Florida
When one of us was a wee lad in Ireland, Florida was an exotic and Pirate-filled land, but now it’s been home for almost half of his life, and most of Karyssa’s. And so it is hard to describe fairly, as making the familiar foreign is a prerequisite for any proper description.
Added to that, Florida is multi-faceted and near impossible to summarize. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a Space-X launch at Cape Cannaveral, tasted an empanada and Cuban coffee in North Beach Miami, and buzzed over a gator on an airboat in the Everglades. And any of these could be taken as definitive of the place. We’ve tried to take a deeper dive into the social history of the state, from the Spanish arrival at St Augustine–and Pensacola, of course–to the recent explosion of settlement the Tampa-to-Miami or “Tamiami” trail.
Its remarkable archaeology is a fixation of Nick’s and many of his closest colleagues at University of West Florida, its bizarre geology and geography a constant source of wonder, and, after this trip, the uniqueness that is Florida will stay fixed in our memories.
We parked in St Augustine and strolled over to the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument and hung around the old town for the night. Little did we know, an old friend and coworker of Karyssa’s would be there the very next night. It was a missed opportunity, but a reminder of how small the world can be.
We also got completely covered in no-see-um bites that night because we left the door open as we worked on our puzzle.
We happened to be driving down the Space Coast when Space-X had a launch and hung out an extra day to see it. In order to kill some time until the rocket launch, we went to Blue Springs SP and did some snorkeling there. It was a gorgeous park with crystal blue waters and a handful of alligator gar swimming nearby.
We made it back to the launch area early. So, after a nap for Karyssa and a football game watched at a bar for Nick, we found a park on the Intracoastal Waterway.
Watching the rocket take off was incredible. At first we saw a flicker of light in the distance before it turned into a brazen flame. Karyssa stated that she had expected the light to stay there as the rocket took off and was dumbfounded – and then struck by the obviousness – when the ball of fire took into the air.
We really couldn’t believe how fast it was climbing to the Earth’s outskirts. It was a full minute or two before the sound reached us, and we were hit by how incredible this moment was.
After having gone to the Space Kennedy Center the previous day, we learned that in order to pressurize accordingly, a rocket must turn off its engines for x seconds before turning them back on. Seeing it in action made us feel like we were in on a secret. And then the little flame disappeared from our view. And we stood, staring out after an object that had just moments ago been on the Earth’s surface, not too far from where we stood and was now in outer space.
We have a video of it on our FB page, if you’d like to check it out. Maybe one day we’ll learn how to upload video. It’s not all that impressive quality though, as the flame is very blurry and the audio is certainly lackluster and does not portray the thundering heard.
Along the way south was Karyssa’s Uncle Sean. The night we were due to arrive for dinner, Lisa text that she was flying into Ft Lauderdale and was wondering if we wanted to meet up for dinner! We invited her over to Karyssa’s uncle’s with us and ended up bonding over a plate of a home cooked meal of spaghetti. Like we said, small world!
We hung out near Wynwood Walls in Miami to check out the mural art. It did not disappoint. Towards the end of the trip though, Daisy scared us real good by having a seizure. She seemed fine after it, but this was the second on in the past two months. So, it’s concerning.
Miami beach lived up to its billing, as we paid close to $50 for a pair of BOGO margaritas, seated next to a music producer who had one of his artists and film crew battling a gale on the beach near us.
We crashed in a parking lot right on the beach on the north end of Miami Beach, woke up to two security guards parked near us, a helicopter hovering over us, and a cadre of coast guard and local cops recovering the body of a drowning victim – or so a homeless local informed us.
We spent the day at the southern portion of the Everglades. Before the Spanish settled the southern part of Florida, the Calusa, the Tequesta, and the Mayaimi lived there. Around the 1700s, the tribes were either slaughtered or had relocated to nearby islands like Cuba (we think?). About that same time, the Miccosukee tribe (branch of the Seminole (who are a branch of the Creek)) was forced out of what is now Georgia and eventually to South Florida, where they escaped into the Everglades for 100 years to avoid assimilation. If living off the land in the Everglades isn’t badass af, I don’t know what is.
A trailhead we parked at in the Glades had black vultures pecking at the rubber part of cars’ windshield wipers. Normally we’d try to bring the girls with us, but we kept them in the car to keep the birds away. Turned out they weren’t allowed on the trail anyway, so it was just as well.
The Everglades trailhead was pretty wild because the trail on the left required a boardwalk over the swamp, yet the trail on the right circle through higher ground. Once you were 20ft along the latter trail, you’d easily forgotten that just around the corner was a swamp.
Swamp 
Hammock
South Florida in general is completely covered in tree and plant species that you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the country. It was really amazing being there and learning about all these different fauna.
Strangler Fig 
Lack of tree rings = ancient species 
Fiber strands just under the bark of the tree 
Fiber Strands on the tree on the outer bark
After exploring the Everglades, we drove back to Miami to have dinner with Koko, Karyssa’s bffl’s (Sabrina) sister. Karyssa practically grew up with Sabrina, and so each other’s families are often included in life events and in the list of “people we must see.”
The Keys were beautiful, and though a gale ruined the diving opportunities, we swung by Pennekamp Underwater Reef State Park anyway and tried to snorkel. While the visibility underwater was terrible, the reptile life on land was astounding. The lizards were bigger than any lizard we’ve ever seen, and the iguanas were everywhere. We meant to stop and take pictures, but they never seemed to be in a convenient spot to stop at.
Key West seems to have degraded into a tourist-trap and Covid super-spreader, but we really only saw Duval Street and the harbor, so we can’t judge.
A friend of a friend, viz., Jeff, owner of Namaste Excursions on Key West, turned us on to a cool art installation on a nude beach on nearby Geiger Key. Here we were privy to the sea life we might have seen had the water been clearer, as a lot of it was washed up on the shore.
We took a helicopter tour on Marathon Key to make up for the bust on diving and water “viz.” We saw some dolphins training at a research center and a shark. Seeing the Keys from a bird’s eye view was quite the treat, however, Karyssa ended up finished for the day from motion sickness.
West to the Everglades, and continuing in tourist mode, we hired an airboat ride through the vast mangroves in Everglades City. Captain Ryan not only tore through the maze of mangrove islands on his family’s private reserve, but educated us on the moving water and bird and gator populations, as well as on how to walk amidst the latter (slowly). Consider this: the gator population was nearly wiped out, and now is thriving, all in my short lifetime! It represents a success story within a larger shitstorm, however, and the “river of grass” is the largest environmental restoration project in the country’s history.
We visited one of the massive dams on Lake Okeechobee on our way south to Miami, and I’ve recently learned that the elevation drop between its shores in the middle of the peninsula and the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts is on average a mere nine feet!
Now consider the hundreds of irrigation canals, ditches, and roads due to urbanization, big sugar, and bigger beef criss-crossing that same peninsula starting with Napoleon Broward’s Caloosahatchee ship canal built to connect Lake O with the Atlantic in the early 1900s, and you can see the problem. The flow making up the sloughs that constitute the river of grass that is the Everglades has been blocked and diverted and reduced to the breaking point.
A littered Lake Okeechobee
Plenty of water here now, however, as it’s the close of the rainy season and many roads in the National Park were closed due to flooding. We reached Everglades City, “the stone crab capital of the world” and parked next to the public park and restrooms for the night, walking across the street to enjoy stone crabs at an outdoor and family-owned and operated restaurant.
A few miles south of Everglades City–which consists of maybe 10 square blocks of houses, one church, a gas station, and several outfitters–lies the even smaller enclave of Chokoloskee. Sitting on an ancient Indian shell mound or “midden,” the outpost clings onto a couple of feet of mangrove duff above the sand of the Thousand Islands and Flamingo further south.
The center of this cultural treasure is the Smallwood Store, which has been outfitting settlers and tourists for as long as they have managed to make it this far south and west. It now perseveres as a museum where for a mere fiver one can bury oneself in an amazing collection of cracker life and material culture.
The skill set required to eek out an existence in the “mus-kee-ter”-infested jungle reveals itself in the store’s bizarre assortment of period dry goods as well as daily ledgers and newspapers. (It will be another crying shame if Florida doesn’t somehow safeguard this extra-ordinary collection, as is.)
A personal highlight was the contribution made by the one and the only Totch, and I am hereby adding his remarkable “Totch: A Life in the Everglades” to your essential reading list. (Another hat-tip to Brian Gallagher, who shared it with me a few years back.)
Born in Chokoloskee in 1910, Loren G. Brown, or “Totch”, dropped out of miseducation in the 11th grade and took to a life of fishing, guiding, and overall totching. His memoir details everything from their foodstuffs–lots of fish and birds, but no gator–their daily tasks–from growing cane to guiding yankees, from curing gator hides and deer skins to collecting egret and ibis tail-feathers, from harvesting clams to mullet–and even how they dealt with mosquitoes–from burning pine tar in “smudge pots” to covering your skin with “red-mangrove dirt.” Totch’s own skiff is featured in the Smallwood Store collection, as were videotaped interviews with the man himself, looping on a tv in a rear of the store.
I bought a copy of Peter Matthiessen’s “Shadow Country” from a teenaged grandchild of one of its protagonists – also features in this amazing account of the murder of E.J.Watson back in 1910. (Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leaopard” is required non-fiction, btw.) This 900-page tome is so detailed and historically grounded–the Chokoloskee teenager attested to its central murder, a “community project” he insisted, as having gone down on the store’s own dock, a few feet from the register where we stood–that it could serve as a textbook for any course in Florida history.
The whole town ambushed and killed Watson, a decorated veteran of “the War Between the States” (as they call it in these parts) who was alleged, inter alia, to have hired desperate field-hands to harvest his cane for a season, only to kill them on payday!
We stopped by Sanibel Island in order to refresh a childhood memory of Karyssa’s. Before we headed to the beach in search of seashells, we stopped by a wildlife refuge and took advantage of the shade and bathrooms by hanging out there to continue working on our puzzle. The no-see-ums seized their chance to feast on us, and our bug bite count drastically increased to twice what they were in St Augustine.
The next day included a visit to Tampa, where we ate dinner with Renea, a college teammate of Karyssa, and walked a bit of the Riverwalk. We debated sleeping in St Petersburg, but we also felt rushed to get home. So we headed north to a spot on iOverlander that, for the first time, failed us. Every road leading into the wildlife management area was gated shut. We ended up staying on the side of the road at a noisy trailhead.
After a hike around a swampy trail, we decided to head over to Alexander Springs and take a look around. But because they wouldn’t allow dogs, our visit was short and we found another trailhead along the Florida Trail in the “Pat’s Island” wilderness area within Ocala National Forest and settled in for the night. We finished the puzzle, hiked a bit, and drove straight west to Crystal River in search of Manatee, and then on to Tallahassee with Obama’s “A Promised Land” audiobook for entertainment.
One SCUBA trip in Vortex Springs later, and we made it back home to Kasandrah’s just in time for Thanksgiving. And now we’re all caught up! We’re in Florida, sitting around, twiddling our thumbs, visiting and helping family, as Nick gets us prepared for Mexico.
