By Fredric M. Hitt

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived at Cross Creek, where the waters of Florida’s Lake Lochloosa flow into Orange Lake. It was there that she wrote The Yearling, Cross Creek and short stories that touched the hearts of generations of readers.

But it was the St. Johns River, 60 miles to the southeast down the meandering Oklawaha River, which moved and affected Rawlings most deeply. She expressed it this way:

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

Rawlings and her companion Dessie Smith launched their small wooden boat on the river near Orlando, and embarked on a northward journey of over 100 miles to the mouth of the Oklawaha. Two women alone, they camped out at night and lived off the land. They traced a portion of the trail set down two centuries earlier by the colonial botanist and explorer, William Bartram.

We followed, in part, the trail blazed by Bartram and later by Rawlings this past fall. We didn’t live off the land, kill game for dinner or sport, or even hack out “swamp cabbage” (heart of palm) as they did. Our craft was a houseboat, complete with air conditioning, two bedrooms, one bath, three decks (fore, aft, and above) and a complete kitchen.

We boarded our floating condo at Holly Bluff Marina, near Deland, on a brisk afternoon in November. The dockmaster suggested we remain in port until morning to give the wind a chance to slacken. A 45-foot long houseboat, ten feet high, becomes a sail in the wind, he cautioned.
By morning the wind had, in fact, “laid down,” and after an hour of serpentine meanderings, getting the feel of the controls, we bravely swung to the north with the current, toward the ocean…in search of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and William Bartram.

We eased past a scattering of riverfront homes on the east bank near the marina, and negotiated the bridge crossing at State Road 44. Within minutes we seemed to move backward to an earlier time. Here, and for miles to come, the only signs of civilization were the occasional green and red channel markers, many decorated with the nests of ospreys. We experienced the river much as Rawlings and Bartram experienced it and were moved by it in the same way.

Ramrod-straight cypress marked the shoreline, their knees in the coffee-colored water, and further up the bank, live oaks sprawled, their huge limbs drooping, each bedecked with Spanish moss unaffected by air pollution. Hickory, pine, laurel oak, magnolia and maple, and the occasional sabal palm over the river provided an ideal resting spot for the great blue heron or goldbreasted anhinga.

The western shore, part of the Ocala National Forest, was marshland and swamp, buffered by banks of water hyacinths and the occasional alligator sunning himself on a fallen log or mud flat, oblivious to our passing.

We had our reference material: our charts of the river, bird and wildlife books, Rawling’s Cross Creek, a well-fingered copy of The Travels of William Bartram and the recent definitive work on the St. Johns River, River of Lakes by William Belleville. But reading is for the evening, tied up at our anchorage. Daytime is for cameras, for binoculars and for watching the river and its wildlife unfold around us.

Except for a wispy fog rising from the warm water, the first morning afloat broke crisp and clear. We had anchored in the late afternoon behind a small island out of the main channel. The sun back-lit the Spanish moss, draping the cypress and live oaks along the eastern shore as we weighed anchor, setting course for Idlewilde Point.

Bartram made camp there in 1774 on the west bank, across from the entrance to Lake Dexter. He tells of having barely escaped with his life when attacked by ferocious alligators.

Bartram asks, “How shall I express myself so as to convey an adequate idea of it to the reader, and at the same time avoid raising suspicions of my veracity?”

Then he describes a scene in which hundreds of thousands of fish congregate at a narrow pass of the river, only to be devoured by alligators packed so tightly together that one could walk from bank to bank by stepping on their heads.

Before we judge Bartram too harshly, we note that this part of the river was known to the Seminole Indians as “The Striking Ground,” and even today the unusual concentration of fish here lends some support to his description.

Although the river channel is well marked here today, the maze of smaller channels, creeks and sloughs are for the most part choked with hyacinths, the floating water lily that so confused and befuddled Rawlings when she and her companion found themselves hopelessly lost on Puzzle Lake, further to the south.

Map and compass had failed Rawlings, and after a night of misery, fighting mosquitoes on a small island of comparatively dry black muck, the morning brought a revelation: an almost imperceptible drift of the floating pads.

We followed the meandering channel and the river suddenly opened up, the banks spread away toward the east and west, and we encountered for the first time Lake George, second only to Lake Okeechobee among Florida lakes.

“Behold the little Ocean of Lake George,” Bartram exclaimed, “I cannot entirely suppress my apprehension of danger. My vessel is at once diminished to a nut-shell on the swelling seas.”

Both Bartram and Rawlings related remarkably similar frightening experiences on Lake George, and we entered the lake respectfully in the early morning before the afternoon squalls that can turn the placid lake into a death trap of churning whitecaps.

We navigated by marker and compass northward into the heart of the lake, then westward to our ultimate destination, Silver Glen Run. It was Jody’s Spring, nearby, that was described by Rawlings in The Yearling.

Salt Springs, a few miles north, was truly amazing to Bartram. He described its waters as “absolutely diaphonous or transparent as the ether,” and its “innumerable bands of fish…some clothed in the most brilliant colors…passing and repassing each other.”

Literary historians credit Bartram’s descriptions for inspiring Samuel Coleridge when he penned his epic poem Kubla Khan.

The waters and spring of Silver Glen were much as Bartram described Salt Springs, but it was the wildlife that was most amazing to our crew.

“Wildlife,” as I use the term, refers to the aquatic, the four-footed or the winged variety. From our anchorage off the main channel of the spring run, we watched the exuberant saltwater mullet, five-pound fish on pogo sticks, leaping high into the air only to splash back into the crystalline waters, disturbing the passing schools of freshwater bass, bream and catfish.

A pair of otters, proof that God has a better sense of humor than Walt Disney, playfully splashed as they chased their tails and each other in and out of the water and through the brambled woods covering the bank.

A morning fog drifted lightly over the spring as we prepared to re-enter Lake George on our way back to the south. Other than the annoying morning sun, dead off the bow on the first leg of our journey, the crossing was again blessedly uneventful.

By late afternoon we anchored at Devil’s Elbow, where a side channel crosses and re-crosses the main river, carving out a figure “8.” We chose a spot just to the west, all but encircled by tall stately pine and cypress and behind a tiny island inhabited by an eight-foot alligator who noisily greeted us by splashing into the water to seek refuge among the lily pads.

For our final meal afloat we uncorked a bottle of wine and while some of us fished, I put burgers on the grill. Later, when I raised the lid and the pleasant smell of the roasting beef drifted away, the gator, more sociable this time, reappeared and announced his readiness for dinner.

We anointed ourselves with mosquito repellent and sat out on deck into the evening enjoying the sunset, good companionship, and the sounds of wildlife shutting down for the night. The stars shone more brightly than any of us could remember since childhood. It was a moonless night.

Then Rawlings’ words came back to me: “If I could have, to hold forever, one brief place and time of beauty, I think I might choose the night on that high lonely bank above the St. Johns River.”

>Back to top