Presenting....

 

 OLD JOE!!!!

 We had a really good time at the springs. When we got there, we felt like we had the place to ourselves

and Owen immediately wanted to go up to the top of the high dive platform and so I went with him and then Vergil came and AMAZED us by jumping off about four times and that was very, very cool. I bought tickets for the jungle boat cruise and so after a little bit of water time, we made our way to the dock and loaded up and although Owen was NOT in the best frame of mind about taking a jungle boat cruise, it was still fun and I got some great pictures. When I wasn't wrestling him like an alligator the way Tarzan does. Let me tell you something about that boy- he may not be nearly as big as I am but he's almost as strong. He, like his mama, is a force of nature.

We saw a bunch of alligators today. Some were swimming down the river, 

some were lying on the banks, basking in the sun. 

The river, in fact, was EAT UP with alligators today. We saw a lot of turtles, too, but I didn't get any of their pictures. I might have been wrestling with Owen at the time. We also saw manatee but they are hard to photograph, being underwater and all. But they are so magnificent, so huge. Sadly, they all carry scars on their backs from boat props. 

The cardinal flower was in bloom

(if you click, you can probably see it) and the pickerel although I didn't get any pictures of that purple blossom. The butterflies were even thicker than the gators and they hovered over those flowers like Dracula draping his wings over a virgin as he sips from her throat. 

Sorry. Didn't get a picture. You'll just have to imagine it. 

There were also birds galore including the Cattle Egret. Here's one.

If I'm wrong on that identification, let me know. Syd?

The Wakulla River has been protected for quite awhile but there are things which have happened in the last decade or so which can't be controlled by boundaries. Such as nutrients which are flowing into the river and causing things to overgrow which should not be there and taking away the gin-like clearness of the water and completely eliminating things like the apple snail which used to coat every cattail stalk with eggs which is what the limpkins ate and so now there are no limpkins.
They don't preach any of that to you on the jungle boat cruise, but they do mention it. And if you, like me, grew up in Florida, and if you, like me, live here now, these things are not just an aside tossed off by a park ranger. They are real and you know what things looked like not that long ago and you remember the strange, wild call of the limpkin and you know we are the poorer for it not being there and you grieve. You grieve.

But. The mullet were there, swimming beside the boat and leaping into the water and it is still a very, very beautiful river with the ancient cypress trees just starting to turn now to orange and gold. Yes, we have leaf-color change here too. It is more subtle, but it is real.

Okay, okay. Here's another alligator.

And no, Mr. Moon has not caught one yet. But they sure are having fun, running the rivers at night under the full moon.

When we got off the jungle boat, we wanted to swim some more, but just as we all get ready to step into the cold, sweet water near the springhead, it began to rain. 

Well? So what? Wet is wet. But. All of our STUFF was on the bank and so we turned to go in but before I did, I did exactly what I went down there to do. I surface-dived headfirst into that cold water and let every bit of me be blessed by it. 

Ah. Sigh.

And then we went to lunch in the lodge

and then we let Owen play in the big pile of rocks in the parking lot for a few moments which was his very favorite part of today's Wakulla Springs Experience, I am sure. 

 He and Vergil looked for fossils. They found some, too.

It was a very fine day. And when we left, the mist was coming up off the springs and wrapping everything in a sort of hazy mystery which is completely appropriate for a place where they have found not only the arrowheads of people who lived and hunted there long ago, but also the entire skeleton of a freaking mastodon which now scares the crap out of children at Tallahassee's Museum of Natural History.

It is a magical place. 

And oh yes- what about Gibson? Well, here he is on the jungle boat cruise. He didn't care a thing about the alligators. 

But he sure made us happy.

And I was reminded once again of why I am happy to live in Florida and why I give a damn about which candidate gives a shit about the rivers and the land I would like to leave to my grandchildren.

Much, much love...Ms. Moon

Adventures With The Boy (Where Tarzan Played And Mastodon Died)

Lily and Owen and Jessie and I took off today for Wakulla Springs which is one of the most beautiful places in North Florida. Or maybe the entire world. I don't know.
But it is so lovely.
When I was pregnant with Lily I took Hank and May down to the springs several times a week at least, where I could get my huge self into the cold, clear water and float for a little while. That water is like ice and the hotter it is outside, the colder it feels. But even just a few good dips would make me more comfortable, cooler for hours. The water boils out of the spring at a rate of 200-300 million gallons a day. Yes. You read that right. It is, according to Wikipedia, "...the longest and deepest known submerged fresh water cave system in the world."
Yeah.
Right here. North Florida.
And people have been living on its banks for 12,000 years. They have found entire giant mastodon skeletons in its depths, one of which resides in a museum in downtown Tallahassee and which scared the living shit out of three-year old Downtown Guy once. He screamed when he came around a corner and saw that thing like I have never heard anyone scream before or since. It is pretty scary looking.

But just telling about water flow rates and mastodon skeletons doesn't begin to explain the glory of this place. It's a State Park now, and as such, is in danger of slipping away from us under our current Criminal Governor and Republican Legislature.
Okay. I don't want to talk about that.
I want to talk about an enchanted place which for now, is available to all visitors for six bucks a car load. There are the springs and you can swim in a roped off part, and there is a high dive where in the summer, kids line up, tossing around dares and shivering from their previous jumps and gathering their courage and closing their eyes, they leap off into space and flying and falling and tucking their legs close to their bodies, hit the water and sink and then rise to the surface to know rebirth.


I have never personally jumped off of it myself. I am not a jumper-into. I am a wader-into. But I watch kids do it and I think Mr. Moon has done it and a few of my kids too.
There are glass-bottom boat cruises like the ones you see above which float gently around the spring head and the operator of the boat calls to Henry, the jumping catfish. I have no idea how they train catfish, but they have, and Henry jumps.
Here are a school of mullet we saw- the protein which have kept the humans alive in this area for forever. They are delicious.

The spring forms the Wakulla River and flows eventually to the Gulf of Mexico and you can take a jungle boat cruise, which is one of my favorite things to do. I never tire of it. You'll see alligators basking on the banks and swimming in the river, looking for all the world like slow-drifting logs. There are cypress trees so old they were standing there when Jesus walked the Earth. Birds of all kinds. Here's an anhinga (snake bird) drying its wings on the other side of the spring head today.

There's something just so eternal and calming and reassuring about Wakulla Springs. I never fail to wonder what it looked like to the earliest people to come across it. Fish literally jumping from the clearest, coldest water on the continent and animals of all sorts come to drink from it, to eat from it.
So okay, there were and are gators and bears and every sort of poisonous snake known to mankind, but still...
I imagine children playing in the shallows, just as they do now, older kids jumping from the high branches of trees. I see people floating in dugouts, fishing for mullet and catfish, I see fires and smell the roasting fish. I see what must have been billions of stars in the clear bowl of sky above the spring when the sun had set and I can hear the gators bellowing, the frogs croaking, the wildcats screaming off in the jungle.
Can you imagine? Can you just imagine?

And here are Owen and Jessie and Lily, come to enjoy the springs the way I did before they were born, the way people have been doing for thousands and thousands of years.

So okay, maybe the path was not paved in those old, old days, but you know there had to have been a path.

Owen pointing to the water from the boat dock:

His mama carrying him into the water for the first time.

Lily and Jessie and my grandson went out to the floating dock and the girls laid in the sun while Owen played with the water in his bucket. I lounged on a quilt on the shore and read an article about Stephen Tyler and watched the people, the water, the sky. Three little kids were playing in inner tubes near the bank and they yelled at their mama and daddy: "Y'all coming in?"
"No," the parents said.
"Why are you smiling?" asked one of the kids. "Are you going to kiss? Are you going to go make-out?"
The parents laughed and so did I.

That's another thing people have probably always done by the banks of the Wakulla. Kissed. Made out. Made babies. What a lovely place to make a baby.

Speaking of, there's a lodge at the springs, built back in the thirties by Edward Ball, a very rich man. It's a hotel now and you can stay there and relax and maybe even make a baby if that's what you want to do. It's a slow and graceful place, stucco with a red-tiled roof, a huge fireplace in the lobby and a gracious old dining room. Here's the view from one of the arched windows in that room.

Look at that water. And yet, people pass up Wakulla Springs all the time to go to Disney World with its own jungle cruise where animatronic hippos bask in the man-made, cement-lined river.
Good. Let them go there. Let us keep our secrets here.

We had lunch in the dining room.They serve the best water and iced tea in the world there. In fact, the Nestle company has taken note of the purity and deliciousness of the water and wants to start pumping it out of the springs and bottling it and that's why I have the signs in my front yard that I do.

Okay. I don't want to talk about that either.

I'd rather talk about the lovely lunch we had.


Salads for us ladies and fried grouper and fruit for Owen.
While we were waiting for our food, I took Owen out to the lobby. Look at these beautiful cypress beams, painted by artists, commissioned by Ed Ball.

We also checked out Old Joe, an alligator in a glass box in the lobby. The sign tells the story.

"He never harmed or molested man, woman, child or pets."
He was murdered, y'all! Cold blooded murder! Which the killing of an alligator would rightly be.

One of my personal favorite Wakulla Springs stories is about the time I was on a Jungle Boat cruise and we came around a bend to find a dead deer being feasted on by a bunch of gators, ripping its flesh from its bones.
The tourists were horrified but I was delighted. FLORIDA! You can fucking try to tame it, but in the end, it's dog eat dog and gator eat Bambi.

After our very civilized lunch, Lily wanted to buy Owen an ice cream in the snack bar. And so she did. Owen however, was not in the least interested in dessert. But he was quite impressed by the cone and the ice cream within.

He took a few licks and then when we he went outside, he let the ice cream drop in a flower bed and proceeded to stick his fingers through the cone.
"Broke!" he announced, and then crumbled up the rest of it.

"Shit," said Lily. "Four dollars, completely gone to waste." Not completely. I did get that picture.

We were going to take the Jungle Cruise but it was so obviously time for Owen to take a nap and so we packed up and headed home. As always, when I leave the springs, I wonder why there is so much time between my visits.

Well. We went today. And I'll leave you with one more fact about Wakulla Springs. They filmed a few Tarzan movies there. Tarzan movies starring my very first boyfriend, Johnny Weismuller. Here's a picture that I have tacked up in my office.


Yes. Check out that loin cloth.

Supposedly, Wakulla means Land of Mysterious Waters in some native language.
That sums it up perfectly for me.
Land of ancient cypress, beautiful endless mysterious waters, bear and alligator, mullet and bird and turtle and catfish.

And Johnny Weismuller.

What more need I say?
It was a good day. A very, very good day. And Owen has been baptized in the mysterious waters of Wakulla and for a boy in North Florida, that is a rite of passage, and in my mind, one more step on the road to heaven.