A Slice of Old Florida

If you ever read The Yearling novel (required reading in many schools back in the day) you have heard of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.  It’s just a two hour drive from Fernandina to Cross Creek Florida, a fine journey for a day trip beyond our hustle and bustle and back into her Old Florida world.

The original 1930’s Rawlings homestead and surrounding farmyard has been preserved as a Florida State Historic Park, open every day of the week.  But if you want the real immersion experience, people dressed in period clothes will give you a tour on Thursday through Sunday, from now until July.

Bucko and I visited the Cross Creek area a few weeks ago, when the fruit was ripe on all of the many citrus trees in yards all around south Orange Lake and the nearby well-named town of Citra. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings house and yard was similarly full of citrus splendor. A bowl of beautiful fresh fruit was displayed on the table beside her typewriter on the screen porch where she typed out her famous manuscripts.  As a writer myself, I happily related to her view of the chickens scraping in the yard under the heavily laden citrus trees inspiration I’m sure for her local novels.  

At the behest of the tour guide, Bucko and I filled our pockets with different varieties of fresh tangerines and oranges plucked from Marjorie’s trees, at one point even using an old style long picking pole handy for the purpose.  At home I tasted this larder, and found a few very sweet varieties in and among the more sour options that would have made good key-lime-like pies. And all were free for the picking.  You can’t get much better than that!

From the homestead, Bucko and I traveled down the rural roads to the Antioch Cemetery about eight miles away where Marjorie is buried side by side with Norton Baskin, her second husband. Her gravestone is decorated with plastic deer statues which might look tacky elsewhere, but here fit into the general décor of the rest of the cemetery, full of kitschy totems left in memory of those departed.

 

We could have ended our trip then, with a late lunch at the Yearling Restaurant in Cross Creek, and driven back to Amelia Island, satisfied with a fine day trip.  But it was beginning to rain and we had the leisure schedule of the retired and decided to stay in the area overnight.

The Yearling Restaurant has a handful of furnished cabins on its property.  Except for modern microwave ovens and flat screen televisions, they are furnished with antiques and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings memorabilia.  There is no internet access there, and the cell phone signal was weak, but for us, that night, that was a plus.  

That evening we grabbed umbrellas and walked from our cabin over to the Yearling Restaurant for dinner. This place is pure Old Florida too, a run-down looking building with a screened-in porch with rocking chairs and a large old “Drink Coca-Cola” ice chest for décor.  Inside was more of the same, but better by far.  The three main rooms—two dining rooms and a bar—were covered with old photos and nature paintings and artifacts, and shelves of Old Florida and Rawlings memorabilia.  The main dining room’s walls of old books were even available for browsing while eating your meal, or for purchasing afterwards.

The food, alas, was not as good as it could be and a bit pricey besides, but it featured exotic items like frog legs, gator tail and quail that were evocative of wild foods that surely were on Marjorie’s menu too.  And, even better, since it was a Friday night, an old time bluegrass bang twanged out their rendition of songs that many of the other patrons knew by heart.

Back in our cabin, we listened to the pounding rain on the tin roof all night and at some point the power went off due to the storm but that just added to the atmosphere.  In the morning, we awoke to our own little bit of Old Florida.  We wandered around the grounds, admiring an old outhouse with its crescent moon cut out on the door beside a large and fading “Eat Florida Oranges” sign, some long abandoned chicken coops, a derelict fish-cleaning station and other yard artifacts that probably were there in Marjorie’s time. 

It is only about 100 miles from Cross Creek to Amelia Island but decades away in time. Next time you want a bit of nostalgia, head for Cross Creek and you won’t be sorry.

Old Florida Fish Camps and Cranes

Whenever Bucko and I get tired of watching the exponentially escalating development on Amelia Island and we want a taste of “Old Florida” again, we head to the middle of the state. Gainesville is the central hub of this area for us, but the further out you go in any direction, the further away fromthe modern developed world you can get.

This time we began our adventure by looking for the single whooping crane that has migrated there to Gainesville on its own, the southernmost whooping crane in the U.S. Like scores of other whooping cranes, crane number 9-13 was raised by people covered from view holding crane-head-like puppets to prevent the birds from getting imprinted on people. Crane 9-13 followed an ultralight plane from Wisconsin to north Florida last year. Now this whooping crane has made the migration on its own and is hanging out with a large group of sandhill cranes in Gainesville.  The birds spend their nights on Paynes Prairie and their days with the cattle at a University of Florida pasture bordered by Southwest 23rd Street and Williston Road. Birdwatchers from all over the state are flocking in to see this, the southernmost whooping crane in Florida and if you hurry over to Gainesville soon, you can see it too.

At last, we headed south down Hwy 441 to begin our real project, a fish camp tour of Old Florida. Bucko and I have always been great fans of Florida fish camps, but not for the camping, and not for the fishing. What we enjoy is watching the wildlife, boaters and fishermen, and trading tales with the Florida crackers that rule this domain.  In years past we hung out at fish camps in Miami and the Everglades when we lived in that area.  And we used to hang out at Pirate’s Cove Fish Camp on Heckscher Drive near us here in Fernandina until the property got sold and the fish camp cleared away.  So now to find fish camps we travel further afield.

Just off Hwy 441on 191^st Place just south of the small town of Mac Intosh we were happy to find that Georgie’s Lakeside Restaurant on Orange Lake was still open. This place isn’t exactly a fish camp, since there is no camping there, but it is nestled in a lakeside park with a boat ramp that attracts all manner of local fishermen, many with stories to tell at the long bar facing big windows on Orange Lake. If great hamburgers and BLTs and beer and local lore is your mission, you can’t beat this place!

 

From our vantage point at the bar we watched an airboat zoom past us on the lake beyond while closer to us, in a canal full of native aquatic plants a tri-colored heron was patiently awaiting a fish to come by, while a group of black vultures flew in to roost on a large tree in the background.

The locals eating lunch with us at the bar were full of information about how Orange Lake had shrunk in size due to a decade of less than average rainfall, and how most of the fish camps and business like Georgie’s had suffered when boaters could no longer access the water from the boat ramps. But now, the lake is back and it has also been restocked with bass fingerlings by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and fishing should soon return to days of old.

When we drove further on to Cross Creek we were dismayed to see that the fish camps we remembered were derelict and up for sale.  The drying Orange Lake had also dried up Cross Creek, which connects it to Lake Lochloosa and the fish camps had dried up along with it.  The water is back here now, but not the facilities except for the cabins connected with the Yearling restaurant where we spent the night. 

But the next day, heading home, we got lucky. The Lochloosa Harbor fish camp on HWY 303 just south of Hawthorne was alive and well! We gobbled down a fish camp lunch of the best (and cheapest) pulled pork sandwiches around and chatted with the alligator hunter beside us at the bar.  Outside the wind was blowing white caps on Lochloosa Lake, but a lone egret stood near us on the dock, feathers rustled but otherwise unperturbed. It was great to be in an Old Florida fish camp once again!

Climate is Relative

Just a month ago I was poking fun at a group of graduate students from Mahidol University in   Bangkok who were shivering in the cold high in a hill resort on the Burma border.These students were adapted to the subtropical lowland climate of Bangkok, and, although the temperature on the nearby thermometer registered 69 degrees Fahrenheit, this was beyond their daily experience anytime in the year.  For them, yes, it was cold.

 

But really, now.  They talked about the coming cold all the way during the five hour drive in the minivan that was taking us on our weekend fieldtrip. On our first morning, eating breakfast on outdoor picnic tables overlooking the hills, the students were all dressed up in long sleeved shirts, jackets and scarves wrapped around their necks. And they weren’t the only ones worried about the cold.  The owner of the resort had dressed his two prize Persian cats in thick sweaters too.  Surely these long haired pets were cold in the 69 degree weather too!

But then I got back to Fernandina Beach and I found more sympathy for those shivering Thai grad students. To my sub-tropically adapted body north Florida was cold too, really cold.  And to give me credit for my new wimpiness, there were even a few snowflakes in the air, albeit only for a few minutes, but hey, snow is snow.

So, with the “cold” and dismal drippiness and stark trees outside my windows, and with twelve times zones different besides I spent much of my first week indoors.  Yes, I did jump into the pool for water aerobics twice during that time, but that only reinforced my notion about the coldness of the air.  I wore my heavy terrycloth bathrobe straight from the house, reached the pool, with its steam rising above the warm water, tossed my robe off and jumped in. The water was great, but my feet were still cold at first and my nose never warmed up.  Afterwards I jumped out and into my warm bathrobe and headed home, to hibernate in my house once again.

Finally, though I readapted, just like those Thai students over that long weekend.  One morning the sun actually came out, and Bucko and I decided to brave the “cold”, put on jackets, and hike the Egans Creek Greenway.  

We weren’t the only ones on the Greenway enjoying the return of sunshine. When we entered at the Residence Inn parking lot and headed north towards the retention pond, the first thing we noticed were the birds on the opposite bank facing the sun.  A white egret, a great blue heron and a wood stork were all lined up side by side taking in the sun.  And the great blue heron was really getting into it, with its huge wings cupped in front of its body, the better to soak up the rays.  These birds didn’t even change their postures as we walked nearby to them--the warming sun felt that good.

The turtles were also enjoying the sun.  We tried to quietly pass them without disturbing them back into the water from the creek logs that they had climbed up on to bask in the sun. It was a bit too cold for snakes, but we were careful to watch our feet as we walked along the grassy trail.  Snakes also like to warm up in the sun after a series of overcast and colder days, so we were on the lookout just in case.

We didn’t see snakes, or alligators or much other wildlife this sunny winter day, but we did see others enjoying the sunny day too. Further into the south end of the Greenway we started meeting other people, also out enjoying the day.  Far down the path a photographer had his lens trained on a rare little blue heron.  Two groups of bike-riders passed us by, and a handful of dog walkers were on the trail too.  But everyone was cheerful, greeted one another, and remarked on the good weather at last.

And now I am readapted to our north Florida winter. It’s all coming back to me now.  This time of year is the very best time here to walk the beach any time of day, not just at dawn, without fear of heat stroke.  It’s the best time to walk the trails of the Greenway, Fort Clinch State Park, Little Talbot Island, the Okefenokee Swamp and other nearby natural areas without fear of biting insects. 

Now that I’m out of the house, I’m staying out.   

It’s good to be home!