October 21 to October, 26, 2016—west coast of Florida
From the Keys we made a long haul to Sanibel island on the Gulf of Mexico. The island is famed for shell collecting because unlike other Gulf islands it has a long beach exposure running east to west and so, owing to the current, intercepts more artifacts from the sea. But there were more shell collectors than shells the two days we were there and the beach was pretty much picked over by the time we made the rounds. A pleasant, reasonably-priced RV camp called Periwinkle. (Diane and Preston had stayed here once before; people still talk about them.) There were lots of exotic birds in cages, and also a handful of captive lemurs. We found a place to hike in the nearby wildlife reserve, but it wasn’t a particularly appealing trail through the mangrove forest in the blazing sun. I eavesdropped on a guided tour to learn that the mangrove seed is the only seed that fertilizes while still hanging on the tree. From the fertilized seed it grows a six inch tube called a propagule, resembling the cigars from cigar trees of our region. Theses propagules fall off and can drift for as long as a year before being washed onto their ideal grounds for sprouting, a shaded sandbar in shallow water.
We headed up the coast after a couple days at Sanibel to a private campground on the Chassahowitzka river. Took a little bike ride around the area and ate onion rings at a dive bar. A couple guys came in accompanied by a trail of marijuana vapor and started getting rowdy after a couple beers. We can get that at home so we rode back to camp at dark. Brenda turned in early, I wound up getting in conversation with a guy playing guitar across camp, a pleasant, philosophical chap. We had a couple beers and a couple laughs. While we were talking a herd of something commenced to stirring up the underbrush. On the way back to the Scamp I discovered they were armadillos as they made their way blindly across the campground nosing around for ants and grubs.
Moved a little ways up the coast to Homosassa to a pleasant-enough camp by the Gulf shore. Unfortunately a guy was running a small loader to smooth some ground in the camp making a horrendous noise, especially the alarm that beeped when he went into reverse. He said he was going to be at it until sundown and start again in the morning so we left without checking in and drove to another campground which proved to be located in a median strip next to a truck stop so we passed that one by too. A little further up the road we chose Newport State Park which was much to our liking. We wound up staying two nights instead of the one we originally planned. There was a little fishing camp town down the road, St. Mark’s, where we had dinner and watched the workboats bringing in the catch. One boat had two square baskets, bushel-size, filled with stone crab claws. Took two men to lift each one. I am guessing that each basket held about $1,500 to $1,800 worth, retail. (The restaurant was selling a pound of claws for $35.) Workers immediately began sorting them by size and packing them on ice.
Next day we visited, a few miles away, Wakulla Springs, billing itself as the largest freshwater spring in the world, 600,000 gallons per minute flowing out of an underwater limestone cave system that is the largest in the US, 30+ miles. For less than ten bucks you get an hour’s ride around the springs on a little pontoon boat. The water is crystal clear to ten or more feet and you see untold numbers and types of fish and many manatees. At least a dozen alligators nearby and many species of birds. Wakulla Springs is a state property now but was founded by Edward Ball as a, here we go again, resort for the rich. The splendid hotel he built is well-maintained by the state. He dynamited the river to deepen it so his buddies’ yachts could reach the springs from the Gulf and put a fence across the river so the undesirables would be kept at a distance. I asked the boat guide how Ball made his pile. He said that Ball’s sister had married a DuPont and her husband hired Ball to manage the Dupont investments. Something sounded familiar and after a few minutes I realized that the woman who married into the DuPont fortune was Jessie Ball who we learned about from all the memorials bearing her name around Reedville when we stayed there in late August. What a coincidence. Both Edward Ball and Jessie Ball DuPont were significant investors and philanthropists in the building of Miami and St. Augustine and are lionized in Florida history, along with Henry Flagler who built the railroad to Key West and is known as the father of Miami and Palm Beach. You can’t throw a stone anywhere in southeastern Florida without hitting something named after Henry Flagler. (Edward Ball is know as the father of one of the most violent labor disputes in American history, a years-long showdown with the railroad union that went on into the 1960s.)
In years past the guides of the various Florida spring boat tours, local African-American boat captains, developed unique, stylized recitations that they would deliver during the tour. If you do a little searching you will be charmed by the recordings. Google “Welcome to Rainbow Springs” and there is an example on youtube. Another is on the florida state archives and features a guide from Wakulla springs named Luke Smith. His son works as a guide at Wakulla currently, tho he was not our guide. Our guide, named Pat, arrived at Wakulla by accident in the early 1950s, hitchhiking around the south as a teenager. He was captivated by the place, hung around till they gave him paying work, and never left. He was an entertaining guide altho, sadly, he repeated two entire stories during the trip. Finally, I should not fail to mention that some of the Weismuller Tarzan movies were filmed at Wakulla as were the water scenes in “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Nature and Culture, together in one place.
(This is the “black lagoon” from which the Creature emerged in the movie.)
Tom and Renee Ewart, old friends from Bushwood Mill past, live in Tallahassee and we met them for dinner at a midpoint between Tallahassee and Newport. It was a nice, old restaurant reminiscent of now-gone crabhouses of old St. Mary’s county. In a remarkable achievement Tom had managed to find the only dining place in Florida that didn’t serve alcohol. Way to go, Tom! Once again I was sorry that we had not planned our trip a little better so that we could have spent more time with our old friends. We certainly wouldn’t have minded another day’s stay at Newport–there were lots of inviting bike trails in the Big Bend nature reserve surrounding the camp—but we are coming up on a deadline to arrive in Albuquerque in a few weeks and have to maintain westward progress.