Category: Florida

Camera Roll: Lake Talquin, Quincy, Tallahassee

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Today’s perambulations took me from the shores of Lake Talquin, where the wind bringing in the next layer of December cloud cover whipped the water to a hard chop–which is the only way I’ve ever seen Lake Talquin, to be honest–to the crisp winter understory of the Lake Talquin State Forest, where the pines are awaiting the distant spring in silent resignation. State Road 267 then carried me north to Quincy, where the clouds ruined my original plan (I’ll be back another day) but cleared enough for me to grab a few shots of a beautifully-restored Gulf Station on the Old Spanish Trail, US 90. A couple shots in Tallahassee caught my eye in the late afternoon and evening.

Lake Talquin. Cell Phone Camera.
Gulf Station on US 90, Quincy, Florida
Florida Christmas
Gulf Station on US 90, Quincy, Florida
Accidental artwork, Tallahassee, Florida
Creation 1 Inn, Quincy, Florida. A full service establishment.
Gulf Station on US 90, Quincy, Florida
Lake Talquin State Forest
Lake Talquin State Forest.

Sketch Book: Abandoned House in Cape Sable

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Today’s notebook entry is based on this photo of an abandoned house in Cape Sable hosted at Florida Memory. If you’ve never visited Florida Memory, it’s a wonderful resource full of photographs, documents, audio, video, maps, and other gems from the Florida Archive. It’s a bottomless source of inspiration for me as a historian, artist, and information geek.

Based on a 1925 photo in Florida Archives.

St. Johns Meditation

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Source: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St._Johns_River_in_Downtown_Jacksonville_with_John_T._Alsop_Jr._Bridge_-_panoramio.jpg

This is not my photo. Sometimes, at the end of a long day, my mind turns homeward, back to Jacksonville, and I find myself looking at pictures of the river I love. I look out over this river and I see my own history running through the current.

Sometimes memories of my dad’s fishing buddies flow in ripples and eddies on the far shore. One of the waves washes a brief but rich memory over me of riding in the back of a pickup truck, one interminable summer Saturday afternoon, beer cans rolling around the bed, hair tousled and burnt by wind and sun. Over and through countless bridges and marshes we rode to the mouth of the river, where I rolled with languid Atlantic waves on the ocean side of the jetty listening to them talk about work.

Dad’s friend asks me to manage the fishing pole while he walks down the beach for awhile, and I take the rod from him with gravity, eager to stand in the surf with purpose. I feel a tug on the line. A joyous weight pulls against the end of the line and I know the fish is hooked. I let out a little yelp as I reel the fish in from the surf, turn by turn, until I see a silver flash just beneath the roiling surface a few feet away. I did not know then that I would remember that little Whiting 25 years later, so I simply took the fish off of the hook and put her back in the water as I had been taught. Some people say it’s not right to catch a fish and throw it back. I don’t have an answer for them all these years later. This is how I was taught, over and over again, right here on this river.

Later that night I felt the waves in my body as I fell asleep on the couch, the warm tones of a PBS documentary and the struggling air conditioner laying down a pattern of white noise that was suitably oceanic in its own way—a way that continues to whisper home in my ear whenever I stop to listen.

Wild Florida: Red Wolf

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Many people don’t associate wolves with Florida, but the endangered Red Wolf still calls a small part of the Gulf coast home. FWC has a fantastic profile on Red Wolves here.

I had the opportunity this morning to photograph a family of these beautiful wolves at the Tallahassee Museum. They were a skittish bunch, warily trotting from one side of the enclosure to another to keep their distance from the keeper as well as keeping a close eye on me.

 

Florida Caverns

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The tour guides always point it out: look up there, they say, shining a flashlight into the pitch darkness between stalactites above our heads, that’s the original entrance. The spot where someone looked down the hole uncovered by a fallen tree and first set eyes upon this strange subterranean world glimmering beneath the middle Florida cotton kingdom. Never mind that the Indians in this part of Florida had known about the caves and used them for longer than anyone could remember. That curious explorer must have been as thrilled and unsettled by this place as the room full of tourists gaping into the inscrutable darkness. Because this place, the Florida caverns, should not be here in North Florida.

This is an endlessly beautiful region, but if you spend enough time in this part of Florida you know what to expect: rolling hills, pine flatwoods, palmettos, red clay, cypress swamps, meandering tannic rivers. It’s a shock, then, the first time you set foot in this fantasy world. The air is cool and damp, odorless. The eyes refuse to settle in one place, for there is no horizon and no distance. There is only this room, only the next room, like a Zelda dungeon. The rocks you know in the human world above are gray and bland, chips off the endless block of limestone that used to be sea floor and sea creatures underlying the entire Florida peninsula. Here the rocks are obscenely variegated, evocative, ubiquitous.

For all that, caves are not entirely peaceful. Peer through the crevices along the well-trod and dimly-lit tour path and it’s easy to imagine losing yourself in a tightening pitch black labyrinth. It’s all too easy to imagine eyeless creatures going about their sightless business, creepy spiders, bats—though you’re likely to see at least one of these without exercising your imagination–insects, even corpses presiding over the inky darkness. This is truly an escape from the Florida you think you know, and a treasure.

Lichgate: Beneath the Spreading Oak

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A short winding path opens onto this unexpected glade of whimsy on the outer rim of Tallahassee’s student ghetto and it takes my breath away. A towering oak twists above the glade, its gnarled fingers pointing toward gardens, a quaint cottage. Delicate paths weave beneath the swooping limbs of the ancient oak at the darkened margins of the clearing, leading visitors past a fairy circle and over a tiny stone bridge to a verdant garden on one side of the cottage, and a wooded chautauqua nestled past the titular lichgate on the other side. On a humid Monday morning in August, I can only imagine the vernal lectures given here.

More after the jump.

My sweat pours and the grass wets my ankles and there is a suggestion of tension in the interplay between shafted sunlight and dense shade here; between blooms and insects and the corpse gate in the side yard of the empty cottage. Spiders weave little webs in the unwashed corners of the windows and transact their sullen intercourse in the shade beneath the eaves. The professor who built this place spent her life studying heroism and tragic ethics, but this place, her place, sings a quiet melody of enchantment. This is more glade than stoa.

I knock away the morning spiders and sit a moment on the wooden bench in the darkened lichgate. Tragedy and heroism, Tudor fantasy and merrie olde whimsy are a sort of tradition, but perhaps it is best to think of this place in light of another tradition: the resurrection gate. Look for the little signpost in an unexpected place on your weary journey. Pass along the winding path and let the oak-scented glade take your breath, too. Walk the maze and watch the insects pass from bloom to bloom.. Let the sweat pour and cling in the thick summer morning air. Then emerge from the glade with new energy.

Where:

Lichgate on High Road
1401 High Road
Tallahassee, Florida 32304