Welcome, but leave no track

Every die-hard Floridian, north or south, east or west, should pick five or six distinct geographic features of the subtropical landscape south of the Georgia line and get to know them.

Especially politicians deciding water policy, of which development is a stepchild.

There’s no other way to understand how this complex state works, a state that seems simple enough at first glance: It has a panhandle and is a peninsula. That’s it.

The Panhandle must have been accidentally included within Florida’s boundaries when it became the 27th state on March 3, 1845; it should have been called simply “South Georgia,” like South Carolina and South Dakota or maybe “East Alabama.” And the peninsula itself is only about 400 miles long, 140 miles wide or less, and roughly 15 feet deep to its limestone underpinnings. It’s not too much of a place, arguably.

But that’s deceptive, like saying a tree is simple, too — just one trunk and a few branches, not too much of a plant.

The oaks at Fisheating Creek. ROGER WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

From my vantage, the essential Florida places would include a given stretch of the St. Johns River in north Florida, the Archbold Biological Research Station in the Lake Wales Ridge country of central Florida, where some flora and fauna have existed or evolved in place for a million or more years; Fisheating Creek flowing 40 or 50 miles out of Highlands County into Glades County before turning east another 30 miles to Lake Okeechobee; almost anyplace in the Ten Thousand Islands of the southwest Gulf coast near Everglades City, where getting lost is still a distinct possibility; and Jupiter Island, so you can see both the power and majesty of Atlantic beaches and the way some humans shape the landscape when they have money and fun.

These places, with the notable exception of Jupiter Island, can look and feel a lot like once-upon a-time, sometimes along with adjacent stretches of agricultural grazing land established in the 20th century.

They’re all still pretty wild, here and there. Fisheating Creek is no exception, the last and now only freshwater tributary running unhampered and unaltered as a Wildlife Management Area right into Lake Okeechobee through the newly restored dike, which opens to admit it.

Coming out of miles of onetime marshes, descending gradually by inches toward the second most expansive freshwater lake in the United States, the place is still chock-a-block with the obvious: alligators and water moccasins. And the less obvious: river otters, the crested caracara, the sandhill crane, turtles, hogs, white-tailed deer, black bears, eagles and Florida scrub jays, to name a few. Swallow tail kites, up from the Amazon, nest there in prominent numbers, and without Fisheating Creek whooping cranes (what few exist), panthers and black bears might have a harder or even impossible time of it nowadays.

That’s what they say.

I was up there the other day with my youngest son, rather too ambitiously planning to walk in three miles from an entrance near Palmdale on U.S. 27 in Glades County to Pleasant Lake. But some strange things began to happen.

First, Pleasant Lake came out more than two miles to meet us, as it turned out — this was not long after Hurricane Milton, which wasn’t a significant rain event (storm surge and wind, dude, storm surge and wind). But still, the region lay partially knee-to-waist-deep, shimmering with water and light.

The trees seemed as real in their liquid reflections as in their heavenward communion beneath the timeless vaulted blue of a cathedral sky — the same blue that would have arched above the trees beyond time, before Rome became a city, before Athens gave rise to the Greek philosophers, even before the Belle Glade culture lived here 1,000 years before European civilization began.

Trees breathe, we know that.

And while they appear silent, impassively observing the frenetic progress of human affairs beneath their canopies, they aren’t. They murmur or sing in some language so ancient, lying alive but so still almost beyond the ken of our ancestral memories, that hearing them becomes near impossible.

Unless we stop, watch and listen.

Then an old oak will call us, draped in the epiphytic fern we call resurrection, embracing a sabal palm in a slow dance with design, performing a natural choreography beyond our living.

“Welcome,” the old tree will whisper. “Welcome, but leave no track.” ¦

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