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rs artists and writers then the surreal opportunity of being attacked by giant lizards cougars and assorted vipers likely was if la florida wasn t too pretty and too luxuriant and too ripe then it was too dangerous we paddle nearly instinctively now and i notice that the energy of the senses has created its own momentum as sure as the v line of a wake my hull leaves behind in the dark liquid the particular scent of the water can be acknowledged the fresh coolness of the air can be absorbed by the pores of the skin the calls of the birds and the animals can be heard somewhere beyond sound what emerges is a profoundness of being one that trumps any intellectual pretense that may have tried to smuggle its way along despite all we have done to sweep it clean from the imagination the true natural florida remains inextricable and sure and i am thankful for the everlasting possibilities of its soul more fish jump and splash a gator groans and a radiant pale glow rises from behind a crown of cypress to the east paddle in hand i push forward riding the moon into the florida river night another ephemeral florida image by george herbert mccord from more than a century ago 5 comments posted in uncategorized tags florida river george herbert mccord kayaking landscape painting posted by floridanature january 9 2011 sea turtle dreams are they even needed a few years ago i spent almost seven weeks in the galapagos islands as part of my life as an itinerant nature writer i was required to write and help with a film when i was there but when i had a spare moment i wrote another piece one that came much closer to describing my own relationship with this strange and wonderful place here it is ashore on tagus cove in the remote galapagos islands some 600 miles offshore ecuador i need the perspective of a steady uphill hike to tell me what i couldn t begin to know at sea level this nicely rounded natural harbor cut into the side of a mountain was once a volcanic crater time and tide took its toil on one wall of the caldera long ago in prehistory letting seawater sluice into a geological bowl where magma once roiled the trail i follow today at the edge of isla isabela winds through a rocky culvert onto the dry reddish dirt that lays on surface of this island like a patina up to where the ghostly bare limbed palo santo trees cradle the finely woven nests of the ground finches looking around i find i m atop a rim between the sloughed off crater of tagus and the wholly intact bowl of another volcano a few hundred meters inland a young naturalist named charles darwin stood near this same vantage point after putting ashore at tagus in the hms beagle 160 years ago carefully recording his visit in his journal the landlocked crater holds a small sullen lake at the bottom of its bowl it is a steep walk crawl down the sides almost 1 000 feet worth darwin who was here in the heat of the midday sun and thinking the lake might quench his thirst had scrambled down the crater with no hesitation when he cupped his hands to drink he was startled to find the water was saltier than the ocean itself all was not lost mapmakers named the crater volcan darwin in his honor our deep diving submersible preparing to launch during the day like darwin i too am here on an expedition the sails and wood of the hms beagle are modernized into diesel and steel the transoms that once navigated by the stars are buzzing computer screens that now chart nearly every thing there is about our position here on earth what the technology of our oceanographic ship cannot read though is the feeling of the place i look down on the sea crater of tagus where a half dozen green turtles are mounting the shells of each other frothing the water in their passion as i watch through my binoculars i see them raising their ancient armored heads up out of the water gulping air in sheer turtle bliss i have seen the turtles underwater often during my month here in this isolated archipelago and each time i have been struck by their primitive grace the way the glint of another millennium shines in their eyes i hike back down to the craggy shore of tagus just as the sun dips below the volcanic peak of nearby isla fernandina in the scarlet light of early evening i see jupiter and venus burning atop each other next to a crescent moon watch the brightest meteor i have ever seen leave a long white trail next to them both like a cosmic hand checking off one more day of life tagus cove during the day after dark i put on scuba gear and with a marine biologist slip under the black water at the edge of the cove here with our dive lights turned off we settled to the bottom at 80 feet flashes of bioluminescence sparkling in front of my mask like the fields of fireflies i used to see as a kid i look for my dive buddy but he seems to have been swallowed up by the ebony sea finally he exhales and the upwelling of his air exhaust tears through the plankton over his head outlining each tiny bubble in a rim of blue green briefly we turn on our lights and shine them under the rocky ledges down into places where the molten lava flow from the craters ran so long ago the sea has done a magnificent job of colonizing itself over the eons upholstering the old lava with a thick fabric of coral and worms sponges and tiny invertebrates all united here in their isolation from the mainland from under the ledge a port jackson shark swims excitedly out a slender and spotted dwarf like creature no bigger than my arm in doing so it pinballs off a rock and my light and my attention ricochets with it i hesitate at the rock and see a tiny nudibranch the size of my little finger striped and iridescent like a day glo poster from the sixties this marine slug is speciated custom designed by its own special needs in the cosmos local fisherman in awe of its bright strips call it el tigre the tiger we flick our lights off again plunging us back into primal darkness i watch as a large discus shaped form moves easily away from us in the water its shell and flippers clearly outlined by the broken bioluminescence a sizzle of blue green it is a sea turtle perhaps one of those i saw earlier on the surface they tell me reptiles don t dream having evolved long before the rest of us earned the right to that luxury but do they even need to out here in the galapagos a place that is still part dream itself gliding underwater like colossal heavy trunked birds tiny wings of scales moving them as fast as they ever need to go perhaps they don t but who can ever say with certainly but the turtles themselves leave a comment posted in uncategorized tags ecuador galapagos nature writing oceanographic sea turtles posted by floridanature december 11 2010 apres wild boar the effigies hidden in the pine flatwoods it s sunny and brisk out here in a broad field of pine flatwoods skinny slash and loblolly poking up randomly from the sea of saw palmetto like utility poles green fringe bristling from the tops we stop to get our bearings about two miles in at the side of the trail as we do my friend bruce casually looks up from his gps and asks in a conversational tone is that a bear that s exactly the sort of thing i always hope to hear and so i look up too and farther along downstream on the trail some 200 yards away is a blur of spiky black hair down on four legs trotting along as a blur it could be a bear certainly we ve been seeing generous piles of blue black scat already so we know they re back in here local bears loading up for their truncated version of hibernation with fat acorns and berries maybe the occasional walking stick or a particularly slow moving armadillo but a few seconds more worth of visual information tells me this would have to be the leanest and fastest bear i ve ever seen another nano second and i see it is actually a large wild boar and with his head down following some sensory path only he knows he doesn t even seem to realize we re here i often run across signs of wild hogs out in the woods and swamps around florida earth tilled for roots as if a small buldozer has moved through sometimes i see the hoof tracks in the hard sand and once in a while i ll catch sight of a few of them way off in the distance running the other way but to be on a trail atop a wide flat terrain under a bright florida winter sun and see a wild boar moving on a fast trot towards you is well unusual this is not a real trail but an unmapped fire break road with two ruts where a vehicle s wheels have traveled and the boar is very politely running in the opposite rut as he approaches as if he understands the american style of driving on the right side of the road in order to pass oncoming vehicles on the left the first domestic hogs were shipped here by desota 500 or so years ago for food and were later joined by others introduced by settlers left to their own devices the survivors turned feral learning to eat nearly anything that would sustain them including rattlesnakes and berries unlike most wild animals the males have a reputation for attacking when cornered or threatened even towards other hogs i think of them as the litigators of the animal world as he closes on us i see his tongue is out and he is panting like a dog on a brisk run except for the long rather lethal curved tusks he could be a dandy disney animal one of those animatronics that are programmed to perform entertainingly on demand but of course he is not so i figure i ought to at least get my camera out since whatever happens next it should be worth a picture as i fumble with my camera bruce and i continue to talk clearly the animal doesn t seem bothered by the fact that in another ten seconds or so he will pass us in the opposite rut i remember wild boars have a great sense of smell and of hearing but they don t see all that well the wind is blowing towards us so the scent reception is lost bear scat thick with acorns yet in another second or so he finally hears us and then does a cartoon like doubletake skidding to a halt in the sandy trail spinning as if on a lazy susan and galloping away in a cloud of dust seemingly all at once the whole experience from beginning to end was actually very brief in linear time i figure it s a testament to how the human senses stretch out each real moment to its fullest potential when the immediacy of a brand new experience is trotting towards you with its tongue out and its tusks gleaming in the sun in such cases our large mammalian brains sort of step back and default to the zen viscera of the now a friend once told me that of all the animals wild hogs will actually hold a grudge although i m still not sure where she learned this i m pretty sure i didn t do anything to aggravate this particular boar but then again i am a human and from the perspective of a wild hog we upright walking mammals probably all look alike hogs are hunted nearby on the other side of the river and maybe he lost a colleague or two to that behavior perhaps they were out one moment strolling through the neighborhood with great porcine camaraderie and glee and then the next the former buddy was being ground up into pork patties in some hunter s garage in umatilla i m sorry to miss snapping a photo of our fellow traveler but am also a bit relieved that any grudge he may have carried won t have a chance to be realized today on we go deeper in through the flatwoods we had seen a good dozen would be hikers back in the parking lot they appeared to be preparing to stage some sort of organized hike maybe orienteering or some left brained activity that required actual planning i figured they stuck to the marked trail which looped a couple miles back through a longleaf forest to the west since the trail head kiosk for this land doesn t even include a map for these easterly fire roads most causal saunterers don t make it back this far which is one of the reasons we are here a pine flatwoods also called pine barrens is exactly what its name implies a nearly flat low landscape colonized mainly by pine with a thick understory of saw palmetto maybe with some gallberry bushes and wildflowers today there s also a mild scent of wild vanilla in the air often the soils are underpinned by clay which means the land is seasonally wet and the occasional open pocket of grasses will hold water becoming ephemeral ponds i get a kick out of the fact that the most common terrestrial habitat in florida is more aquatic than not wild vanilla as we move deeper in the sun warms me seeming to radiating into my bones replacing the earlier chill the flatwoods is bordered on horizons to the east and west with great thick tree lines as if we are strolling through a giant natural ailseway the farther north we go the more narrow the aisle becomes tree lines moving in closer we are headed for the st johns near where the wekiva confluxes with it the fire roads sometimes loop around but i figure if we continue in the same direction we ll eventually make it to the rivers wetlands regardless of which road we take my hiking partner is a former planner who teaches environmental studies at rollins down in winter park we hike together a few times a year and once in a while i sort of dress up and actually drive down into there to speak at that college either to a class or to a larger public gathering maybe about a book or a film when i ve hiked here before the wetlands to the north near the river will eventually sweep down into this low landscape making a complete passage impossible but today is different we ve been without heavy rain storms for several months now and if there s ever a chance of making it all the way into the actual wetlands it s now where the flatwoods gives way to hammock finally the tree lines meet and we head off into a trail that takes us northeast inside a thick hammock of live and water oak hickories a few pines and old sabal palms as we go the ground is thick with fat acorns much larger than i ve ever seen them before and bruce wonders if the bitter cold of last winter has maybe inspired the trees to grow bigger seeds offspring more able to withstand the cold surely a larger acorn is also good for the animals such as the black bears who must bulk up on fodder for the winter bears smarter than we give them credit for have actually been seen shaking trees to make the acorns fall indians who invested all of their intellect and emotion into the landscape and its gods must have known the particulars of this maybe they didn t have a written language but they knew more luxurious fodder would also meant fatter bears hogs and other wildlife it s not surprising that most anything in nature that has a use has been historically woven into the lifeways of both animals and people over time the earth people as peter matthiessen describes the indigenous pre industrialized cultures took full advantage of florida s rich diversity and long growing seasons they ate wild grapes hickory nuts both the roots and vine of the 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