Tag: Florida

Field Notes: My Pines

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Hurricane Michael blew through today. Michael made this probably the most memorable birthday I’ll ever have, but, more importantly, it bulldozed a heartbreaking path of destruction across a huge portion of the Florida panhandle I have come to know and love. I have a few photos of the aftermath in my neighborhood which I will post soon, when the power is restored, but I just wanted to mark the occasion tonight.

Here is a video of the pines in my backyard swaying in the Tropical Storm-force winds blowing in the storm’s wake. These trees stood long before I was born. They stood tall through Hurricanes Michael, Hermine, and Kate, just to name the direct hits; bent but never broken. They lost a sister tree in Hermine, but continue to smile down on our home, which is really their home. I love these trees fiercely. Their strength and resiliency can be an inspiration, I hope, for all of us in the difficult days ahead. When the complaints about trees and power outages start–and they will, very soon–these mighty pines will remind me why we value trees in Tallahassee, and why we choose to live with them.

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