This old gas station and store was in Cherry Lake, Florida. The one in Gulf Hammock was similar but sadly now long gone. Photo Courtesy Florida State Archives
 Old drink machines kept bottles cold in icy water. Gulf Hammock is barely more than a wide spot in the road these days but it used to be a busy place as my mother tells it. It was strung out all over the woods when she was growing up and had more people and a mill that was owned by the Paterson-McInnis lumber company that ran the town. She remembers boardwalks snaking through the woods following one lane roads to houses tucked back from US 19, the hard road that ran north to south full of truckers and people in a hurry to get somewhere else. Like any good company town there was a commissary that offered almost anything you might need including the post office that took up one corner of the big square building ringed with a porch on three sides. There were two other stores, Peek’s and Gavin’s, both small side-of-the-road mom and pop places with basic groceries, hard candy, ice cold drinks in a big square cooler filled with water so icy it would hurt your hand when you dug around for the coldest soda down in the bottom somewhere. On the side of the cooler box was the opener where you popped your soda’s metal top off. There was a satisfying snap of a sound and the metal cap fell down among the other tops. I don’t know what happened to them when they were cleaned out but I have seen bottle caps used like washers when nailing things together. There was even ice cream and Popsicles. Well, what a choice. To have the small Dixie Cup of vanilla with its own little wooden spoon or the double barreled banana Popsicle. Whichever one you picked was bound to melt before you finished it in that heat. And even though you might want to linger and savor the cold and the flavors, a prudent person wouldn’t. Gavin’s sold flour in 20-pound bags and also in smaller amounts from flour kept in a big barrel. They kept all the flour sacks, cotton with some sort of decorative print on it, and sold them to women who made clothes out of it. I had some flour sack outfits myself, mostly little shirts or shorts. It was always a few degrees cooler in the store because of the refrigerated cases and the fact that they were smart enough to keep the windows and doors shut down against the heat of the day. One of my favorite things was the knives for sale. There were pocket knives and every man had a good one that he took care of really well. They were cleaned and oiled and sharpened and considered essential. I really wanted one and as a tomboy was eventually given one. It was easy to be a tomboy in those days, cute even, but I imagine it would not have been easy to be a little boy who wanted to do girl things. Years later as a teenager I lived next to a boy who played with dolls. His name was Jerry and I made fun of him like everybody else did. With years behind me of seeing how people are different and yet wonderfully valuable all over the spectrum of human experience I can only say one thing to him and nothing in my own defense. I’m so sorry, Jerry.
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  Ibis on nest, courtesy of the Florida Archives. It’s 6:30 a.m. and the sky has pinkened up nicely. Toward the horizon over the Atlantic slate blue clouds are piling up and will begin their march toward land where they will dissipate or maybe coalesce and dump some rain. I’m waiting for the ibis.
Every morning, near sunrise, the huge flock of ibis that roost in the trees lining the short waterway across the street give a collective shake and then take off, silently, as a group. Usually they come straight up out of the trees like a covey of quail flushed from the brush by a good bird dog and then all fly off in the same direction. It’s as if they are commuters headed to work and in a way they are. Somewhere, and they seem to know where that is, there are plenty of delicious grubs and bugs just waiting to be beaked up. My guess is golf courses though during the day you are likely to see them almost anywhere around Fort Lauderdale — parking lots, quiet streets with small lawns, mega houses with equally impressive boats in the canals behind them. Once in a while the ibis seem to get their magnetic compasses out of whack and then they swirl and re-roost and re-take off abortively a few times before settling into their purpose and winging away. Still, it’s a silent thing. The parrots on the other hand are noisy from the get go. Their flight seems as intoxicating to them as teenagers on a roller coaster and like the teenagers they scream and screech as they wheel around the sky. Before the parrots do their first morning takeoff they sometimes gather in the tops of the trees and murmur to each other in parrot talk. Occasionally it’s just one parrot, a lone sentinel turning this way and that before giving some signal to the others that it’s time to fly and scream. The young ibis tend to stick closer to the roosting area and it’s common to see their brown and white bodies bobbing down the streets nearby. The parrots definitely break into smaller groups and swoop around chattering and looking for bird feeders and other easy targets. At night, everyone comes home. The parrots come in dribs and drabs, the ibis have joined up as they return and arrive in a big bunch to throw their wings up over their heads to make a graceful drop into the trees below. When you spend time in one place you get to notice these things and know them in the same way that you know how to park your car or tie your shoes. It just becomes part of what you carry around without thinking about it. You might be drinking coffee and suddenly think, it’s time for the ibis and wander over to the window, cup in hand, just in time to see their silent arrowing across the sky.  Fred Neil at Montreux Jazz Festival 1975. Went out for an early morning appointment the other day and started wondering about people you see on the street at that hour. If somebody is walking with a shopping cart full of stuff and you can be pretty sure that person is homeless. But, lots of others are not so easily pegged. Still, that’s a time of day when a lot of homeless folks are moving from their nighttime hideaways to their daytime hangout spots.
And that got me to thinking that when I was kid it was rare in north Florida to see a homeless person. There were a few hobos and on occasion some rootless soul that you just knew couldn’t stay in one place but it seemed more a choice than a terrible circumstance. Those days someone would come up to the house and ask if you had any work and maybe they’d rake your yard or whatever you asked and you’d pay them with a meal served to them outside. They’d eat in the shade, say thank you ma’am, hand back your plate and be gone. Today it’s not only marginalized people who are out of the mainstream and into the subculture world of homelessness, whether through addiction, post traumatic stress or mental health issues, it’s also families: moms, dads with kids or just moms or dads with kids. People are living in cars, sleeping in church parking lots and trying to keep clean and get the kids to school. This is definitely not the world I grew up in. I moved to Miami when I got grown and before too long moved to New York City. About that time the movie Midnight Cowboy came out and I understood how someone might dream of getting out of the dirt and chaos and crime and head down south. Fred Neil — a boy who grew up in Florida and was a well known songwriter to other musicians but largely unknown to the public — gave us a song (Everybody’s Talkin’) that was used in that movie and performed by Harry Nilsson for a Grammy and I think it really sums up the allure. “Everybody’s talkin’ at me/ I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’/ only the echoes of my mind… I’m going where the sun keeps shinin’/ through the pouring rain./ Going where the weather suits my clothes./ Banking off the northeast wind/ Sailing on a summer breeze,/ Skippin’ over the ocean like a stone.” Fred Neil spent some time in New York too around the same time I got there. Bob Dylan played harmonica for him down on Bleeker Street, Fred did concerts with Joni Mitchell. Roy Orbison and the Jefferson Airplane recorded his songs but he's still largely unknown. I was a folkie back in Miami and I knew who he was. Right before I moved north I went to see Fred in a coffee house in Coconut Grove. He came out, never said a word, sat on a stool and did a bunch of his songs. He didn’t talk, didn’t look up, just hung over his guitar and gave it to us. Then he stood up and walked off. I remember that night all these years later and remember that he sang about something just beyond your grasp, some bittersweet thing like weather that suits your clothes or the thought that something might change somehow. Today, thinking about Fred Neil and all his music I looked him up on Google and found a fredneil.com website that lists all his records and lyrics, has a bunch of photos. It was put together by a web guru from the Netherlands who told me he was just a fan, like me, when I asked him about the site. Fred went on to found the Dolphin Project on Earth Day in 1970 with a friend. That attracted a bunch of other people like a young Jimmy Buffet and brings to mind another classic Fred Neil song, The Dolphins. “This old world may never change/The way it’s been/And all the ways of war/Can’t change it back again./I’ve been searching for the dolphins in the sea/And sometimes I wonder/Do you ever, think of me.” It was a great combination of the big issues like world peace put together with the very personal do you ever think of me. He stopped appearing or recording but remains a songwriter’s writer. Plenty of folks like Stephen Stills name him as an influence and the Jefferson Airplane used to not only cover his Other Side of This Life but also dedicated a song to him at their concerts. And we are left with a handful of gravelly-voiced songs on LP now reissued on CD and the question, “sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me?” I do. Fred Neil died on Summerland Key in 2001.
 Island Pond is shrinking and weeds grow where water stood. It’s 93 degrees. I’m in mom’s car, toes curled around the accelerator bumping along by the edge of Buck Lake in Geneva (between Orlando and Sanford). I’m less than five miles from Lake Jesup the big lake local legend claims has the most gators per shoreline mile of any body of water. Some population estimates claim 13,000 of the bumpy-backed prehistoric lizards hide in the dark water and cruise the surface like nuclear powered logs. I’ve seen more than a few there.
But this morning, on this little lake, all I see is a family of sandhill cranes foraging by stabbing their long beaks into the boggy land surrounding the lake. Down by the water, car left by the road, mud coming up between my toes, I cast out a black and yellow rubber worm past the lily pads and reel it slowly toward shore. The water boils and the worm is sucked down by a small but scrappy bass. He hangs on to the tail for a tenacious few yards but spits it out before getting hauled out of the water. A couple of casts later the line sinks and then goes taut and the rod tip bends just a touch. But when I start to reel there’s no fight and the small bass that’s caught is a sad specimen. He’s so thin I swear his cheeks are sunken and his flanks are lean. I get him unhooked and back in the water fast and wish I had a bucket of fish food and not just a tackle box full of rubber worms. Somehow, seeing the little bass made me think of a big trout my father caught in Lake Santa Fe when I was a kid. He was boat fishing and brought the trout back in the live well. It was early in the day so he tied the fish to a line anchored to a cypress knee. It swam there in the knee-deep clear water as if suspended in air, its fins beating a delicate figure eight on its sides. I untied it and walked it like a dog in the shallow water for what seemed like hours. It became my pet and when it was time to kill it and clean it for dinner I cried. I refused to eat any of the trout that night but within a couple of days was back to loving a good piece of bream or trout or speckled perch dusted in cornmeal and fried up with hushpuppies and grits. We loved the land and what grew on it. We loved the water and most of what swam in it. We would not have hurt any of it on purpose except poisonous snakes though I supposed we did our own share of damage by not knowing any better. My sister lives on Island Pond now, near Buck Lake. The eagles who nest in an old dead tree behind her house used to bathe in the shallows of her small lake but now the shallows are all gone, replaced by muck and dry sand that used to be on the bottom. The eagles are bathing somewhere else though they still nest nearby and rest in the big pines looking for signs of something small and lunch-like moving through the tall grass and dog fennel. Ospreys make passes over the lake and a couple of crane families come flying in every morning, their distinctive yodeling call preceding them by quite a ways. The cranes wander the changing shoreline with their graceful, syncopated, tall stepping walk. There used to be pretty good sized bass all over Island Pond and maybe there are a few left. I hope so. To be sure there is evidence that Island Pond has gone through rise and fall dramatically in recent history. It has come up enough to be one lake and dropped enough to become three. Dead pine stumps ring the marshy edge, proof that the water was low enough to let a small stand of trees flourish for at least 10 years. And the stumps prove that the water was high enough, long enough to then kill those trees. Over tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years with glaciers capturing and releasing the planet’s water, Florida has risen and spread its shore out hundreds of miles and then retreated to a tiny series of islands. But the change I’m talking about is happening over years, not millennia. So are the measurable water level shifts we can see part of that larger, slower cycle the earth goes through or is it something else, something we are causing through our unwillingness to take care of what’s right outside our doors? Finally, after more than three years of talking about this site I am ready to launch it. For those who have listened to me talk about it all this time, thanks for listening and thanks for all your good advice.
I grew up in Florida, in Gainesville, and spent my childhood looking for shark's teeth in Hogtown Creek and camping on the Suwannee River. We fished in the lakes and rivers in our Chris Craft and sometimes roared out the mouth of the river into the Gulf of Mexico where we once threw a prop and were stranded on the shallow sandbar. My father stood waist deep in the Gulf as the tide began to rise and he repeatedly slipped under the boat, holding his breath while he managed to get a new prop on the motor. My mother and I held our breath when he did. Just in the nick of time, or so it seemed to me, he got it fixed and pulled himself into the boat, shaking water all over us and laughing. We went back up the river, probably to Clay Landing or maybe Fowler's Bluff and by dark were sitting by a campfire, safe from the grabbing fingers of the sea. Were we in any real danger? I thought so. I imagined floating out to sea, pulled far from sight of land with no way to get home. Turns out, getting home is what it's always about in one way or another and that's what this site is about for me — a way to get home to the place (real or remembered) where my heart beats to the same rhythm as the land and water around me.
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AuthorWriter and photographer Sue Harrison is a fifth generation Floridian who left for many years but came back still calling it home. Archives
December 2016
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