(I enjoyed this one and thought I would share. Got this one from friend and family member, Whit, who is down in south-central Florida)
ANCIENT FALL RITUAL
By George T. Edison,
Jr.
As November
approaches a small, dwindling group of Floridians senses a difference in the
air, imperceptible to the "snow birds," it signals the advent of
hunting season. The woods are drenched this fall from a hundred summer
downpours. Curiously, cottonmouth moccasins are found in the flat woods, their
stumpy bodies draped over palmettos far from the lake and creek bottoms which
they prefer in drier times.
Wives and daughters
shake their heads in disbelief that husbands and fathers could leave clean
white sheets to spend a few days in places where snakes eat rats at night, and
one arises at 5:00 a.m. to sit on a stool in a dark hammock where vicious
Florida mosquitoes feast on ear lobes. One dares not slap one lest he spooks a
nervous turkey roosting high and dry in cypress trees.
The fall hunting
season is ushered in with much joy for those still fortunate enough to have a
place to hunt.
Hunting has many
detractors these days. Some people see no harm in slitting little sheep's
throats to provide their palettes with rack of lamb, but they are reduced to
spastic comas at the thought of shooting a running buck at 200 yards. It's okay
to wring a rooster's neck for Sunday's chicken and dumplings, but a pox upon
the devil that bags a quail on the wing as it bursts from the palmettos in
front of a pointer.
It was not always
thus. I recall that as a boy growing up in Orange County,
the taking of game was considered a natural and valuable part of life's
progression from boyhood to manhood. Some hard lessons about self-reliance,
friendship, and the impending passage into adulthood were learned around
glowing litered-knot camp fires in the oak hammocks and cypress heads of the
upper St. Johns and Kissimmee
River valleys.
Hunting camps,
hunting dogs, and hunting guns were a cracker boy's heritage and he learned the
nuances, respect, and use of each at his father's or grandfather's side.
Hunting camps, like
season tickets to Florida Gator games, are passed down from generation to
generation. Perhaps the mother of all such camps was Tosohatchee on the West
bank of the St. Johns River in Orange
County. These 18,000
acres of happy hunting grounds were sold to the state a few years ago for a
wild life reserve. The land had become too valuable to be kept for a private
place to hunt turkey and deer. The membership roll of Tosohatchee read like a
roster of pioneer Orlando and Sanford
families: Beardalls, McEwans, Spears, Campbells and so on. A nostalgic tear
glistens in the eye of any surviving alumnus of Tosohatchee at the mere mention
of that name. As one looks toward the St. Johns River
with a melancholy gaze, memory becomes reality. For the moment one is in
the woods on the eve of opening morning at Tosohatchee.
Sometimes in the
midst of a traffic jam on the Expressway or Turnpike, inhaling the pungent odor
of a hundred diesel semis, my ears pound with the sounds of pulsating engines
and boom boxes, my mind wanders back fifty years to my hunting camp in the
Florida wilderness on K-6 Ranch west of Lakes Poinsett and Winder on the upper
St. Johns River Basin just south of famed Tosohatchee. Dolph Keene's K-6 Ranch
had recently been purchased by the Mormon Church, a new client of my mentor and
boss, Billy Dial. Henry Moyle, the great Mormon elder and lawyer from Salt Lake City, who
represented the Church in the acquisition, had given me a permit to hunt and
fish on that fabled tract of almost 50,000 acres.
"Fabled" is
not an exaggeration because to hunters the K-6 was as "fabled" and
famous as the Serengeti Plains. When Mr. Keene owned the ranch, he employed Jim
Black, an ex-sheriff of Orange
County, to keep poachers
away. Jim was 6 feet 5 inches tall with no fat on his lanky frame, and was
known far and wide for his lack of mercy toward trespassers and knowledge of
the terrain. A cracker friend once remarked that you had to be a hungry
son-of-a-bitch to steal venison from K-6. With such protection, the game
flourished and the population of deer, turkey and quail was legendary.
Someday a book or
movie will be made about Jim Black. His life story is stranger than fiction. He
came to Jacksonville at the turn of the century
from rural Kentucky
to play semi-professional baseball. He slew a fellow worker in a fight over a
dispute at the dairy where he worked part time. The seventeen year old Jim
Black was so distraught that he ran to the depot and asked for a ticket on the
first train out of town and told them that he did not care where it was going.
The young ballplayer,
on the lam, landed in the tiny town of Orlando
at the onset of the 20th century where he lived until his death not long ago,
well into his nineties.
Jim often visited me
at my hunting camp on Ten Mile
Road in Osceola
County just east of
Highway 441 and The Red Alligator Saloon. He was always with Ralph Hansel, his
buddy and a fourth generation Orange Countian who still lives on the banks of Lake Gatlin
where the Hansels homesteaded in the 19th century.
When those two
Crackers got together around the camp fire along with legendary bow hunter,
Fred Bear, their stories kept boys of every vintage wide-eyed and awake well
past bedtime. Fred and Jim have gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds now, and I
wish that I had taped one of those sessions. The National Archives would have
been richer had I done so.
Jim Black used to
hunt turkeys where the sprawling Florida
Hospital now stands. He
said the tall pines on the northern rise overlooking Lake
Estelle were a favorite habitat for
big gobblers, as was Ferncreek's cypress trees where Mayor Carl Langford Park
now stands.
Fred Bear's stories
were not set that close to home. He brought movies to the camp trailer of
himself shooting a man-eating Bengal tiger in India
with a 75-pound bow at 100 yards with a Maharaja just after World War II; or
maybe some action shots of Fred shooting pheasants on the wing with a lighter
Bear bow in Michigan.
To us who were lucky
enough to have been in my camp when those two were alive, Fred Bear and Jim
Black will always be a part of wilderness Florida, and the hunting tradition we
cherish.
*
But I digress. I will
never forget arriving that first morning at the gate on the sandy Taylor-Creek
road that marked the northern entrance to the ranch. My Florida law school roommate, Ben Smathers,
was with me as my guest. It wasn't that Ben was such scintillating company but
he owned the bird dog and one could not borrow the dog without taking Ben along
too.
As we pulled up into
Ranch headquarters early on the opening morning of the season, we looked out
across the 6,000 acre "pasture" which lay to the west of the
foreman's house. The tract was called a "pasture" although it was
unimproved and covered with the native flat woods of palmetto and pine,
interspersed with cypress "heads" (as ponds completely filled with
cypress trees were called). The northern boundary of this pasture is Taylor Creek;
the southern boundary, Wolf
Creek.
In front of the
cypress head nearest the road was a scene straight out of East
Africa. A hundred or more white-tailed deer stood three and four
deep, ears up and bodies tense looking in our direction. As we approached the
herd for a closer look the deer suddenly bolted, leaping over palmettos with
white tails flagging as they headed for the Taylor Creek
bottom. Should an ornery deer hunter ever make it to heaven, it will surely
look something like that K-6 pasture did half a century ago on opening morning.
Ben and I enjoyed one
of those perfect days. Anyway it was as near perfect as it gets for
"bird" hunters. (It is a tribute to the bobwhite that they are the
only species so called by quail hunters. Doves are doves and ducks are ducks,
but only quail are "birds.") Back then we had no off-road, 4‑wheel
drive vehicle to hunt from, so we walked through the woods with the dog. To use
another cliché, of quail aficionados, we were "in birds" all day. As
a matter of fact, the hunting was so superb that Ben found it necessary to
claim only half as many of my kills that day as he usually did. Bird shooting
doesn't get any better than that.
I hunted K-6 for over
a decade and then the pasture was "improved," as they say, and the
charm was gone and so were the coveys of fat quail. That was progress? The pine
trees were cut down and the stumps removed to make room for a carpet of pasture
grass to cover the ground and feed the cattle. Dull-witted bovines now chewed
their cuds where swift, classy white-tails once dominated. The deer still
ventured out in herds to feed at night, but the quail were gone from the
pasture for good, except around the fringes next to heavier cover, and at night
when they roosted in circles on the ground with butts toward the axle of their
roosting wheel in the open pasture, so that predators could be seen or heard
approaching from any direction. It became a common sight to see a covey
suddenly rise from the low palmettos and dive in unison into the pasture in
late evening to roost, or fly to the cover of the flat woods in the early
morning when the birds were ready to feed.
The "African
plains" were replaced by a "dairy pasture" look. The coup
de gráce, however, was the flooding of the Taylor
Creek and Wolf Creek
basins under the direction of and at the instigation of those mothers of all
useless and arrogant bureaucracies, the St. Johns Water Management District and
the Corps of Army Engineers. (At one time 98% of the St. John's budget was allocated for
administrative expenses and 2% for constructing works of the District.) In the
'50's, the St. Johns Water Management District and the Army Corps of Engineers
conned the Mormon Ranch into granting thousands of acres for a drainage
easement along the western side of the upper St. Johns River. The sales pitch
was irresistible. They promised to build a series of dams or spillways across
the creeks flowing easterly into the St.
Johns, thereby creating huge lakes or reservoirs.
These reservoirs were to be connected by ditches and earth berms. When
complete, the project would hold back flood waters in time of deluge, furnish
water for irrigation in time of drought and in between, create a water
wonderland for the local peasantry.
After spending nearly
$100,000,000 (yes, One Hundred Million Dollars), the project was scrapped by
President Nixon as unfeasible and the entire barrel of pork was abandoned. It
was determined that the huge flooding, damming and digging boon-doggle would
harm the environment. Why so much of our tax dollars were spent to uncover this
dark secret has never been explained.
As a matter of fact,
the abandonment of the project was such a well-kept secret that by the time the
full folly of the situation became evident, the news was so stale, no one gave
a damn. Meantime, the Taylor-Creek Reservoir is the only grand lake in
existence as a result of the initial plans. The multi-million dollar dam across
Penny Wash Creek to the South, stands looming in the flatwoods while the meager
waters of the stream flow around it, avoiding the embankment like the plague.
Millenniums from now our ancestors will happen upon this monument to
bureaucratic ineptness, scratch their heads, and ponder what gods were
worshiped by the builders of such monstrous concrete ruins.
The southern terminus
of the system ends ignominiously at Ten Mile road in Osceola County,
a dirt thoroughfare affording access to the interior of the southern extremity
of The Mormon Ranch. This southern-most terminal is merely a great ditch with a
high berm on each side cutting straight through hammocks and heads alike until
abruptly ending at the unpretentious Ten
Mile Road. Hunters and cowboys, down there,
quickly christened the big ditch, the "Panama Canal",
by which it is known to this day.
Curiously, the St.
Johns Water Management District held on to the wasteful and useless "Panama Canal" for years after the project for which
it was dug was scrapped. The ditch was enclosed mile after mile with the finest
barbed wire fence in the surrounding cattle country, and a crew was kept by the
District's staff in Palatka to mow the grass on the berm and keep the fences
mended so that no cows could chew on the precious turf. (Fret not! I
understand railroads still hire fireman for diesel locomotive engines.) I
cannot leave that mama of all red tape, the St. Johns Water Management
District, without one more observation. Among the cities in its jurisdiction
are Orlando, Jacksonville
and Daytona Beach,
all served by air lines, railroads and turnpikes or thruways. Yet the
District's sprawling headquarters lie in the pinelands west of Palatka,
unserved by an air line or a major no-access highway. When these headquarters
were placed and built, the Chairman of the District was from Palatka and the
architect of the Headquarter's 2.5 million dollar building was from Brevard County. They both served in that great
deliberative body, the Florida Senate, at the same time: That is the upper
Chamber that put the headquarters in the thriving, non-accessible metropolis of
Palatka in the first place. We should all be proud.
*
Before the flooding
of Taylor Creek and the arrival of portable saw
mills destroyed the pasture, the golden age of hunting on the Mormon Ranch
flourished. I used a weather-beaten, board, cracker house with a tin roof for a
number of years as my hunting camp. My house was located behind the ranch
headquarters on a two-rut trail that led through Wildcat Hammock down to the St. Johns River. It was hardly Isleworth, but it was
suitable and handy to live close to the ranch foreman and the other cowboys and
their families who also had houses and trailers under the oak trees nearby.
The Wolf Creek
delta was my favorite place to hunt turkeys and squirrels. The creek, where it
enters Lake Winder,
spreads out like the Nile
River and is fringed by a
beautiful oak hammock whose ancient trees spread their huge branches in a
seamless canopy of moss, leaves and airplants. There are many Sable Palms,
Bays, Florida Maples and Hickory
trees disbursed throughout the delta along with the oaks. In some places the
ground is always soaked with creek water. Aged cypress trees soar skyward
and gnarled cypress "knees" rise above the surface around their
trunks at water level. Tall yellow pines separate the delta region from the
sandy flat-woods beyond.
Wild turkeys thrive
on acorns, dollar-weed, and palm berries under the trees. Cypress trees furnish a
perfect roost for young turkeys, that fly up just at dark and spend the night
over water so they might hear coons or bobcats wading out for a turkey dinner.
When sunlight becomes bright enough to see the ground, turkeys fly down and
spend the day on the forest floor foraging for food. The tough old gobblers
prefer the tall pines at the hammock's edge for roosting except in the spring
when their chests swell up and they gobble at every sound, including hoot owls
and banging jeep doors. Then they sleep close to their harem deep inside the
delta.
White-tailed deer
also love the delta. Strangely, they forage like the wild turkey and eat the
same food.
Feral hogs also roam
the delta, gorging on pinkroot when acorns become scarce. Turkeys follow
rooting pigs and gobble up the grubs, worms, and edible roots overturned by
ravished porkies.
I guess it is
impossible to deny that the swarming hordes of humans now milling around in
every city and hamlet in Central Florida have
been good for business. That infernal mouse has made Wall Street Journal
subscribers out of many a dirt-poor cracker who was lucky enough to own a sandy
lot near the Magic
Kingdom.
But I miss the real
magic kingdom we had before the mouse infestation: the magic kingdom of
litered-knot camp fires, early morning turkey hunts under gorgeous live oaks,
and afternoon duck shoots at the south end of Mosquito Lagoon before the
"federals" invaded our pristine land. Most of all I miss the
steady, easygoing people who lived and worked here and took enough time to
value and nurture friendships and our priceless Florida wilderness.
