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.
Take a break with me on the banks of the mighty Apalachicola River at the Woodruff Dam overlook in Chattahoochee.
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.
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
C.B. Crenshaw 