Riding the Woods with Poppa

One of my special treats when I would visit my grandparents in Gulf Hammock back in the ‘50s is that my grandfather would take me to work with him once in the while. He worked for Pat & Mac (Patterson McInnis Lumber Company) out in the woods. He had a company jeep, probably a WWII surplus vehicle with a canvas top and hard seats.

Some days he would drive the firebreaks and make sure they didn’t need to get plowed again. Other days he’d drive through the piney woods and mark trees to be slashed for turpentine. He was always watching out for fire and keeping an eye on men who were camping so they could hunt or fish in the woods.

He took lunch in one of those domed-top metal lunchboxes with a thermos in the top and a sandwich and a sweet in the bottom. He always kept a fishing rod and tackle box in the back of the jeep because you just never know when the perfect little fishing hole will appear.

The woods were honeycombed with little creeks, all trying to find their way to the Waccasassa River or the Gulf of Mexico like hungry dogs scrambling to get scraps thrown out the back door. Mostly they were shallow and clear as glass, fed by springs out in the swamp. But there were places where they deepened up into tannic-brown pools with plenty of lily pads where a fish could hide on a hot day.

Mostly he drove and looked and paid attention to everything he saw in nature. He could track and recognize all kinds of signs that most people would never see.

So, a day in the woods with him was special. It meant getting up well before dawn. Granny was up before either of us, getting the woodstove hot, making coffee and cooking grits and eggs for our breakfast. She would have packed our lunch too, usually sandwiches or maybe a piece of fried chicken left over from supper the night before.

By the time we got in the jeep there were tinges of red in the sky lining the bottom of clouds or on cloudless mornings, just making a smudge across the horizon.

We started out with headlights on and bumped our way out of town and eased onto a sand road you could have missed if you didn’t know it was there. By the time the sun was up good we were deep in the woods.

Sometimes he’d sing a bit, usually church hymns or old time favorites. He liked to tell old-fashioned jokes that were usually plays on words. They were the kind you told when you were a kid and then hit the other kid in the ribs with your elbow and asked, “Get it? Did you get it?”

One of my favorite jokes was old wood eye. There was this boy and he had lost an eye down at the mill. Someone carved him a nice wooden eye and he wore it all the time but he was very sensitive and hated when anyone made notice of it. There was a gal in town who had lost most of her hair through some unfortunate way that no one was very clear about. She had a wig that she wore but it was not very good and tended to slide to one side if she bounced around much. Everyone knew about her wig. They both turned up at the Friday dance and he watched her a long time before he got up the nerve to ask her to dance. He took a deep breath, crossed the floor and asked, “Would you like to dance?” She enthusiastically replied, “Would I?” Shocked, he immediately replied, “Baldy, baldy, baldy!” and never went to another dance again.

Poppa seemed simple in his ways and yet he knew so many things. He could plant anything and get it to grow. He built two houses that I know of from scratch and there may have been others. He could get home from work and walk down to the creek with his fishing rod and be home in less than an hour with enough fish to feed everybody. He could hunt with precision. He probably enjoyed it but I don’t believe he ever hunted just for the fun of killing something alone, he hunted to put meat on the table.

I remember you always had to be careful when eating squirrel. He hunted those with buckshot and no matter how well you cleaned them there was likely to be a couple of shot in there somewhere waiting to surprise you when you bit down hard.

He gave his work its full due and at the end of his workday he gave his family and his home all his attention. He was never too tired to take a walk with you and he did not miss church on Sunday. 

But the arrival of those malls was a turning point and most of America has gone through it. First a town is tired of being old-fashioned and gives up its center to become modern and at the same time everybody wants to move to a new concrete block house in a new subdivision far away from the tired wood frame houses closer to downtown. Then later you realize you feel lost and disconnected and you hope Disney or someone will build one of those old-fashioned town replicas near you so you can move in and feel at home again. Or maybe you stayed put and got lucky and are still living in one of those downtown homes near the Duck Pond that have all been redone by now.

In the years since I grew up Gainesville has embraced its historic buildings and many are restored and back in use including old houses and businesses. There’s been a lot of repurposing — car dealer to dance club, post office to theater, movie house to concert hall, restaurant to offices — and some of it has been pretty good. People love Gainesville and compared to some Florida towns it remains a really good place to live. 

Newnan’s Lake still beckons from right outside of town though it has a fancy parking lot and boat ramp where you are not likely to get stuck in the mud trying to put your boat in. Cross Creek and the memory of Miz Rawlings is still just down the road and so is antique-laden Micanopy out between Gaineville and Ocala. The Devil’s Millhopper is still there but now it’s a state park and you can’t scramble down the side of that deep sinkhole and explore the little creek on the bottom or pull your car in late at night for some closed-eyed heavy breathing and kissing. Now there’s a raised walkway that you must not leave it. 

Maybe it’s for the best that the juke joints are gone along with the late night café down the street from my first apartment that sold chicken sandwiches that had whole pieces of fried chicken, bones and all covered with a slather of mayo and some lettuce and tomato. I don’t think the BBQ place just off 13th is still there with its challenge that if you could eat its hottest sauce, you could eat for free. 

Oh but sometimes at night there are ghosts in the trees along the dark narrow roads leading in and out of town. Roll down your car window and you can almost hear singing in the distance or the sound of laughter soft and far away mixed in with the other night sounds.

Joni Mitchell nailed it, “Don’t it only seem to show that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

(All photos this page courtesy of Florida Archives.)

Every kid should have a dog. I had Princess.

She was half Chihuahua and half cocker spaniel and was born with a naturally cropped tail and a less than sweet demeanor. Of course that may have been because of how I tortured her believing she enjoyed our play as much as I did.

Princess was short-haired and black with floppy ears and a white diamond on her chest. She must have been fixed or my parents must have kept a good eye on her because she never had puppies. But boy did she want them.

At one point I was given a little mechanical dog for my birthday. It was brown and white and appeared to be lying down. It had two wheels underneath the hind legs and a wire coming out the back of its collar like a leash except it led to a control box. Press the button and the little dog would zip across the floor yipping madly and at a certain point would stop and then stand up on its hind legs, front paws waving in the air for a few seconds before falling back to the floor to begin rolling around again.

I liked the little mechanical dog but Princess evidently liked it even better. One day I couldn’t find it and searched everywhere. My mother eventually located it in the back of a closet. Princess had made a nest out of towels she dragged out of the laundry basket and had taken the toy in with her. She was acting like it was her puppy and licked it until it was completely soaking wet. (It’s fur was never quite the same.) She tried to make it nurse but didn’t have any luck.

After that I had to be sure the mechanical dog was in my toy box or up high or Princess would find it and take it away.

Princess could talk. She said three things though honestly they all sounded fairly similar. She said “hamburger,” “grandmother” and “I love you.” She had a place at dinner where she sat up on her little hindquarters on a chair with her paws on the edge of table. You could put anything down in front of her and until you said okay, she would not go near it.

Sometimes I’d put a tasty bit of chicken or pork chop in front of her and get her to say all her words before I gave her the okay. I don’t think she minded.

What she did mind was being used as a horse or worse, a calf.

I had a lot of plastic cowboys and horses and liked to strap one of the saddles on her. She was too wide in the beam for any of the cowboys to fit but I had a couple of soft dolls (like Jimmy and James, the rock and roll stars I made clothes for) that I could tie on. That was annoying to her but not nearly as annoying as when I pretended to be riding a horse and ran up behind her, threw a lasso over her head, jumped down off my “horse,” and grabbed her front and back leg on the opposite side of me to flip her over on her back. Then I quickly tied three of her legs together and threw both of my hands in the air to signal I was done just like the calf ropers do at the rodeo.

I’m pretty sure that’s why she finally bit me though I have to say at the time I cried because my feelings were hurt, not because of the small amount of blood that was shed.

Princess finally succumbed to a chicken bone that she snuck out of the garbage. 

This morning the rain is falling hard and reminds me of weekends when I was a kid and the skies would seemingly open and stay that way. In Florida the raindrops are big and when they hit you hear them. They sound like a drum when they pelt the thick green leaves of the plants and when I was young, the sound of rain on the metal roof was an unremitting din. In fact you could judge, moment-to-moment, what the skies were doing even from deep inside the house by the rising and falling level of sound. There was an element of speed too as hundreds of falling drops turned into thousands and then tens of thousands pounding down in a few seconds.

And though Florida is a big sand pile on top of porous limestone sometimes the water falls too fast to soak up and instantly every low spot in roads, in ditches, in yards becomes pools, ponds, mini lakes, creeks. If there is somewhere lower to go, the water rushes away in its new streambed. If not, it sits, making an unlikely pond with grass showing through on the bottom.

If the water stands for a few days there are suddenly minnows and tadpoles in every roadside ditch though none are connected to streams or lakes where these little fish could have been before the rains.

If you run outside right after the rain the puddles are cold in stark contrast to the brooding heat of the day. But the ground is so constantly heated by the sun that in minutes the water is warm.

On days with quick thunderstorms popping up, which is exactly what they do — pop up out of clouds that suddenly come building from the horizon, turn black, dump rain and sweep by like a car speeding to an important destination somewhere else, you might wait the rain out. Standing on the porch one foot tucked up behind the other knee, you might look out gauging when it would pass and when it did be okay to run down the stairs into the yard splashing water all the way to the street as you headed for a friends house, or just a romp in the woods.

If the rain settled down, like that speeding car had got a flat and was stuck waiting for the guy at the gas station to get around to showing up, it would be time to hunker down and find some inside worlds to live in.

I liked to take the rocking chairs on the porch at my grandparent's house in Gulf Hammock and lay them on their sides to make a three-sided box and then cover them with sheets that granny let me use for my “fort.” I could play there for hours while the rain droned on outside. Or I might turn the porch into a boat and be making my way slowly down the Amazon. Then, when the rain would stop I’d put on my flippers and mask and walk down the dive ramp (front porch steps) into the river where I would look for treasure while trying to avoid the piranha that were everywhere.

Swimming was a little tricky since the real water was only about two inches deep. But, if I was careful I could walk across the yard wearing the flippers without falling. I’d bend at the waist parallel with the ground and appear to pull myself along with long strokes of my arms while I turned my head side to side looking for the hidden treasure.

I could make a sound exactly like a scuba expelling air and I did. I can still make that sound and sometimes do just for fun.

Of course I had a knife to defend myself with and sometimes a spear gun made from a sharpened palmetto frond. And if I didn’t feel like diving I’d just fish from the deck of the “boat,” casting lures into the yard in hopes of snagging anything that I could pretend was a fish.

I fought some pretty big fish from that porch and in retrospect am surprised my grandfather never minded that I used his rod and nice lures to hook limbs and pieces of wood to drag across the yard.

I guess he believed I might catch a dream and of course, he was right. 

Behind Granny and Poppa’s house in Gulf Hammock was a path that ran between the garden and the edge of the swamp. At its end was a little creek, crystal clear with a sand bottom in the middle and deep muck by the edge. You might step in and feel fine white sand ease up between your toes or you might step in and sink slowly down up to your knees. It was hard to get out of and there was known to be quicksand around so there was always that scary part of wondering if you would stop sinking.

I remember reading comic books about people getting stuck in quicksand and slowly being pulled down until finally all that was left was one hand waving feebly over the surface. I read once that if you acted quickly you could throw yourself prone and very slowly “swim” across the quicksand to firmer ground. Probably not but I was prepared to try it.

Anyway, back to the creek.  Another one of my chores was to take one or two big enamel buckets down to the creek to get washing water. I had to walk to the end of the two-plank boardwalk out to mid creek and dip in the buckets to fill them then totter back to the house. They were heavy.

That was a good place to fish too.  Dig up some worms and rig up a cane pole with a bobber and a little hook. Stand on the end of the boardwalk and lightly swing the line upstream. Let it drift down and around the boardwalk. Try to maneuver it up close to some lily pads. Things waited under the lily pads. Hopefully a fish but could be a snake or even a gator.

One day I was getting water and when I got to the creek there was a huge cottonmouth moccasin. I put the buckets down and backed up a ways and then turned and tore ass for the house. I slammed open the back screen door coming in and started yelling, where’s the shotgun, where’s the shotgun? Granny said in the bedroom and asked why. I ran in there and she followed me wiping her hands on her apron. I grabbed the 410 and ran back out the door.

“There is a big cottonmouth,” I yelled over my shoulder.

When I got back to the creek I started to creep toe to heel just like the Indians did so as not to make a sound. I edged out to the boardwalk and he was still there, fat and dull black in the light dancing off the water. As I came closer he felt something and started to slither off. By then Granny had caught up with me and took the gun. Before he could swim away she threw the gun up to her shoulder and fired, cutting him nearly in half.

The current caught him and took him on down into the darkness of the swamp. Granny lowered the gun. I filled the buckets and we walked back to the house together.

For all of my life the way I have remembered this story is that I shot the moccasin before my grandmother caught up with me. I swear I have a clear physical memory of throwing the gun up to my shoulder and shooting before it was seated properly which caused it to give me quite a big recoil that hurt for days.

My mother said no, it was my grandmother who pulled the trigger but I thought she was wrong. Several months ago I was visiting with a younger cousin who out of the blue said, “Remember when we were visiting Granny and Poppa and you found that moccasin and Granny shot it?”

Just like that, a vivid lifetime memory declared untrue. It sure makes me wonder about the veracity of other things I remember but it does not make me question the emotional truth they have in my heart.

Dorothy Allison who wrote Bastard Out of Carolina once said in an interview with Ellise Fuchs for PopMatters, “People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you’re telling them is true. The thing I’m telling you is true but it did not always happen to me. It is absolutely true to my experience.”

 

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.