Bahamas near Man o’ War Cay. When Hutcheson approached the current owners of Silver Springs with the concept of exploring the main cave, they saw the marketing possibilities, and agreed.

Eric would chart at least some of the conduits inside Mammoth for the very first time, and when possible, collect small cave-dwelling life forms for scientific study. Later, maps and photos from the cave could be displayed at the attraction and replicas sold in its gift shops. When his divers were entering or leaving the water, tour guides could point them out to the tourists, weaving them into the myth of Tarzan and Sea Hunt, and the 20-odd movies that had all been filmed there.

Silver Springs, after all, is the archetypical Florida theme park, first created when an enterprising soul back in the 1870’s figured out a way to put a slab of heavy glass in the bottom of a row boat. At that same time, steamboats traveled up the Ocklawaha River and then onto the seven-mile-long spring run known as the “Silver River” to the headsprings here. A luxury four-story hotel awaited them, making Silver Springs and its river a mandatory stop for anyone wanting to experience the exotic jungle mysteries of this off-the-grid peninsula.

Today, we assemble our gear, lights and line that cave divers carry, and from a temporary floating platform at the shore, descend under the clear surface of Mammoth Springs. At the edge of the spring pool, I see a seven foot alligator enter the water, and then spooked by our exhaust bubbles, swim away. I notice it is far more graceful underwater than gators ever are on land. On the 30 foot bottom outside the cave mouth, a glass bottom boat glides by just overhead. The water is clear, but not as transparent as I remember it, shards of stringy algae now swirling about us.

Sitting on the bottom, I push against my mask to clear the pressure in my ears, and then ascend a few feet above the wide cave mouth.  Strong flipper kicks alone aren’t enough to pull me in against the enormous outflow of spring water. Hutcheson had earlier advised me of this, suggesting the best way to enter is from the top of the mouth rather than the bottom. And so I force my way in by moving up and against the cave ceiling, just above the main force of the flow.  I notice the ceiling is made of thousands of fossilized sand dollars, left from when all of Florida was once covered by the sea. Once inside, the rock opens into an expansive cavern and the strong flow has a chance to spread out; it is not unlike how the energy of a swift stream dissipates when it meets a wider river or bay in the lighted world above.

From deeper in the cave, I see flickers of Hutcheson’s light in the darkness and move towards it. As I do, I fin over the boulder-strewn floor and see remnants of large prehistoric animal bones.  They are mineralized black,  gargantuan in size. Long before the Europeans ever arrived, springs like this were favorite camp sites for Paleo-Indians—who stalked mastodons and bear and harpooned manatees here for food over 10,000 years ago. With the outsized bone yard below me, I am treading a fine line between myth and reality, part of me thinking this is an old stage set, part of me knowing it is real.

Although the cavern is large, boulders that have collapsed from its ceiling have created small cave-like alcoves amidst the rubble of bone and rock. I squeeze inside one of the dark openings. Down in here, I hold my light with one hand, and use the edge of the palm of the other to gently fan across the sand, as I have seen archaeologists do to find artifacts. When I stop fanning to allow the tiny vortex of sand to drift away, my light beam reveals a four-inch-long spear point cared from chert. Hidden here for centuries in the rock and sand, it looks as if it was carved just yesterday.

I gingerly turn and pull my way out of the little cave, and poke around some more on the bottom, exploring other large crevices. I see more paleo-artifacts, and finally, spot a tiny albino arthropod, a shrimp-like crustacean, flipping about in the crack of eternal darkness. I remove a small specimen collection bag from my dive vest and carefully coax the little animal into it. Many caves like this in Florida nurture endemic creatures, some of them not yet known to science. Later the little shrimp will travel to the Smithsonian where Hutcheson sends such specimens, and experts in troglydictic lifeforms will try to classify it.

From the far side of the cavern, I watch as Hutcheson removes his tank from his back and pushes it ahead of him into an even tighter “restriction” until he disappears in a cloud of silt and churning water. The cave he has entered takes him farther back under the land above, following a route that—if he were the size of a tiny shrimp—might lead him miles to soft limestone fissures below the distant uplands where rain fall seeps into the springshed itself.

I poke about some more on the bottom, following the edges of the cavern as far as I can. Under another boulder pile, I see large wooden timbers, charred black from a fire long ago. There is no way of telling for sure, but I know that the old four-story luxury hotel that sat next to Mammoth Springs burned back in the 1890’s. Hutcheson had told me others have seen charred wood down here; history shows that the burned hotel was razed, much of it simply dumped into the spring, because that is what people did in such times.

Minutes later, when Hutcheson returns from the narrow tunnel, he carries a clam fossil the size of a breadbasket. I marvel at its heft, of how clearly defined the striations of each rib still is on the surface of its shells, a bivalve forever welded shut by time. Later, after we finish the dive, he will tell me there are scores of such clams along the base of one wall, a bed of giant seabottom mollusks long extinct.

Mapping of the sort that is being done here helps scientists better understand the limitations of our Floridan Aquifer. The cave does stretch for miles into the limestone under the rolling north Florida landscape, veining out into tiny crevices and fissures, sometimes opening back up into gigantic cathedral-sized rooms. But it’s not truly “bottomless”, nor is its water supply endless. It’s a  hard lesson we are now learning throughout Florida as the magnitude of our major springs declines, and our potable water supply ebbs away. It is a lesson the extinct seabottom clams learned long ago.

It is time for the dive to end and so I fin back out to the cave mouth and let its energy literally blow me out onto the bottom of the spring basin. Just as I recover and sit upright, a boatload of families in a glassbottom boat pass overhead.  Despite the algae, the water is still transparent enough that I can look up through my mask and make eye contact with a little boy sitting in the boat, intently looking down at me. His eyes are big, and he seems entranced, pushing his face closer to the glass than the rest. It is a true Florida out-of-body moment, where the transect that connects us seems to shift there, for just a split second, and I am now the little boy in the boat, looking down at the bottomless pit and at the mysterious man in the mysterious suit who has emerged from it. And all the years in between disappear as if they’ve never been.

Can there be any difference between me, the bass and gators, the old Sea Hunt set, the imported monkeys, the bottomless spring?  Another myth, a sacred story,  in a little boy’s imagination has been created. I don’t know where it will lead him, long after I’m physically gone from this spring, this earth. But it gives me great joy to know that, in some way, I have entered the sacrosanct dreams of a child, an inviolable place. If he is careful, he might also store this moment away for a lifetime, just as the cave has stored its own relics from so long ago.

From behind my regulator, I smile  broadly, watching the  boat putter slowly away until all I can see now are the swirls in the water it has left behind. The other divers emerge and as they ascend, they motion me to join them. I shake my head as if waking from a long and beloved dream, and fin upwards, ever towards the light.

It was warm this morning, even at 7 a.m., and the anoles have already started scuttling about my backyard. They move in quick, time-stop jerks, navigating their world in a series of invisible leaps—almost like an old motion picture that doesn’t have enough frames to communicate the art of uninterrupted, fluid motion.

I think on this some, watch the gambusia peck at the surface of the pond, listen as a cardinal begins her sweet call from somewhere low in the young magnolia with the bright green leaves. The passion flower has put so much energy in its vine that it’s covered almost the entire reed-fence where I first planted it; it now blooms only at the very tips, as if the baroque flowers are trumpeters announcing the arrival of a tiny green army.

I sip on a cappuchino with a dash of chocolate and nibble on slices of tangerine, thumbing through “The Book of Naturalists”, an anthology that the great marine scientist William Beebe assembled in 1941. I ran across Beebe’s work several years ago when I was getting ready to go on an oceanographic expedition to the Galapagos Islands for a month. Beebe had been there in the 1920’s, and did some of the first meaningful science underwater using a “hard hat” diving system. A female colleague of his produced some of the very first underwater art by actually actually painting what she saw using special oils that were not soluble in water.

The anthology was one of the first to give me a real context for what this nature writing business is all about. Certainly, if you only read popular literature, you’ll likely be left with the idea that “nature writing” is a modern invention that requires a great deal of hand wringing and self flagellation. While I much admire those who are skilled in observing nature, I am less impressed with the self absorbed way in which this observation is filtered.

Beebe sets us straight, reminding us that Aristotle started it all in 344 B.C. with “Fishing-Frogs, Cuckoos, and Other Things”.  The philosopher watched animals closely, reporting that fish sleep and many animals—including insects—dream. It’s the natural precedent to Billy Bartram who, in his own wonderful mysticism, figured humans are no higher or lower than any other member of the plant and animal kingdom. And, if animals dream, who are we to interrupt their dreams with our own overblown sense of ego ? And, isn’t this what the nature ethicist Aldo Leopold also tells us—that humans exist as an essential weave of ecology, and not separate from it ? To indulge in self absorption requires a very large ego to set ourselves so completely apart from any other living thing. It’s no wonder that otherwise gentle souls transform into authoritarian know-it-all’s, brining us not accounts of nature but accounts of how all of nature swirls about them in an elliptical orbit, words and deeds simply satellites to glorify the ego.

Certainly, mysticism is deeply embedded into nature; Blake knew this, so did Thoreau. And, while he gets little attention from most modern nature writers, so did Marcel Proust, the early 20^th century French novelist and essayist. Proust figured it was the artist’s responsibility to confront nature, to figure out its essence, and to translate that to us in art.

Wow, what a riff. Are the anoles and cardinals, and now, the newly-arrived wood thrush, any better because I have pondered all of this?  Or do they become more comfortable because I sit silently, not moving about in lizard-like jerks—absorbing not myself but the moment ?

No one can say for sure. And in fact, if another human were to observe me here at my patio table in my enfenced yard that is quickly going feral, they might even wonder if I am doing very much at all.

And that, all by itself, is part of the writer’s plight: If I were a plumber or physician, my work would be defined by how skillfully I use a wrench, or how well I use instruments and tests to interpret the human condition.

Instead, it is more likely I appear like the anole that moves in time-warping spurts. No one even sees the actual movement; all they know for sure is where the lizard starts and stops. That blur of light in between may be a true dynamic. Or it may simply be white space on a historic map, territory that is too unimaginable to be known.

And, one second ago, I was sitting at my patio table with my cappuchino. And now, here I am, tapping little plastic keys on a strange machine.

All the space in between is a white blur

….with a twist.

It’s 8 am on a clear and bright summer  morning, and Mothers Arms awaits.

Yvette and I drive to the edge of the man-made peninsula called Marina Island near the heart of the historic downtown of the old riverboat landing of Sanford. Here, I coast the SUV  down a new concrete ramp on the northeastern edge just outside the harbor, and park a few feet from the water. No one’s around, except for a large black woman who is sitting under a pavilion nearby, reading.  We quickly unload the kayaks from the rooftop racks, and I drive back up the ramp and park the SUV. The waters are calm, flat as glass almost, and the tiniest notion of a breeze is lifting up from somewhere far away.

Yvette’s at once vivacious and cool, ready for most anything. She owns one of the neatest independent book stores in the region;  instead of trying to make it sound pretentious, she has named it Maya, for one of her cats.

Steamship on Lake Monroe 1906

 

We wedge ourselves down into the cockpits of our individual boats, and push away with our paddles. Within a couple minutes we’re a hundred yards from shore, out on the vast blackwater lake.  The map shows a peninsula charted as “Mother’s Arms” jutting out from the eastern edge of the lake. I’m figuring the “arms” are the bayous of water that surround it on both sides. Whatever the origins of the name, I’m excited to be paddling towards it, happy as always to be able to have a chance for discovery in a place I’ve never been.

Yvette’s every bit as thrilled as I, perhaps even more so. The last time she paddled was on the Russian River in California almost 15 years ago. Despite the fact she’s lived in Ormond over on the coast and here in Sanford, she’s never paddled locally. We’ve brought along bottles of water and a few granola bars.

We move easily across the lake surface, feeling the slurping of gentle swells at the edges of the experience.  Although this is a broad dilation in the St. Johns  and not really a self-enclosed lake, it’s as big as one—nearly 15 square miles. There’s close to six miles worth of big water behind us, a sleeping liquid god with enough potential fetch  to bat us around like one of Yvette’s cats would bat a tiny anole, if it wanted. I had been closely watching the forecast, waiting for a day when the winds were expected to lay down, barely a knot or two an hour. But this is Florida, of course, and anything can change within a couple of hours, the cotton-white cumulus behind us turning black with vapor and coastal breezes sweeping inland, just because they can.

We’re paddling directly into the  morning sun, bright now and halfway up in the sky, high enough so that a jet trail passes between it and the horizon. As it goes, it underlines the sun with its white thread of smoke, almost as if the sky wants us to remember something. I figure we can reach the tip of the peninsula, mapped as “Grassy Point” within l5 or 20 minutes as it’s barely a mile, and we do. Since the river flows north, we’re actually paddling upstream, but the current today is slight, particularly so where it broadens out and is absorbed by the giant expanse that is Lake Monroe.

 

Monroe Shore, 1835

As we approach Grassy Point, I see it is less grass and more of the tall exotic water weed, Phragmites. The reed-like grass has consumed this tip of land, and it continues to do so as we paddle around its northerly shore. I have seen the tops of hardwood trees from the kayak, so I know there is likely dry land deeper inside the peninsula somewhere, and I look forward to what it will reveal. Now that we’re squarely inside the aquatic embrace of Mother’s Arms, we slow our paddling to allow more time to examine the shore. We push in and out of stands of reeds, spooking some fish that jump and a little blue heron. We are headed towards the northernmost “arm”, a splotch of blue mapped as “Big Smokehouse Cove”.  From the cove are two upstream outlets, and we will take the closer one, planning to follow it eastward as it encircles the peninsula.

 

Soon, the shore turns into hard packed sand, like a little beach, and I see wading birds have left behind the empty shells of Viviparous, the small snails expertly plucked from their homes by the sharp beak tips of wading birds. The shells are russet colored, lightly striped and shiny from the varnish of moisture. Not long after the first beach of shells, I see two very old cypress side by side just a few yards out from the peninsula. One is a dead gray snag; the other is very much alive, its crown of soft green needles sitting atop the old trunk, at once haphazard and neat, as only a cypress can be. The live tree is a dwarf, like those I have seen up in Lake Norris and down in Blue Cypress Lake, no more than seven or so feet high, but with a trunk base that is a couple yards in diameter.  I guess it is also hollow, like other bonsai-style cypress I have seen, and when I paddle next to it, I gently thump it with my paddle blade. The sound resonates as it would if I hit a drum made of heavy wood.

I turn to see Yvette paddling just ahead, close to shore. She has exclaimed several times at the wildness and singularity of the place. We are both astounded this old peninsula is so close to where we live. Yet, like those too-familiar parts of our lives, we have never bothered to examine it because we figured it would always be here. Nearby, great blooms of the wetland flower known as the marsh mallow shine in the early sun, crimson throats giving way to lighter pink petals, not as red as the scarlet hibiscus but every bit as grandiose.

To the north shore is Stone Island, where the Bartrams camped when they journeyed through here in 1763. Later, archaeologist Jefferies Wyman scouted the same waters in 1860, reporting one of the largest shell middens on the entire St. Johns on the shore there at Old Enterprise. Native Americas lived and camped here for 6,000 years, tribes of the Mayaca and Jororo fishing and hunting around the lake when the Europeans first arrived. We know that Monroe was named Valdez by the Spanish and later Wepolokse (round lake) by the Seminoles; but the  pre-Columbians were dispatched before we could learn what they called it.

Midden on N. Shore, 1860

 

 

The deeper we get into the cove, the more hardwoods we see on the peninsula, some sweetgum, some nut trees of some kind, and of course, the occasional sabal palm. The deep grunts of gators, scarce at first, become more frequent. I sound the bottom with my paddle and learn it is hard here, not muddy as it can be in the downstream reaches of the lake. To the north, we see a lone fisherman several hundred yards away, fishing in the bulrush there. Out of the cove now, we nose up the narrow stream, and pass another lone fishing boat.

Pot shards found in Monroe midden, 1867

 A creek that will allow us to round the peninsula opens up just ahead, and I realize this is not a peninsula at all but an island. Ashore, I see a patch of midden shells, about the size of a large cottage, rising several feet high, and I imagine hunters or fishers from a Mayacan tribe camping here for several generations.

 

Nearby, spats of apple snail eggs begin to appear regularly on the stems of plants; the presence of the eggs are a good sign ecologically, for the large snail that lays them insists on healthy water. I wonder if this eastern portion of the “lake” simply isn’t cleaner since its upstream from the stormwater drains that regularly drain street and lawn toxins into the waters—down where the concrete bulkheads of Sanford also rob the waters of its historic wetlands. Whatever the reason,  both Yvette and I take great pleasure in knowing that at least this portion of the lake—native and wild— still carries with it a legacy that others have known there for thousands of years.

The creek is narrow, deep, and as we enter it, I hear a motor boat coming up behind us. I slow as I hear him throttle down to idle speed. It is a FWC patrol boat, and for the fun of it, the officer has clocked our speed with a radar gun. He shouts to me over the motor: “You’re clocking 6.5 miles an hour”. Happy with this information, I give him the thumbs up, and he waves and speeds off.  It is nearly twice as fast as I thought I was paddling.

As we round the eastern shore of Mothers Arms, the land becomes higher, more trees and even some old pasture land. Another creek, Woodruff, nearly splices this pasture in two; when we round the corner to the wide old canal that will take us back to our launch, I see a few cows. Ahead, higher trees rise from the shore, and I’m elated to see they are cypress, relative giants at 100 or more feet, and at least one crowned with a nest of both an osprey and a great blue.

Hotel Forrest Lake, 1931

 

 

We paddle strong now, headed out beyond the natural shore to where the bulkhead begins, passing the old Hotel Forrest Lake as we go, a gilded time-stuck vision from the tourist boom of the 1920’s, back when a few paddlewheelers still steamed here to this “Gateway to South Florida”.  As we get closer to the launch, the large Rivership Romance churns its way out of the harbor there, exhaling its deep bass honk as it goes, a boatful of visitors learning about how things used to be on a lake that is really a river.  Yvette paddles ahead, and I wonder if the image of our plastic dugouts carries any symmetry with it, tiny boats of voyagers juxtaposed against so many poignant images of a rich river past, moving with careful stealth now towards our inevitable  return to the present. I glance once over my shoulder at Mothers Arms, and just for now, I let it go.

My bow, Yvette, Rivership Romance

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 anchors 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.