Rehydrating a Florida boyhood.
I drove to Florida last week thinking about Flipper and Sea Hunt and all the other 1960s TV-fueled fantasies that darn near came true in my life. While plowing through tropical storm Claudette—the torrential wash of it on my windshield and the swollen, soggy aquifer under my wheels—it also occurred to me that some memories are sort of like instant mashed potatoes. All you have to do is add water to bring them to life.
Lake water.
After moving from Murfreesboro, Tennessee to Lake City, Florida for my father’s health in 1965, we ended up in a nice split-level in a quaint, palm-tree adorned neighborhood, set on the edge of an 800-acre freshwater lake—Alligator Lake. Back then the slimy, scary reptiles were on the endangered species list, although we occasionally saw a few gnarly snouts trolling around under the midday sun. (Of course, nowadays, you’ll find a gator in almost every kiddie pool, post office, and Publix supermarket parking lot from Two Egg to Yeehaw Junction to Key Largo.)
One of the first family purchases was a Sears aluminum johnboat and outboard engine. Fittingly, Daddy named it the Alligator Queen. He stenciled it on the bow, even on the oars and cushions. Pepe, our beloved chocolate-colored miniature poodle, loved to perch on the front seat of the boat as it skimmed across the lake, his fuzzy ears flapping in the muggy breeze like handless brown mittens.
My older brother Jim and I made fast friends in the neighborhood. It seemed everyone had their own boat and the lake was our playground. We skied on plywood panels or old planks behind the woefully underpowered little boats. Built forts and treehouses on the edge of the lake, most of those constructed by my brother and his friends as secluded smoking parlors, Playboy magazine libraries, or bomb-making labs. Yes, explosives — store-bought and homemade—were never in short supply. Neither were guns. We hunted ducks or anything that moved, sometimes one another. (Fun fact: if you arc a 12-gauge shotgun high enough into the sky in the general direction of a friend you want to aggravate and then pull the trigger, the shot will eventually rain down on human flesh without doing too much damage.)
As I got older and life became complicated, the lake became my refuge. A place to think and hide. I always sensed a powerfully healing presence in the natural beauty of it all. Sometimes it came into my eyes in the form of a bald eagle diving and swooping through a bright hot summer sky or a wayward gang of snow geese kerplunking into the lake like bags of flour dropped from a helicopter. Other times that presence came into my nose. As if that presence—God maybe—had a particular smell. Sort of a combination of Coppertone suntan oil, cypress tree needles, gunpowder, and two-stroke outboard engine oil.
River water.
We also had quick and easy access to some of the most pristine, stream-fed rivers in America—the Suwannee, Santa Fe, and Ichetucknee Rivers (it takes three tongues to pronounce the last one, so don’t bother).
We rode the gentle currents in canoes, kayaks, or with our butts planted in tire inner tubes acquired from local gas stations. Snorkeled and scuba-dived in icy-cool springs as clear as glass. Wildlife was abundant. As such, we did have a few “encounters.” The first time I ever tubed the Santa Fe I came nose to nose with a fat cottonmouth moccasin curled up on her nest in a hollowed-out log. Miraculously I escaped with a venom-free bloodstream. That same summer, I stepped on the head of a pygmy rattlesnake—barefooted. Which sort of felt like stepping on a wet garden hose. But no damage done there either.
Sometimes we took extended journeys down the rivers. The most memorable: a 9-day raft trip from the headwaters of the Suwannee to the Gulf of Mexico. A crew of four giddy but river-wise teenagers, the original “live streamers.” In addition to surviving each other, we also survived hellacious thunderstorms, even a tornado that danced across the river in front of us at one point. But we had crucial provisions: two six-gallon gas tanks for the outboard engine, an AM radio that seemed to be stuck on Neil Young’s Heart of Gold, and four bottles of vodka. Food and personal hygiene seemed to be secondary. We finally managed to reach saltwater 220 miles later, stinking like dead mudfish, despising the sight of each other and longing for our cool beds and a hot meal.
The mirrorlike rivers were an ideal stage for our sometimes brainless water skiing shenanigans, whether hot-dogging on knife-edged slalom skis, trick skis, or our own bare feet. Our audience? Usually, an assortment of scraggly, unkempt birds perched high in the cypress tree grandstands draped with Spanish moss. I don’t recall them ever being too impressed but rather more perturbed than anything. (Imagine a turkey buzzard eye roll, followed by: “Oh great, here come those idiots again.”)
Ocean water.
If we drove east or west from Lake City, the car tires would eventually touch saltwater about an hour later in either direction.
The rambunctious Atlantic Ocean: nests of aircraft carriers at Mayport Naval Station that smelled like boiled potatoes and nautical paint, giant stingrays exploding out of the water like UFOs, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Three Steps blaring out of dive bar speakers on the Jacksonville Beach boardwalk, riding the angry waves for hours on dime-store styrofoam floats, the summer sun roasting Daddy’s snow-white chicken legs until they were done enough to be served with coleslaw and baked beans.
The more rustic and peaceful Gulf of Mexico: trout fishing on the grass flats, eating smoked mullet out of greasy paper sacks, stuffing ourselves with boiled peanuts, swimming with porpoises in the Cedar Key channel, stumbling barefoot across oyster beds, and then wondering why we were trailing bloody tracks on the hot sand—all under an endless blue sea and sky that seemed one and the same. I’d be lying if I said much of this didn’t happen under the influence of cheap Cutty Sark scotch absconded from one dad’s off-limits liquor cabinet. But we always topped off the bottles with water so no one could ever tell (we were so smart that way).
But then we do grow up, right?
A few decades downstream from these moments, it seems harder to stay hydrated in the heat of life. Lots of changes and unexpected turns—the ones that come with the somewhat drier, more cynical seasons of aging. But, lucky me (and I hope you, too). The reservoir of fond memories is still there to balance out the attitudinal seesaw. All I have to do is remember to read and heed the most important step in the label directions: just add, well, you know.
