Florida trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive

by Winthrop Packard

Gathering turtle’s eggs on a Florida beach

CHAPTER XXIII
DOWN THE ST. JOHNS

The everglades, which on the later maps of Florida are concentrated in the southern tip of the peninsula, there hardly conceded to extend as far north as Lake Okeechobee, as a matter of fact do flow in certain favored localities much farther north, well into the middle of the State. Up through St. Lucie and Osceola counties run one “slough” after another, wide depressions which in any but the driest weather are shallow, sand-bottomed lakes filled with numerous and beautiful wooded islands.

In the driest of weather these are deserts of white sand with tiny ponds innumerable all about in them, alive with concentrated schools of fish. It takes long drought to make this condition. A single good rain will set the fish free to roam clear water for mile on mile, and where before the rain the alligator hunter walked dry shod, afterward he must wade, knee deep or waist deep as the case may be. In the height of the rainy season, say in July, I believe a man could make his way in a canoe up the St. Johns and on without touching bottom till he slid off the lower end of Dade County, having traversed the entire peninsula by water. He would, of course, have to know his way, as probably no man now knows it, but I believe the water is there. A good part of all Florida, in fact, emerges in the dry season, which is the winter, and submerges for the rest of the year. You may hoe your garden in January and row it in July, raising tomatoes in one season and trout in the other.

There is a project on foot which glibly promises to drain the everglades. Several dredges are lustily digging ditches through which this flood water is supposed to drain rapidly off some thousand square miles of level, clay-bottomed sand. To look at these tiny machines merrily at work on one hand and the area of water they attack on the other is to smile once more at the Atlantic Ocean, Mrs. Partington and her mop.

So the St. Johns River, the one large river of the State, rising on the map as it does in Sawgrass Lake, on the lower edge of Brevard County, not a dozen miles from the East Coast and the Indian River, really draws its water, during a part of the year at least, from the everglades themselves. In that it is to be congratulated, for the water of the everglades is beautifully clear and pure. There are bogs and mud in the everglades, to be sure, but in the main their water falls straight from heaven and is caught and held in shallows of white sand that might well be the envy of a reservoir of city drinking water. The little city of West Palm Beach draws its water from one of these shallow everglade reservoirs, and has thus an inexhaustible supply, which analysts have pronounced pure and wholesome.

But if the lake bottoms of southern Florida are thus pure and send only clear water down the St. Johns, the condition of clarity does not last long. The St. Johns, as the tourist knows it, from Sanford to Jacksonville, is a dark and muddy stream that winds through an interminable succession of swamps, miry and forbidding at the surface, but brilliant above with foliage, flowers and strange birds and beasts. Beyond these swamps are higher ground and many pretty villages, groves and farms, but one sees little of this from the river. Except for the occasional landing, the occasional razorbacks and range cattle, one might as well be coming down the stream in the days before Florida knew the white man, and the river’s only boats were the narrow, artistic dugouts of the Seminoles, built by fire and hatchet from a single cypress log.

Through the energy of many bold real estate men and many patient gardeners Sanford is rapidly becoming known to the world as “The Celery City,” a title once held alone by Kalamazoo, Michigan, though it might well have been disputed by Arlington, Massachusetts. If you travel back and forth enough in Florida you can come to know certain spots in it, spots favored or otherwise, by their odors, also favored or otherwise. I know haunts in the upper part of the State toward which the fond, free scent of jasmine will lure you through many a sunny mile of stately, long-leaved pines, themselves giving forth a resinous aroma for a solid foundation on which the airy jasmine scent is built.