I do believe in soundtracks and often when I am remembering the past it’s country music that I hear. A little Hank Williams goes a long ways toward setting a mood. “If you loved me half as much as I love you…”

It’s odd because I really didn’t like country music. Me, I was too hip for that old stuff. I used to fight with my father about the radio station. I’d press some rock station button, maybe the Big Ape out of Jacksonville and he’d push another button and get a country station. I always lost but not because I didn’t try.

Now if I think of those long ago days I always hear a little twang and heartbreak in the background.

Sometimes I hear my grandfather playing the harmonica. I don’t think he knew many songs but he loved “Little Redwing,” a sad story about love cut short.

“Now, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing
The breeze is sighing, the night bird's crying,
For afar 'neath his star her brave is sleeping,
While Red Wing's weeping her heart away.”

It breaks my heart that I didn’t think to make a cassette tape of Poppa in his work clothes standing in the yard and singing “Little Redwing” in his unexpectedly high and scratchy voice.

Once when friends who had a band visited they actually knew the song and pulled out a fiddle and did an impromptu version for him. Could be the best gift I ever gave him. Certainly better than the pipe I gave him for Christmas after he quit smoking but not much better than the styling pork pie hat from New York that I bought for him in a West Village shop. He wore it for years in the dusty rural south.

Towering three feet above mean sea level Taylor County’s Jug Island was once home to a bunch of rickety houses on stilts, some out over the water, some on land. We vacationed there a few times, if you can call a weekend a vacation.

For me, it was the best possible place. It was on the water, heck, in the water and it never got over my head so I was allowed to go in and out as I pleased.

My recollection is of parking on the shore and wading out the house with our weekend supplies. The sand bottom made the water fairly glow somewhere between gold and green. Occasionally there were batches of sea grass but I avoided those ‘cause who knows what might be in there.

Each little house had a small porch and wooden steps leading down into the water.  It must have been summer because Cracker Floridians like us didn’t go to the beach in the winter then. The water was warm, always. At low tide it was about knee deep and at high tide above my waist.

Although looking at pictures tells me it was really humble, to me it was a shining palace. All I cared about was that it was an adventure like some crazy wonderful thing I had made up except it was real.

I always had a good imagination and frequently turned mundane places into exotics. Like I might turn my grandparents’ screened front porch into an old chugging boat ambling up the Amazon. Or a tree fort might turn into a real fort with hostile Indians milling below, making me hold my breath until I got a good shot.

I’ve been on wild horses you might have thought were 55 gallon drums laying on their sides and in stagecoaches that strongly resembled the backseat of cars.

But Jug Island, it was real.

I was up early this morning and got to see the ibis doing their silent dawn takeoff from their rookery across the way. But just because they were silent doesn’t mean this morning was. No, the air was full of bird sounds, a cacophony of high and low notes, of trills and chirps, and all of it was coming from a handful of mockingbirds.

A friend recently told me she heard a cardinal in the yard and was looking around for it. But when she found it, it was a mockingbird. It had completely fooled her with a complicated cardinal song that was spot on and she is a serious birder.

Myself, I came out the other day to run to the store and hit my car’s alarm off button. It sounded the appropriate rapid dweep-dweep sound and that was followed immediately by a series of dweep-dweeps from the top of the telephone pole at the end of the driveway. Yep, a mockingbird.

I have heard them mimic almost anything. In town here, not far from US1 there are plenty of fire trucks and ambulances and our mockingbirds have taken note of that and frequently make siren sounds. Sometimes they give a little bark like the neighborhood dogs or start imitating the noisy parrots and that live around here.

Birdjam.com describes the song as a “long-continued stream of loud phrases, many being imitations of other birds’ songs and calls along with squeaky gates, machinery, barking dogs and humans whistling.” The males sing in the spring and more loudly than the females. Both sexes sing in the fall. Mockingbirds often sing at night.

All my life I have watched and listened to mockingbirds but never really gave them a lot of thought until this morning. Sure, they are the Florida state bird but so what? And sure there was an old song from my mother’s days but I can’t seem to find who did it though I can hear it in my mind.

Turns out that song was much older than I thought — it was written by Septimus Winner under the pseudonym of Alice Hawthorne in 1855. It was a sad song about a sweetheart who had died and the mockingbird that sang over her grave. Supposedly Abraham Lincoln liked the song (it was widely used as marching music during the Civil War) and he is quoted as saying, “It is as sincere as the laughter of a little girl at play.” Perhaps it reminded him of the laughter of his own lost-too-young sons, Eddie, Willie and Tad, forever sleeping in a valley somewhere with a mockingbird’s song for company.

The Three Stooges used it as a theme song for a while and it was recorded by a variety of swing and jazz groups and has more recently been revived as a traditional folk song.

Here’s a modern version of the original folk version of Listen to the Mockingbird by Tom Roush if you want to give a listen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvr3lbxi1a0

But I guess when I think of mockingbirds the first thing I think of is the line in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” saying it’s a sin to kill one. (In that strange way that the world brings disparate things together, I just read that 87 year-old Harper Lee just sued her agent on May 3, 2013 to regain her copyright that he allegedly wrongfully took from her.)

“Atticus said to Jem one day, ‘I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’ That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. ‘Your father’s right,’ she said. ‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’”

― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Seems like that’s the truth. I know that just after dawn today they were singing their hearts out and filling up the morning air with a wild bunch of sound that didn’t have one mean bone in it.

In September of 1950 when I was three and a half years old a hurricane blew in from the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Florida coast around Cedar Key. With the unlikely name Hurricane Easy the storm broke national records for most rainfall (38.7 inches in 24 hours at Yankeetown) that stood for years and is still the Florida record. 

My family was right in the middle of things.

The year of the storm my mom and dad had opened a café in Chiefland, Fla. they called the City Grill. It was on US 19 where it came through the center of town. There were sidewalks in front of the block-long strip of stores that nestled up tight to either side of US 19. On the opposite side of the street my father’s father ran a hardware store.

The City Grill was open three meals a day. Breakfast and lunch found a lot of locals sitting at the counter or hunched over tables but for dinner most locals were at home and it was folks traveling north and south on US 19 that stopped to eat. The jukebox stood ready to take your nickels, and coffee was a dime.

Things were going pretty well as summer slipped out of August and into September. In those days there was not the complicated early warning system we now have for big storms and Easy crept up the coast with little initial warning.

It dumped torrents of rain on Yankeetown south of Gulf Hammock and on the way up caused the tide in Tampa Bay to rise by 6.5 feet flooding north Tampa with two feet of water.

When the warnings were sounded in Cedar Key (situated 29 miles southwest of Chiefland) some people left and others decided to stick it out. The storm swept into Cedar Key with 125 mph winds and then made a big counter-clockwise loop out into the Gulf, all the while gathering moisture, dumping rain and putting Cedar Key in a siege-like state of enduring sustained winds of over 100mph for nine and a half endless hours.

Those who remained in town huddled in the high school. Out of 200 buildings in Cedar Key, 150 lost their roofs and a full 90% were damaged. All 100 of the boats in the town’s fishing fleet were destroyed.

My father was in Gainesville when it all started and my mother was in Chiefland running the café. I was in Gulf Hammock in a house my grandfather built down a sand road back in the woods. We didn’t know what was coming.

My mother says that as the storm really kicked in people swarmed from Cedar Key and the many homesteads out in the swamps and woods and along the Suwannee River into Chiefland, the nearest town looking for shelter and food. My father drove down from Gainesville and they kept the café open and fed everyone who pushed through the door and out of the rain and wind. After a while they stopped giving people checks for their meals and just kept cooking and putting out hot food and hotter coffee while the winds howled outside.

I don’t know what everyone knew or when. I was just a small child but I do remember being in that house and the sound of the wind thrashing the trees and scratching at the house looking for a way in. I was scared but I was also curious. I later heard someone say that the wind was so strong that it took a pine needle and buried it four inches deep in a tree. It was such a vivid statement that to this day I believe I saw that very thing though it’s likely I did not.

What I do know is that at the height of the storm, when it had made its loop and hit Cedar Key for the second time and started inland that my father came for us.

He drove down US 19, dodging tree limbs on the road, the rain almost horizontal and the night so black that everything wet shone like silver. When he got to Otter Creek, midway between Chiefland and Gulf Hammcok, the State Police had closed the road because of flooding and the danger of downed trees and power lines that followed the road. (Three people died in Easy, all from electrocution from downed lines.)

“Sorry,” the State Policeman in his slicker said, “you can’t go through.”

My father told him. “My little girl and my wife’s parents are down there. I’m going to get them.”

The police must have pulled the barricade aside because he did come and get us. We bundled into his car and he drove us back to Chiefland through the furious night.

They kept the café open until no more people came in looking for help.

The next day, like most days after hurricanes, was sunny and despite the damage all around us it was almost like it never happened.

The only thing I know for sure is that for the rest of my life I always remembered that my father pushed past the police and drove through the crazy black night and storm to save me. That’s what fathers do.

I recently met a cool biologist named Benny Luedike who works for the state DEP and he sent me some photos of a project in Ft. Pierce within the Indian River Lagoon to create a series “barrier islands” to protect the city operated harbor. 

Humans have tried to protect what they consider theirs for as long as they could figure out a way to do so but they didn’t always think about unintended consequences. We built dams and caused downstream marshes and wetlands and their incubator essence to be lost. We took down forests to grow a better cash crop and threatened the diversity of our planet. In Florida we drained the Everglades to grow beans and tomatoes in the verdant muck and though we have changed direction on the wisdom of that decision, much of our food (and OMG the sod farms stretch out forever) still comes from large farms ringing Okeechobee. Don’t forget big sugar either.

We hailed DDT as the miracle that would let us feed ourselves better and cheaper. Turned out to cause cancer and nearly killed off the bald eagles.

Florida has busy sucking as much water out of the ground as possible for golf courses and developments or to sell as “spring water” and all the while our aquifer has been dropping lower until our fabulous springs are being threatened.

As a nation and a state we are finally taking a harder look at what we want to do and are trying to make sure that, like a doctor, we first do no harm. That’s a big part of what Benny does, he reviews proposed projects to see if they can be done without causing harm whether unintended or not.

In this case, the Ft. Pierce barrier island proposal was subjected to a lot scrutiny to make sure it would not cause erosion problems further down the shore or that it would cause the seagrass (another big incubator) to silt up and disappear. FEMA, the organization that provided partial funding, said an ecological component had to be included in any harbor protection plans. What is being created seems like an elegant solution. 

The 11 acres of islands will not only protect the harbor by breaking up incoming tidal action and wind driven waves, it will create a new series of habitats that will include an island that’s perfect as a shorebird nesting habitat, a mangrove habitat and oyster reefs. This protection will then allow the marina destroyed in the ’04-’05 hurricanes to be rebuilt.  

One part of me looks at parks and restored lands and thinks, but this isn’t nature in the raw, much the same way some cute historic towns are really not Old Florida. And it’s not. But neither is it the Disneyfication (no insult meant to mouse and co.) of a natural area. It is the nurturing of an area to create something that nature itself could have and might have created given enough time and protected from enough detrimental human action.

All over the state nonprofit groups and grassroots organizations are working hard with government agencies on the nurturing side of things. We are seeing increased protections for our waterways and shores and coming to new understandings about land use. Turns out cattle ranches are pretty good for our prairie-like lands in mid state. Who knew?

So the next time you paddle around the bend in a little river and feel like you are the first human to ever see this piece of glorious land and water give a little smile and know you probably are not. And you probably wouldn’t have had that experience if a lot of other dedicated folks hadn’t worked to keep it just like that. People like Benny. People like you.

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.

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. 

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.