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By HERBERT HILLER
Of course, I'm rarely the same after any trip. I live in a place in North Florida where all trips start by crossing a lake on a boat. By boat and car, it's an hour each way to a movie, followed by crossing the lake back home at night. So I never go to the movies, and I don't watch TV, either. This adds an edge to each time I do leave home and re-enter the world.
And so places change how I feel about life. Farmlands adapted around Homestead for horticulture, and towns such as Dade City and High Springs that show promise for small-town, 21st century Florida style, add to my confidence that we may yet control the relentless subdividing of our state. I bring some places home with me. So why do a few January days on the Suwannee River stand out? It was the utter remoteness so near to my already-remote home. Danger and a double reunion also made the trip memorable.
Do you know Werner Herzog's 1982 movie Fitzcarraldo? In the film, an opera fanatic, obsessed with bringing a riverboat far up the Amazon to lodge the great Caruso, talks a native tribe into building a marine railway and hauling the boat across a mountain. In Suwannee, that movie hung in my mind. Not because photographer Dudley Witney and I were going through anything remotely like Fitzcarraldo. But we were houseboating on the lower Suwannee, a stretch of river that, same as the Amazon, is unlike anything in Florida and maybe America. Nowhere that we motored did we find a single aid to navigation. No channel marker, no range lights. For long miles, there was no house, no store. Nothing. It is as if you are not supposed to be there. Only a few hundred yards after we left the marina, the river feels barely touched -- America before Columbus. To begin with, the marina we used is in the middle of nowhere. The town of Suwannee is at the far end of a two-lane road in the Big Bend of Dixie County. People here clam and fish. They hunt possum and otter. They sell hides. * * * Dudley had set aside two days to shoot the river but wound up with bad luck. It rained the first day, and our two nights were the coldest of the year. Temperatures dropped to 19. In the absence of civilized surroundings, we felt ourselves trusting in a floating life-support system. And although we had comforts -- the food we cooked, some wine, good-as-Starbucks coffee, a radio -- we felt unusually adrift in time and space. The boat moves slowly, maybe 10 to 12 miles per hour. The 15 meandering up-stream miles before we reached any settlement locked in our sense of remoteness. Wide bends of the river add to the mystery. Mile after mile, forest edges the way. Big sandbanks drive you to opposite shores. You can get close because the houseboat draws only 3 feet of water. Rivulets cut through bluffs, forming sandy white beach.
The unblemished world that glides by leaves you feeling idealistic and intrigued, wanting to start civilization over. January nights kick butt. Gray days shut down thoughts about fun in the sun. Nobody lazes on the upper deck or thinks about firing up the front-deck barbecue. The wind rises and the river narrows. Alice-like, the houseboat grows uncontrollably larger. I figured the anchor would grasp nothing solid if we tried hooking bottom. Instead we made for Fowler's Bluff. It is the first settlement up-stream from the town of Suwanee. I had another reason to head there, but now I just wanted out of the mid-channel wind. The only commercial dock I saw was at Treasure Camp. I remembered the first time I floated a houseboat on the St. Johns. In no wind at all, I had clobbered a fuel dock, tore off a section of the houseboat's overhanging roof, and settled on the spot with the owner for cash while he cursed himself for not yet having put up the sign that said the place was off-limits to houseboats. Now the wind was howling across open river. It was dark. I'm used to docking a 19-foot Carolina Skiff. This was like maneuvering the QE II. The dock was rickety to begin with. I eyed the few fenders. The trick was to calculate wind and current, then let the current ease us toward the dock while the offshore wind slowed our approach. The engine might work for sluggish adjustments at best. At the last minute, we figured, Dudley would jump ashore and tie us up. We were spit in the wind. All I remember is time compressed to seconds: huge boat, small dock, splintering contact, shouts in the freezing night. * * * Dudley and I, between us, rack up 145 years. Maybe that night at Fowler's Bluff we gave up our eighth lives. And a lot of adrenaline. At Fowler's Bluff, a green neon Beck's beer sign shone in the window. Inside was packed with partygoers, middle-aged or older. Mostly snowbirds, they has come from 50 miles around. Many know each other from years before. It was darts night. Dudley tossed a few while I schmoozed. The tipsy evening gave Fowler's Bluff a Brigadoon feeling. But I already knew this place from years before: I had been cycling one morning before sunup from Cedar Key, looking for a way to the river. Fowler's Bluff showed on the map. Only one road in. I cycled to near its end. A woman was fetching the morning paper and she asked if I had had breakfast yet. When I said no, she invited me in to meet her husband. He was C.D. Tummond. He had just been defeated for a fifth term as Levy County tax collector. Over breakfast, he got to talking about growing up poor in the swamp, getting a break with a timber company, making a life. He asked where I was heading. I told him I was looking for a way across the river below the bridge at Fanning Spring. No problem. He carried the bike and me on his boat across to a sandy beach on the Dixie County side. I had seen him once again when driving those parts. I had fallen for a woman in Gainesville. I asked his advice. "Go get her," he said. How full of country assurance he was and how faint I felt, full of my city-bred doubts. The advice was good but I failed to heed it. * * * That night at Treasure Camp, some folks loaned Dudley and me a golf cart. We found C.D. at home, same place beside the river, but with a second story added. He was 84. His wife had passed on. He was up for talking again. He told about how, when he was defeated for re-election, he decided, "I'm not gonna work. I'm gonna do like the rest of these hippies out here and I'm gonna' 'find myself.' I was born in a swamp, lived in a swamp, was gonna' live off the land." He built coon traps that brought him $14 to $18 per hide. The fur man would skin the coons, take the meat and pay C.D. for the hide. What little he had coming in, he put in the bank. Then he and his wife would take his houseboat, go out in the gulf, stay maybe a week. One winter, they houseboated for about three months. "Every full moon and new moon we'd pick up oysters. Peggy liked to do that. I'd keep a gallon for the boat and she'd take the rest and sell 'em. We'd do that three days out of each moon. That was good living. "Then I remember a fellow coming down one time -- have you heard of him?" C.D. asked. "Name was James Van Fleet. 'Enjoy this while you can,' he said, 'because prosperity's coming.' " * * * I figure if, like Dudley and me, you houseboat the Suwannee in bad weather, you may not be the same when you come home again either. On the other hand, in good weather, you won't care. -- Herbert Hiller lives in North Florida and writes frequently about the state. If you goFOR MORE INFORMATION: For anything about Suwannee, contact Miller Marine, toll-free at 1-800-458-2628; the Web site is www.charternet.com/powerboa/miller/. You will learn more from folks at Miller than by logging on to the Suwannee River Chamber of Commerce, which is at www.suwanneeriverchamber.com. Houseboats rent for about $200 a day. Check carefully what comes with the boat. For information about wildlife, contact the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge at (352) 493-0238.
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