River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River

By Bill Belleville

First explored by naturalist William Bartram in the 1760s, the St. Johns River stretches 310 miles along Florida's east coast, making it the longest river in the state. The first "highway" through the once wild interior of Florida, the St. Johns may appear ordinary, but within its banks are some of the most fascinating natural phenomena and historic mysteries in the state. The river, no longer the commercial resource it once was, is now largely ignored by Florida's residents and visitors alike.

In the first contemporary book about this American Heritage River, Bill Belleville describes his journey down the length of the St. Johns, kayaking, boating, hiking its riverbanks, diving its springs, and exploring its underwater caves. He rediscovers the natural Florida and establishes his connection with a place once loved for its untamed beauty. Belleville involves scientists, environmentalists, fishermen, cave divers, and folk historians in his journey, soliciting their companionship and their expertise. River of Lakes weaves together the biological, cultural, anthropological, archaeological, and ecological aspects of the St. Johns, capturing the essence of its remarkable history and intrinsic value as a natural wonder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780820342245

Bill Belleville

BILL BELLEVILLE, an award-winning environmental journalist and filmmaker, is also a veteran diver. His books include River of Lakes and Deep Cuba (both Georgia). His articles, which have appeared in such publications as Sierra, Oxford American, Islands, and Salon, have been anthologized in six other collections. Belleville lives in Sanford, Florida.

Book preview

Belleville reveals the waterway’s exotic voluptuousness… in writing that is both silvery and refreshingly unrehearsed… two qualities much in keeping with the milieu. Belleville creates in the reader a protective affection for the St. Johns, all any river can ask of its lover.

—Kirkus

[Belleville] establishes his kinship with William Bartram… and other artists who have felt the tug of [the river’s] currents.

—Audubon

Eloquently captures one man’s quest to explore both the known and unknown about a mesmerizing body of water.

—Southern Living

A wise and inspired book… This is an important and beautifully written work that deserves to be widely read as a lesson in learning to know and love the damaged places that surround us.

—Alison Hawthorne Deming

Filmmaker Bill Belleville has written a fine account of the St. Johns.… a definitive book.

—Miami Herald

[Belleville] kayaks and boats the St. Johns, hikes its forests, dives its springs. He talks to scientists, fishermen, historians, and residents. And he depicts, with finely tuned prose, the many threats [the river] faces from haphazard development and destructive pollution.

—The Tampa Tribune

River of Lakes

A Journey on Florida’s St. Johns River

BILL BELLEVILLE

Paperback edition published in 2001

by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

© 2000 by Bill Belleville

All rights reserved

Designed by Erin Kirk New

Set in 11.5 on 14 Fournier with Cochin display

Printed and bound by Maple-Vail

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America

10 09 08 07 06 P 8 7 6 5 4

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition

of this book as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Belleville, Bill, [date]

River of lakes : a journey on Florida’s St. Johns River /

Bill Belleville.

xxxi, 220 p. : 1 map ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [203]—210) and index.

ISBN 0-8203-2156-7 (alk. paper)

1. Saint Johns River (Fla.)—History. 2. Saint Johns River

(Fla.)—Description and travel. 3. Saint Johns River Valley

(Fla.)—History. 4. Saint Johns River Valley (Fla.)—

Description and travel. I. Title.

F317.S2 B45 2000

975.9’1—dc21      99-33373

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-2344-2

                 ISBN-10: 0-8203-2344-6

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Map on page xiv by Karen Harrod Miller.

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4224-5

To my Dad,

who taught me not to be afraid of the woods

and knew the names of all the trees.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Headwaters to Blue Cypress Lake

2 Lake Hell ’n Blazes to Puzzle Lake

3 Econlockhatchee to the Osteen Bridge

4 Lake Monroe to Blue Springs

5 Hontoon Island to Lake George

6 Juniper Springs to Croaker Hole

7 Ocklawaha to Charlottia

8 Palatka to Picolata

9 Palmo Cove to Jacksonville Landing

10 Jacksonville Landing to the Atlantic Ocean

Appendix A. Relevant Public and Nonprofit Contact Agencies

Appendix B. Access Points on and near the St. Johns, from South to North

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Journalists, as Bill Moyers once noted, enjoy a license to be educated in public. And the research for this book has been nothing if not a public education, a joining of many pieces—some known, some not very much so—into a larger whole.

This is especially true with a resource that hasn’t been approached inside a single book cover in more than half a century. The world has changed since then, with the peninsula of Florida transmuting as suddenly and as thoroughly as any environment in our country.

There is chronology to this book, as there is to the river itself. The narrative begins at, well, the beginning. From here, it flows with the current of the St. Johns, from south to north, each chapter taking it a little farther downstream to its confluence with the ocean, to its consummation.

To flow north is highly unusual for any large river in this continent, and my constant referral to downstream as north and upstream as south will perhaps be unfamiliar at first.

You’ll have to blame the river for this—or more historically, blame the ancient seas. As Walter Schmidt put it in The Geology of Florida (edited by Anthony F. Randazzo and Douglas S. Jones), Florida’s landforms show the dominant effect of marine forces.… Ancient seas have left behind extensive flat plains that were their shallow floors, and scarps where old coastlines were cut into the uplands. The St. Johns has filled one of these almost flat, barely northward-flowing plains with its waters.

Like the river and its tributaries, the narrative digresses here and there, wandering into figurative sloughs and bayous, springs and creeks—places of discovery. Sometimes, it lingers on critters I’ve found fascinating; other times, it reveals a bit about other people who have developed an affection for this unique riverine environment.

You won’t find the river matched, word for water acre, along its route. If it were, the massive main stem of the Lower St. Johns would consume 90 percent of the narrative, for that is about how much water surface is represented by that broader stretch of river during its final eighty-mile run from Palatka to the ocean.

Instead, I’ve devoted more energy to the river that comes before, in the belief that the river upstream defines in many ways what goes down. Besides, most of us simply find a narrow, twisting waterway more appealing than a broad thoroughfare.

By the end—or perhaps somewhere in the middle—you might even feel the urge to put the book down and go out on the river to see it for yourself. I hope so—because I believe we don’t protect what we don’t value. And one of the surest ways to value any place is to connect with it, even if only a little bit.

I have made this a bit easier for you to do in the list of public access points in the appendix, grouped chronologically as to how each point appears along the river or in its valley.

As for private access points—the marinas and private ramps and boatyards—they can be highly transient, as shifting as the river itself. They open or close, expand or change names. Perhaps the dynamic of the river breeds in this whimsy; maybe it’s a function of living in a rootless place like Florida.

Public land usually remains public. And, thankfully, more land is becoming public all the time as folks come to understand the finite value of such resources. But this also means new parks and preserves take shape in places where, the year before, there were none.

If this book whets your appetite for more specialized information about the river, or if you need to express yourself about its well-being to those agencies charged with its care, you will find another list in the appendix that will help you accomplish both.

As for your own expression, it is important to know that public agencies seldom have enough ammunition to do the job they need to do to protect the river—it is rare for them to have adequate money or clout. In addition, staff members are being hammered routinely by those who would dilute laws and rules regulating the health of the St. Johns and its tributaries, usually in the name of short-term and selfish gains. Your voice counts as part of a building consensus that brings conservation to reality.

Today, the St. Johns and its wildlife teeter on the thin line of survival, balanced dangerously on the curve of biological sustainability, sometimes even dipping below. Chipping away at its many small parts sooner or later reduces the ability of the whole river system to regenerate itself. Such a loss would be not only a massive economic blow but one that would also drain the natural aesthetic, eroding the fragile well of its soul.

In this reality, protecting the St. Johns is a never-ending process that requires eternal vigilance from individual citizens, the media, civic groups, and religious congregations. Wanting to do right by the river is a beginning, but expressing that concern to top administrators and elected officials goes a long way toward making it happen.

Yet on occasion expression can get sucked into that great political stew of politics, a thrice-removed, emotionally driven theater in which logic is only a bit player. When, in 1998, the St. Johns joined a select national list of other waterways to become a prestigious American Heritage River—besting 126 applicants in the process—the reaction was not unanimous. Although the designation promised to help the river with badly needed cleanups, environmentally sound economic development, and historic preservation, not everyone was pleased about its new status. Conspiracy zealots went to work, figuring a federal sanction would mean everything from more government interference to UN troops bivouacked on its shores. Controversy, even the kind that courts haywire opinion, helps. When the dust settled, the publicity at least brought attention to the needs of the river, and officials began to respond.

After all, a river is a rare thing all by itself, a conveyor of water and history and myth. Of the water on earth, 97 percent is in the oceans; most of the rest is locked in icecaps and glaciers. Less than 1 percent is left as surface water. Yet it takes work to release a single drop of water from its commercial boundaries, to make it more than just a backdrop for our clever human contrivances.

If we are all students in this great shared learning process of life, then perhaps we can see the river as a great lesson in ecology, as a metaphor for learning how the integration of each natural part affects the whole.

I believe it is in seeing that true affection, of the kind that leads to an ethic, really begins. And you’ll find that to be a theme in all that follows here. If I have helped the reader see a river that has been notoriously unseen in modern times, then I’ll have done my job.

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude to poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming for her belief in this work, as well as to Barbara Ras of the University of Georgia Press—they were among the very first to get it. And certainly Grace Buonocore’s intelligent and thoughtful copyediting has helped make this a more readable book.

At the St. Johns River Water Management District—in addition to those who appear in the book—I owe a special gratitude to Patricia Harden, formerly of the Board of Governors, for her support of the book, at the beginning and end. Also thanks for professional assistance to scientists Kimberli J. Ponzio, Palmer D. Kinser Jr., Doug Munch, and David Toth, outreach coordinator Jeff Cole, and information specialist Beth Hickenlooper.

Also very helpful were Fred Harden, a true Bartram disciple, of the Friends of the Wekiva River, Dan Ragan of the Florida Times-Union’s Web site (www.jacksonville.com), Bob Giguere of WMFE-TV, Herb Hiller and Mary Lee Adler of Drayton Island, Judy Armstrong of Holly Bluff Marina, Dr. Robin Denson of Gulf Archaeology Research Institute, Gray Bass of the state’s Game and Fish Commission, Dr. Jim Miller of the Florida Department of State, Jerry Clutts and Dr. Ray Willis of the U.S. Forest Service, Alicia Clarke of the Sanford Museum, David Brown of Florida’s Backcountry River Adventures, Jody Rosier of the Florida Defenders of the Environment, longtime friends Russ and Katie Moncrief, and kayak buddy Dr. Steve Phelan of Rollins College, who, besides giving an extremely thoughtful reading to the manuscript, provided spiritual counsel, even when he may not have known he was doing so.

Thanks, too, for the conscientious work of Patrick Harvey of Rollins College’s Environmental Studies program in Winter Park, Florida, in researching and assembling the list of public access points, as well as assisting in fact checking of the narrative.

Finally, I can’t leave the river without expressing my appreciation to Eugenia Stefan for the support and encouragement she provided during the research.

Introduction

Unlike the mountains and sea-shore of the North, the scenery of the Tropics is greatest in its little things.—A traveler who journeyed up the St. Johns by steamship in 1870

Just moments after full dark, when the last shards of twilight slip away into the night, the junglelike woods outside my tent abruptly turn on, as if someone has thrown a switch. There are raspy screeches and deep, throaty grunts and the unsettling crack of branches being snapped in the underbrush. From the river nearby, something very large splashes and then exhales loudly. As I stretch out to rest, the hard-packed shell mound under me pushes through the thin tent fabric, outlining the knobby relief of thousands of freshwater snails gathered here by aboriginal campers centuries ago.

I am not in a tropical rainforest in Latin America but on the banks of a river that parallels the eastern coast of Florida, from Vero Beach to Jacksonville: the St. Johns. Tonight, I have made my camp on Idlewilde Point, a rich, lush oxbow in the middle river basin rimmed with towering cypress and sabal palms, bermed by the high, chalky earth of Indian shell middens.

Historically, other chroniclers of Florida’s longest river have come here before me over the last several centuries—from the early French artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues and naturalist William Bartram to composer Frederick Delius and novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. All of them found something that touched them deeply. In turn, they helped create a legacy of art and artistic science, themed by the river and the people it nourished.

At times, their discoveries and creations could be astounding, affecting those who lived far beyond the boundaries of the St. Johns. For instance, Bartram found that northern songbirds didn’t spend the winter under the ice of lakes or fly to the moon, as commonly supposed in the mid-1700s. Instead, he reported, cardinals and robins like those he had seen back home in Philadelphia migrated south, down along the great winding, exotic valhalla of the sublime St. Johns River valley.

For American and European readers who followed Bartram’s Travels up the wild Florida river from the civilized comfort of their parlors, this junglelike St. Johns may well have been on the moon. Although several degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer, this was, indeed, the tropics, with an exotically voluptuous promise locked inside its green walls. Wedged in between these more aesthetic travelers have been a checkered lot of conquistadors, soldiers, renegades, and—this being Florida—unabashed promoters of tourism and development.

Steamships, which first hauled cargo up and down the river for early settlers and rugged frontiersmen in the 1830s, became larger and fancier, accommodating visitors lured by blue sky dreams here in the land of flowers. These archetypical snowbirds descended on the swampy peninsula in a mad quest for health, wealth, and adventure, riding the highway of the St. Johns each winter into the heart of known Florida, like today’s snowbirds ride Interstate 95 and the Florida Turnpike. Between 1830 and 1920, there were some three hundred paddlewheelers trailing their distinctive plumes of black, pinefed smoke up and down its shores.

In this way, the St. Johns also became Florida’s first tourist attraction, with luxury hotels, boardinghouses, and busy landings dotting the riverbanks from Mayport at the river’s mouth all the way down to Lake Poinsett, more than 225 miles south. As for the rest of Florida, it was simply too wet or too remote to catch on: a census in 1880 revealed that only 257 people lived in Dade County, including Miami, while 4,535 swarmed over St. Johns, a county bordering the lower river.

For those who would promote such travel, it seemed almost impossible to describe the St. Johns without using the word salubrious. Promotional pamphlets and guides to the river from the late nineteenth century told of a surreal waterway that was, apparently, not only free of bugs and frost but a sort of balmy Shangri-la—a geographic version of the Eagles’ Hotel California where you can check out but you can never leave.

There are men and women, healthy and vigorous, who in years gone by, came to Florida as a last resource from death, observed the writer of A Hand Book of Important and Reliable Information for the Use of the Tourist, Settler and Investor in 1885. They dare not return to their old homes where the enemy still lies in wait for them. As for reality, it was given a sort of backhanded acknowledgment. There is malaria in Florida, noted the same writer, but not to the extent commonly supposed.

Predating this deluge of Europeans by several millennia were the original natives of the river valley. When the climate of Florida became moister and the flow of the St. Johns surer after the end of the last Ice Age, pre-Columbians began to settle along its shores. The certainty of this river and its bounty helped these people become less nomadic, more given to geographic commitments. They had time to invent pottery and myth, time to interpret the nature that sustained them. The culture that arose was as complex and organized as that of any North American tribe, with ceremonial centers, pyramidal temple mounds, plazas, and playing fields for a sort of ball game—a contest simmering with religion and allegory.

Of the dozen or so tribes that flourished here at the time the Spanish discovered La Florida, those known as the Timucua lived along the shores of the St. Johns, worshiping the sun and the stars, imbuing the eagle and rattlesnake with mystical powers, and using wild herbs to fire the magic that created a successful hunt, a victory in battle, an everlasting love.

It was Le Moyne who first captured these Indians at work and play in the valley of the late sixteenth century, rendering indelible likeness of them in forty-one finely detailed drawings. Theodore de Bry’s engravings of Le Moyne’s art were published in England in 1591, giving the world its first glimpse of the people of the St. Johns.

Although they were only here a short time, the French related to the Timucua in an intimate way, telling us more about them in three years than the Spanish could in two centuries.

Before the Timucua, there was a succession of even earlier peoples, stretching all the way back to the Paleo-Indians who briefly shared the river valley with huge Pleistocene megafauna like the mastodon, bison, sabertoothed cat, and the glyptodont, an armadillo-like animal the size of a Barcolounger.

After the Timucua were enslaved, diseased, and driven away by the Spanish, Creeks from Georgia and Alabama migrated down, often living atop the same middens and village sites the Timucua and others had created. Adapting to their new riverine environment, often accepting escaped slaves into their villages, the Creeks became known to the Spanish as cimarrones, wild ones or runaways. In the Muskogean language of the Creek, cimarrón became Seminole—a description not of themselves but of how the Europeans saw them.

The river fed them all, man and beast, bringing them to life on the banks of its channels, lakes, and springs and then—just as quickly—turning them into detritus upon which the ever-changing, water-rich system would continue to grow and reform itself.

From the Seminoles came a version of a word first used to describe the St. Johns, Welaka—a corruption of Ylacco. It was said to mean river of lakes or big water. Ylacco is surely a graphic description of a system that seems to be a series of broad inland bays linked together by a channel. There is another, lesser-known interpretation of Ylacco. For me, it fits just as well, for it wanders into poetry: It hath its own way, is alone contrary to every other.

The clues earliest men and women left behind from their occupation of this river tell us not just about life in another time but about how any environment shapes the social evolution of a society. And it leaves us with questions about what happens when we become clever and industrious enough in turn to shape the environment that will ultimately reshape us.

The history of this river was a heady one, to be sure. It was not only the first trail down into Florida but, in fact, the first great river in North America to be explored by Europeans.

When I prepared to examine the St. Johns for myself, I was more than aware of the distance between today’s expedient Florida realities and the slower, less frenetic times that set the backdrop for earlier visitors here. Since the turn of the century, the river has undergone marked changes, most having to do with humans’ conceit that they know how to run things better than nature.

Could I still find an authentic experience here, in a go-fast state that seems either in a swoon with progress and contrived, theme-worldish fun or randomly sullied by crime and violence? When I told two friends of my extensive plans to visit the St. Johns and its swamps, one wondered whether there was anything truly wild left to see; the other suggested I carry a gun.

The advice was well meaning, if uninformed. But I understood: pinning down any reality in a transient, pro-growth state like Florida nowadays is a bit like nailing Jell-O to the wall. What was true last year, even last week, may not be true today or tomorrow. Change can sometimes be heartbreaking: I have a very good 1966 field guide, Birds of North America, in which the local endemic known as the dusky seaside sparrow—found in the salt marshes just east of the St. Johns—was listed as uncommon, a step before rare and surely far from extinct, which it now is.

Into this uncertain equation comes the factor of perception. The riverine environments of the St. Johns have never been easy to figure. For one thing, by the standards of other North American rivers, it is a virtual newborn, having configured itself into its present condition barely more than five thousand years ago.

For another, the St. Johns is a slow-moving, tannic-stained blackwater river that meanders through a floodplain, leaving in its wake a shore that is more often flat and swamplike than high and banked. Because they are still and given to nuances that leak into the consciousness, swamps confuse many people into thinking these complex resources are much less than they are.

Perhaps the most famously confused was artist-scientist-woodsman John James Audubon, who came here in 1831—32, precisely because of the wonders Bartram had described forty years before. Although he had dreamed of exploring the St. Johns since he was a child, Audubon picked up a quill and wrote to his wife soon after his arrival: I am now truly speaking in a wild and desolate part of the world—no one in the eastern United States has any true idea of this peninsula. My account of what I have or shall see of the Floridas will be far, very far from corroborating the flowery sayings of Mr. Bartram, the botanist.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, better known for Uncle Tom’s Cabin than for her 1873 nonfiction paean to the St. Johns, Palmetto Leaves, was more sympathetic. In that later work, she noted, Fully half the tourists and travellers to Florida come back intensely disappointed, because visitors arrive on the river with their heads full of certain romantic ideas… [expecting] flowers and arabesques and brilliant coloring.

If travelers are not put off by the lack of melodramatic relief in the flat terrain, said Stowe, then they’re confused by the absence of distinct seasons, in a place where nature is an easy, demoralized, indulgent old grandmother who has no particular time for anything and does everything when she happens to feel like it.

Oddly, a contemporary state-funded tourism slogan popular a few years ago decided The Rules Are Different Here. Although I’d like to think this meant the uncertain and enchanting natural rules Stowe described, it undoubtedly had to do more with the popular concept of the place—an arabesqued and umbrella-drink-studded playpen—rather than one full of dark swampland and natural discovery.

To their credit, a few savvy outfitters up and down the river today have found that Stowe’s blackwatered mystique can be sold. There are now a handful of eco tours on the St. Johns offering visitors a chance to bird or photograph or simply exalt in this unique environment, to help displace the audioanimatronic Florida with the real.

Yet, as always on the river, some folks just don’t know when to stop when it comes to putting a spin on natural history: I think of the ambitious Realtor who sold lots near a little creek off the Wekiva, a major tributary of the St. Johns. Here, more than 160 river miles from the sea, buyers were solicited not for the chance to listen for kingfishers in the cypress boughs and watch otters play in the clear, spring-fed water but to have real estate with ocean access.

Adding to the confusion is the reality that the river is different things at different places, that local experts on one leg of the river may think they have it all figured out when, in fact, all they have figured out is their place on it.

Rivers also seem to birth exaggeration in the best of us—especially when it comes to sizes of things, and particularly when those things are cold blooded. As the great Florida naturalist Archie Carr facetiously explained in the introduction to his book about reptiles, amphibians, and fishes of Florida, There is a great deal of irresponsible talk about the sizes attained by some of our cold-blooded animals, particularly snakes and fish. In fact, the whole subject of fish sizes is so delicate and dangerous that talking about it would probably only lose… readers.

Still, it is hard to resist: How can I forget the good old boy on a tributary who bragged to me about his catch of a "26¼ pound" black mullet—a fish that usually gets no larger than around 3 pounds? Or the modest conservationist who insisted he routinely encountered an 18-foot gator on a river-fed lake—about a yard beyond what any known alligator has so far achieved in the world.

Hydrologically, the waters that feed the St. Johns are grouped into three basins—upper, middle, and lower—that chart the river’s progress from feral wetland creek to broad lake to deep tidal estuary. Because it flows northward, the upper river—as in upstream—is south and the lower river is north. There are officially fifty-one artesian springs charted in this valley, many with their own narrow creeks or spring runs, some with limestone portals leading to the underwater rivers that feed them.

Within this reality, a maze of serpentine twists and isolated oxbows still remains, many with inviting tributaries and bayous, making it impossible to experience the entire St. Johns fully in a short time.

In fact, it would take me months to cover its entire territory, an act accomplished in bits and pieces, taking place aboard kayaks, canoes, research vessels, houseboats, airboats, and small airplanes and even while wearing a wetsuit and a set of scuba tanks.

In making this journey, I wasn’t looking for speed but for more of a commune. Biologist Edward O. Wilson has written of such intimacies, explaining them as the primal affinity we humans have for a subconscious connection between ourselves and the rest of the natural world. He calls this quest biophilia, a link to the great expanse of time before industrialization, when humans lived directly on the land and from it. For this connection to soothe our soul, some form of wilderness must be left, says Wilson, a place for people to travel in search of new life and wonder.

Thus I was searching for a way not just to traverse the river but to know it, to feel a hint of what it was that had evoked such passion in others over the centuries.

Ultimately, I suppose, I was hoping to hear a few notes of Delius’s Florida Suite in the breezes that rise from its waters, to understand why Bartram so loved its plants and animals that he drew them as almost human, to find that place—or one like it—where Rawlings camped on the shore of the upper river one night and never fully let it go.

If I could have, to hold forever, one brief place and time of beauty, Rawlings later wrote, I think I might choose the night on that high lonely bank above the St. Johns River.

Along with 3.5 million others, I live in the St.