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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charred palmettos

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

wild vanilla

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

 

shiny blueberry

 

 

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

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

me & sand pine

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

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

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

Seepage spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

palmetto in bloom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Island in the Whitsundays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

The late Mel Fisher, with Atocha treasure

 

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

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

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

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

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

pond being built

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is early and Sunday, and there’s a refreshing coolness in the air. We drive in to the nearby state forest, over 20,000 acres, a relic landscape that gently cascades down from scrub to flatwoods and then hardwood hammock and tea-colored southern river, surrounded by swamp. The terrain is ahaped by freefall motion and time, in a speed too slow to register in the human heart.

A few other visitors are here today, odd for this vast stretch of wilderness, but most are intent on fishing or launching kayaks near the old concrete bridge that crosses the Blackwater Creek. I drive past them, wave to one of the fisherman, and then enter another series of canopied roads, more like thick foliage tunnels, really. We crawl along atop old berms, sloughs to both sides from the excavated fill, and hydric hammock spreading out just beyond.

It’s my friend’s Yvette’s birthday, and I offered to take her to a place she’d never seen, somewhere deep in the subtropical forest where little springs still burst up from the ground. It’s been over two years since I’ve been to these particular springs, and I overshoot the trail, blissfully driving onward to where the dirt road splits three ways. We get out here and hike a bit atop another berm until finally I realize nothing looks familiar. We return to the jeep, backtrack, and then find the right trail, one bracketed by shiny wild blueberry bushes, little fruits ready to be edible soon, a bear’s dream come true. From there, we hike in, only a mile or so. Ahead, I see the thick green wall of hickory and sweetgum open up, and know the high bluff surrounding the springs is somewhere nearby. This hidden little system is named, oddly enough, Palm Springs.

The bluff falls away into a valley of willow and sabal palm and wild grape vines, and we skirt the edge of it, headed for where the foliage opens below, just enough to reveal a clear ribbon of spring water sneaking its way through the landscape. We stand at the top, marveling at the sharp drop in the terrain that leads to the tiny creek. The valley seems almost like a steephead, a rare formation created when water flows laterally underground, finally collapsing the surface and rock above by the force of its erosion. A three sided valley remains from the collapse, and the lateral flows continue. But this place is somehow different, since the vents are in the base of the valley and not seeping from its walls.

We carefully step our way to the bottom, headed for the little portal in the willows. The water is transparent here, but the sandy earth is reddish underneath, the sign of iron being exuded, perhaps from the soil, the water, or both. Bacteria, likely nurtured by the iron, grows in white clumps, edges splayed out in filigrees of organic tentacles. Fat little minnows converge here, all trying to point their snouts upstream, in the strong run. There are killifish and gambusia and sailfin mollies, some with the distinct melanistic blotches of black, miniature dalmations recreated as tiny fish. An ebony jewelwing, the damselfly with the opalescent body, an insect seldom found too far away from a spring, flits nearby, and a bird I can’t identify calls happily from the treetops somewhere.

These springs were once impounded when the land was privately owned, creating a large, deep sullen pool for god knows what. Now, with the impoundment breeched, the weight of the water that once reduced the magic upwelling to a trickle, has gone, and the earth is returning itself to life.

I figure it would be fun to try to find all the little vents, and so we move a ways back up the sides, just far enough to find a good approach to the fretwork of scrub and small trees clustered around the flowing headsprings. We push our way through the wild grape vines and brush, coming out on no less than six separate boils. New, bright green leaves of the leather fern cluster near some of them. Although most of the upwellings are hidden below the surface, at least two springs push the water up with such force it seems there’s a faucet underneath, creating distinct little fountains. Of course, I think of Bartram’s description of the Florida springs as “fountains of ether”; back then, even the large ones like Salt and Blue were powerful enough to rise up in flowing eruptions from the belly of each boil, no compromise of the recharging uplands to diminish the wonder.

We squat next to the upwellings, one at a time, take a few pictures, absorb the alchemy of water and sky seeming to converge near our feet as one. We do this for a long time.

Back up the bluff, we pass a field of prickly pear cactus, many of them sporting wonderful sun-yellow blossoms, the great irony of softness and sharpness in the same plant, nature’s little zen joke. A few of the flat cactus pads have bites taken from them, and I notice that each is about the size of the horny mouth of a gopher tortoise. Without deciding what to do, we simply sit under a small magnolia tree, cool here in the shade; we break out some delicious nuts Yvette had sautéed in a pan, and some water. Soon, I lay back and put my hands behind my head, watching the great diorama of the sky move beyond the leaf canopy that, just for now, protects us, as if it is our home.

We talk some, relax, retune our senses to the rhythms around us, shed a few layers of “civilization.” Yvette is amazed that the absence of sound seems to produce a sound itself, except one that is calming. Finally, it seems as if we should try to make our way down the side of the bluff that slopes sharply towards the swamp, to the place where the spring run will converge with the Blackwater. And so, we do this for a bit, struggling through thicker vines, cat briar, thorny blackberry thickets. But when we finally reach the run, we are still a distance from the larger river.

Back up we go, more appreciative now of the dramatic rise and fall of the topography. I pause, just for a moment, and when I do, I focus. The aperture opens, just enough to allow the vision of a perfectly formed dusky pygmy rattler to settle in. It is full grown, maybe 18 inches, and it is spectacularly etched with a brilliant crosshatch, the same pattern the Timucua incised into their pottery and wood. The little snake neither moves nor acknowledges our presence. I clumsily fumble with my camera, and snap off a few shots before the rattler vanishes, dissolving back into nature, just as gators dissolve into the water at twilight, molecule by molecule.

Funny, but I’ve only seen snakes when my hiking companion is a woman; often, they see them before I do. All have been smart, striking—sometimes downright beautiful like Yvette—and it all leaves me wondering about the wakefulness of snakes, and why they only reveal themselves to me when a female is nearby. I figure it’s not mere surface beauty, but a deeper aesthetic of the soul, a sort of ecological unity of purpose, bound by poetry. Men, hunters all these many lifetimes, forged ahead with singleminded bloodlust; women, left to gather seeds and plants and to ponder the gods, stored their own wisdom, instead of letting it leak away in great primal surges.

And so now, we head back towards home on my friend’s day of birth, taking these moments with us, knowing only for sure that springs can still flow and valleys rise and fall, and tiny, exquisite vipers can appear, seemingly at will. Nature never fails to both awe and to humble me, reminding me that I only have the illusion of knowing. That, just in case I think I have it all figured out, I really ought to look more closely.

Nature, left to her mystic devices, did what was needed.

I was just along for the ride.

Doe Lake is tucked away off a dirt road in the Ocala National Forest, surrounded by a hammock of live and water oaks. Its shore is green, crammed with native plants and soggy wet soils, and it sparkles in the late afternoon light, a sandy-bottom Florida lake as clear as they all once were, in another century.

The old dining hall for WPA workers who helped clear roads through the Forest and build trails and offices and kiosks back in the 1930’s sits atop a bluff that slopes gradually down to the edge of the lake. There were barely 1.5 million people living in Florida then, and the interior was lonely and wild.

I park next to a row of big American pick-up trucks, and walk inside. There’s already 150 people here, spread out under the rich hardwood or outside around the edge of the lake itself. We’re here for a celebration, one intended to bring attention to a little cabin once used by the family of the great naturalist Archie Carr for three generations. The cabin, built of cypress and pine in 1938, was a backwoods refuge for the Carr family, a place where they could learn about the wonderful strangeness that distinguished natural Florida from all else.

Fla. Gov. Claude Kirk, Marjorie, Archie Carr

The little cabin with its Cracker-style look and feel is symbolic of the ethics the Carrs embodied, ideals once learned and then shared with all who cared about the power of the natural world, and the animals that populated it. Its full utility is not easy to define; it’s a bit of Cross Creek, a bit of Aldo Leopold’s “shack”, a bit of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond.

Certainly, key ideas vital to understanding ecology and the singular nature of Florida were born here; but like all righteous ideas, they sometimes hide in the margins of our existence and are not always evident, until we really need them to be. All we know is that they urge us on when we walk a strange, dark trail at night, or paddle an unknown sliver of river that seeps through a rainforest, no real map and certainly no guide to show us the way. For me, life has come down to that, and as such, is clearly divided between those who move ahead with quiet and informed determination; and those who pretend they do.

woods around the cabin

The dress for this evening is “Florida casual”, and if we were at a country club somewhere, that would mean the “swells” would be tricked out in their L.L. Bean outdoor garb. But here, folks are honestly relaxed, t-shirts and camo and jeans. We line up cafeteria style for our dinners, and I heap piles of local flora and fauna on my plate, hearts-of-palms and venison and fried gator. We needed a hog to round it all out, and Dr. Ray Willis, the archaeologist for the Forest, went out and shot one, and the cooks roasted it. I grab a large glass of sweet iced tea, and sit at the table near the front, next to a good fellow from Umatilla who has fished and hunted most of his life. We talk about the St. Johns River, since he has loved fishing it, and I once wrote a book about it. We talk of gators, because, well, that’s what Florida folks usually do—sooner or later, they trade gator stories.

The idea behind this all is to raise money that will help restore the little Cracker cabin so that it becomes a functioning emotional symbol of a true Florida-born conservation ethic, one embodied by Archie and his wife, Marjorie Harris Carr, his father, Pastor A. F. Carr, and his five children. Dr. Tom Carr, Archie’s surviving brother, has donated the 46 acres of land and the cabin to the USFS in the hope its iconic value might provide a sort of beacon in the ever-darkening night of Florida’s post-industrial, self-absorbed world. To that ends, Bob Giguere and I have produced a short film about the cabin via our non-profit, Equinox, and when the time is right, we get up and screen it for everyone.

Bob Giguere shoots Ray Willis for our film

There is a sort of protocol for presentations, and we all file dutifully up to the lecturn to add a few words when needed. We are not showmen, so the coming and going is often clunky, but in an endearing and genuine sort of way. Two former UF students of Archie who have now earned worldwide reputations for their own work in conservation biology speak respectively, first Dr. Peter Pritchard and then Dr. Perrin Ross. Both are low key, funny, informed, eloquent. A few years ago, Peter was named as one of the “Heroes of the Earth” by Time magazine. Both he and Perrin tell of the inspiration gifted to them, a quality they continue to pass along to all of the rest of us students of the earth. Ray gets up and explains a bit about the plan to restore the cabin, and why. Rick Lint, the Ranger in charge for the Forest, introduces some of us, no fancy prelude, just a few meaningful words.

A woman next to me at the table leans over and whispers “This is like a movie”, and she is right because there is almost no pretense, no sign of acting, no individual promotion, just a bunch of guys who have all tried to do the right thing, and are doing it with their hearts. It is, if anything, a theater of true courage, and that sets it all dramatically apart from a mere just-pretend theater with music and narrative scripted and precisely managed. And do you know the old phrase—actions speak louder than words? Action is what the evening is really about, and not the choreography of charade, but the rich energy of an inner core infused by the light.

And I think again of philosopher Joseph Campbell and of his description of the “Hero’s Journey”; he reminds us that being brave or strong is not the most vital quality of this archetypical “hero.” Instead, it is sacrifice, which means “making holy.” All return to their starting point with elixirs, food, or knowledge to share with the community. If, on return, they seem ragged and humble, well, it matters little.

And, so this evening from another century becomes one of hyper-reality, a moment so rare that we can hardly find room for it in our imaginations, except to think that, just maybe, this might be a movie, one in which modest but righteous men prevail. And outside a cloud bank drifts away in the night sky and the lake becomes luminous under the moonlight, as if it has been perfectly cued to do so.

[During the filming of a recent documentary, I journeyed up to "The Yearling Trail" in the Ocala Forest. This is a story about that visit].

The river leg of our “In Marjorie’s Wake” film may have ended, but we are still poking about in the folds of our story before we finally reconverge at Cross Creek.

Our film is more than just the recreation of Rawlings’ historic “Hyacinth Drift” river journey, of course. There are many “characters” in this documentary–Marj and Dess, Leslie Poole and Jennifer Chase, the rivers and their wildlife, the river-influenced art, and of course, the way Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings herself learned to pay attention to it all. Her skills as a narrator and her ability to listen and record the world around her were profound. As a human, she was imperfect, as we all are. But as a writer she transcended her mortal life, and taught us something about ourselves along the way.

Mrs. Rawlings at her home in Cross Creek

For now, Bob Giguere and I drive up into the Ocala National Forest to hike and to shoot some footage along The Yearling Trail, west of Lake George.

I have always found a singular beauty in the rolling pine landscape of the “Big Scrub,” and have always cherished the springs here. I have scuba dived into Alexander and, during another project, into the chasms of Salt and Silver Glen. On other trips, I have paddled the runs of those springs along with that serpentine sliver of ether that flows out of Juniper. While I know the scrub and sandhills on public land not far from my home in Sanford, I am less conversant with that of Ocala. The visit today gives me the chance to better understand the intimacy Rawlings once knew here with both the landscape and its people.

Earlier, Bob and I had traveled to the Smathers Library’s Special Collection at the University of Florida in Gainesville where archivist Flo Turcotte graciously arranged for us to have a look at the Rawlings memorabilia willed to the school. We both put on white gloves, Bob to shoot and myself to sort through files of photos, letters, old home movie footage, and original manuscripts. There were photos of the Fiddias, with whom Marj stayed when researching South Moon Under, and of Barney Dilliard, who was preparing to skin a bear he had shot. Dilliard’s story of a giant, marauding bear made it into The Yearling where the bear was immortalized as “Old Slewfoot.” Another showed Calvin Long with a hunting dog, holding a shotgun in front of his homestead on Pat’s Island.

Here, I also saw an astonishing 1938 map of the Ocala Forest where Rawlings had scribbled handwritten notes to identify the real places she had fictionalized in The Yearling. On the map, Pat’s Island in the scrub became “Baxter’s Island.” Other notes marked where the “first tangle with Old Slewfoot” took place on Juniper Creek run and identified the fictional “Forrester’s Island” as “Hughes Island.” I sifted through a chronology of old photos, from Marjorie at age two to just before her death at age 57. She grew into a pretty, vivacious young woman before my eyes and then, prematurely, grew heavier and jowly, her smiles less frequent. Towards the end, her face was puffy and her eyes were tired and she looked as she were in pain.

And, I held the original typewritten pages of The Yearling and of Cross Creek, let my fingers retrace the Courier type and penciled-in edit changes Rawlings herself once made. The moment moved me, to be sure. It was if the yellowed page in my hand was more than processed wood fragments, was in fact an image capturing the split second when information passes between the human heart and the human mind, and is thrust out from the spirit onto the tangible worlds that flash when a spring bursts forth from the limerock, or when a lightening bolt leaps from the heavens to the earth. The creative gust is no less than that; it is simply much better at pretending to be invisible.

I thought a lot about all of that during our drive up into the Ocala National Forest today, earnestly hoping that deconstructing an author’s work is not an intellectual charade. I remember the poet Browning once said: “When I wrote that, only God and I knew what it meant… and now, only God knows.”

Finally, we reach the entrance to Silver Glen Springs on SR 19. Just to the left in the palmetto scrub is a sign with a fawn on it that reads “The Yearling Trail.” I am grateful that someone in the national forest service had the good sense to match literary fiction with reality.

It is a sunny midmorning during the week and the road we have taken is straight and quiet. The Forest itself is bordered by both the St. Johns and the Ocklawaha Rivers to the east where a hardwood swamp rims the water’s edge. But here, in its heart, its geography is vastly different. It is this rise in the topography, these many square miles of sandy terrain, that serve as the uplands where the great springs of the Forest are recharged by rainfall.

We pull over and walk to the trail head kiosk where we find some description of the literary heritage of the landscape. We learn that “Pat’s Island” is one of the most popular historic attractions in the Ocala National Forest. Here, of course, an “island” is not surrounded by water but instead is a fertile, cooler hammock of longleaf, wiregrass and turkey oak in a virtual sea of rolling, arid scrub.

Cal Long at Pat's Island

I shoulder the tripod and Bob the camera satchels, and we hike a trail, past the low saw palmettos and the gullberry and the little wild blueberry bushes, tiny leaves reddish and shiny. It is November but after a mile or so we are both covered with sweat. We find the old cemetery where the extended Long clan is buried, a tiny plot of grave stones surrounded with a dilapidated picket fence. The air is heavy, no sound but that of our own breathing.

From the kiosk, I learned that a Rueben Long first came here in 1872 with his family. Others followed, and by the turn of the century the population of the 1,400 acre island peaked when about a dozen families worked the land, making a meager living with small crops, cattle, hogs, fishing, and moonshining. By the time the National Forest was created here in 1908, many of the original settlers had sold or leased their homesteads. When Rawlings visited descendent Calvin and his wife Mary Long in 1933, they were the only ones left. Calvin told Marj colorful yarns of the scrub, narratives made real because story telling was still an art then. Rawlings heard the tale of a fawn being nursed to a yearling by one of the Longs when they were young boys.

My time here in the Long cemetery under the hot Florida sun is difficult to fully process. It means fiction and history have met and that the poignant, heartbreaking stories that Rawlings told so well were once lived by men and women and children, and that many of them–the prototypes for Penny, Ma and Jody Baxter–are still here, beneath the sandy graves at my feet.

The wondrous irony is that there were plenty of people throughout Florida living hardscrabble lives, scrapping together a subsistence existence from the land and its rivers. Some were courageous and some were not, but they were all human, with deeply abiding human qualities and human frailties; they laughed, loved, lived, died. A writer brought some of them back to life, and then with the grace of a god, animated them so that the eternal amalgam between her heart and theirs became one. And now they are all gone, the evidence that they lived at all found here in this place, and in the stories of the books one human once wrote.

Jody & his flutter mill

We pack up and leave the little cemetery, hoping to find our way to the sinkhole, the one the fictional Baxters used to draw water for drinking and washing. We walk from the open, hot scrub into the hammock where it is cooler and more pleasant. A hammock is not unlike a river, because you can no longer see straight ahead across the horizon; your vision is blocked by oaks and pines, and the trail inside of them seems to meander, almost without purpose. A hammock begs a story to tell what is behind the next tree, the next thicket of muscadine vines. Jody’s little friend Fodderwing in The Yearling saw “Spaniards” in the hammock, willing mythic images from the mystery of the dark woods. And, Rawlings herself wrote of the enchantment found in the dim light of the hammocks, and how comforting it was for her.

Suddenly, the edge of the earth falls away and the entire terrain descends into a giant earthen hole, steep sides thickly colonized with foliage. This was the Baxter’s sink, where limestone catchments held tricklings of water from the slopes of the sink. With no well, it was the only fresh water for miles around. I stumble cautiously down the edges to the bottom, and look carefully for water, but see none. The terrain of Florida is much drier now than when Rawlings lived here. We have drained over half of our wetlands away, and our springs are now declining in magnitude because of over-use and the loss of places where rain once replenished them. Perhaps the “pure filtered water” that seeped into the sink from lateral limestone veins in the earth has been compromised by all of this.

At the lip almost a hundred feet above, I see Bob, and he is dwarfed by the scale of it all, a stick figure in the midst of all the shadowy green. With a child’s eye, he could easily be a Spaniard moving in and out of the narrow shafts of sunlight.

The day is growing long and I am still anxious to visit the little spring where Jody built his fluttermill. It is the sort of place I would also have loved as a child, the sort of place I still love now, really. Most of my own wonder for nature as an adult comes from that nascent awe I first experienced as a little boy, walking in the woods with my dad, fishing, and hiking for miles through the countryside.

I know “Jody’s Spring” is across the road beyond the main spring at Silver Glen, so we pack up and head over there. We walk beyond the two large vents of the main spring along a quiet trail into the hammock, following the clear rill that arises from somewhere deeper in the woods. Jody came here to be alone as child, to build his little “flutter mill” out of sticks and palmetto fronds, and to watch it spin in the flow of the current. Rawlings wrote of it:

“A spring as clear as well water bubbled up from nowhere in the sand. It was a though the banks cupped green leafy hands to hold it… Beyond the bank, the parent spring bubbled up at a higher level, cut itself a channel through white limestone and begin to run rapidly downhill to make a creek.” The Silver Glen creek joined the St. Johns at Lake George and then flowed north to the sea. “There were other beginnings, true, but this one as his own.”

When Ma Baxter complained Jody’s play took away from his chores, Pa Baxter said: “A boy ain’t a boy too long… Let him kick up his heels, let him build his flutter mills. The day’ll come when he’ll not even want to.”

The sand boils still roil today, small gambusia and killifish skirting about the edges of each, and the roils flatten out into mirrors of light, and just as in Jody’s time, they flow out to the great river and then to the sea. Bob fiddles with the camera, shooting some footage of the tiny spring. I build a crude version of a flutter mill, and for a few precious moments, watch it spin about in its own beginnings, poetry and science and a boy’s dream captured in this moment, in this place, just for now. The peace it gives me is immeasurable.

And then we pack up and leave the timelessness of the hammock and return to the harsh glare of the sunlit world with its roads and traffic and all its grown-up chores. And I think with great nostalgia, of the stories Rawlings told, and of the life I have known as a man growing up in the South. And I have a great longing for it all, both for my own reality as well as the natural world Marj saw and imagined, a mythical place cobbled together from springwater and dreams and old timely yarns. Maybe, a boy ain’t a boy too long. But if he works at it, he can carry a sense of wonder with him that lasts a lifetime.