Moving from North to "South"

Floridians need not read this. All others might find the horror story of the love bug to be bewildering and maybe even funny.

The love bug is a creature we only have found in Florida. It has the delightful habit of finding a mate and having a conjugal visit while flying through the air in thick clouds. Their life cycle climax (forgive me) seems to occur when they splat into the windshield and grilles of all the trucks, cars and RVs that head north and south on Florida's interstate highways.

As we rolled north on our first day of our trip, the bugs were out in force. We could see rainstorms of them splattering on our windshield. We picked up perhaps 2,000 of them. Helluva way to die: conjugalis in extremis is what I call it.

It's imperative that you scrape their bodies off the front of your vehicle as quickly as possible. They seem to leave a nasty acidic residue which burns into paint and leaves permanent scarring if not scrubbed off within a few hours of death.

We are moving desperately slowly as we roll north. And this suits us just fine. We are in no great rush. We drove for 90 miles on the first day. And that was enough. We stayed in the little town of Bushnell, FL, when the rolling green fields just begin to signal the beginning of Florida's horse country.
Then we moved across to the western side of the state and parked on the banks of the Suwanee River in a state park. We are cocooned in a canopy of oak and magnolia trees. We also have moved into a different kind of Florida. You see, half the state – the southern half, strangely – is much more like the northern states. That's probably because it is made up more of northerners.

There's an invisible line, though, just to the north of Tampa, where one moves into what is more generally considered to be The South. This is more Bible Belt. You come across billboard after billboard that preaches anti-abortion messages while, in that slightly mad way there are endless other billboards that let you know of cafes and restaurants where “We Bare All” and where you can find “X Markets of Adult Toys and Videos.”

A mighty strange juxtaposition.

I've just finished a stunning book, The Known World” by Edward P. Jones. It is set in Virginia in the 1850s from the point of view of slaves and slave owners. The principal characters, however, are black people who own slaves, something I had no idea occurred and still, after reading the book, have a hard, hard time understanding: How could a black man who has bought his own freedom and the freedom of his wife and child cope with the child growing up and then purchasing his own slaves. The brutality and inhumanity of the book, written by a black man, by the way, is tough to stomach. But it paints an unusually rich portrait of life in those not so good old days. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel.

The springs after which the Manatee Springs State Park are named ($8 per night for Florida seniors who camp here!) bubble up from the aquifer. The clear water maintains a steady temperature of 72 degrees F. Manatees make their way here in the cold winter months because they need the warm water for survival. In the heat of summer, though, we could see a school of mullet swimming in endless circles through the knots of cypress standing with wet feet in the spring waters.

William Bartram came upon these water in July 1774 and here is some of what he reported”

“Having borrowed a canoe from some Indians, I visited a very grat and most beautiful fountain which boils up from between the hills about 300 yards from the river.

“The basic of the fountain is about 100 yards in circumference. The fountain is very full of fish and alligators and at a great depth in the water appear as plain as if they were close at hand.”

We crossed into the Central Time Zone after crossing the Apalachicola River, west of the state capital of Tallahassee. We're in the rolling hills now: no more flat plains. Our campsite for a few days was down a potholed road, alongside a lake at Three Rivers State Park. On Saturday, we drove the car west to the next state park where we explored the only caverns in a Florida park.

In a nice piece of Americana, we found upturned white ceramic bowls in the roof of the caves. These has been cemented in place by the young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps who uncovered the caverns and made them usable in the late 1930s. The bowls were used to reflect the limited light produced by carbon lights while the young men carved out walkways. The caverns, filled with stalactites and stalagmites, dripping water and deliciously cool, showed little evidence of having been used by the early Indians. The preferred drier accommodations in other caves which have evidence of fairly ornate pottery shards and tools from 10,000 years ago.

On our way back into our campground, we were delayed a few minutes by the car ahead of us. It stopped and a young woman jumped out and disappeared ahead of the car. She reappeared holding a five-foot-long snake by the tail. She gently deposited it in the undergrowth and it slithered off. I had to admire the young woman's gutsy approach to snake maintenance.