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Pine Island
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 [Photo: Lee Island Coast] Fishermen work the flats of Pine Island Sound at sunset. |
By HERB HILLER
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 19, 2002
Escape from the crowded and predictable here, where ancient Indian mounds and cozy B&Bs punctuate a landscape that's an invitation to quiet leisure. |
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But other visitors drive another 4 miles to Pine Island Center, a commercial crossroads so plain that if you don't know where you're going, you're likely to turn around and go back.
For the persevering few, the lackluster last miles, the beaches accessible only by boat and a rural landscape without the sheen of large Florida islands elsewhere, all protect against that dreaded travel condition: the same old same old.
Pine Island may be old, but it's no way "same."
Without billboards or pizazz, it appeals with its slow pace, big history and, when you happily get to them, its barely visited, undeveloped, offshore beaches.
The island is 18 miles long by 1 to 3 miles wide. About 8,500 people live here year-round, half that number again in winter.
A nearby arc of outer islands includes Sanibel, Captiva, others large and small and scores of islets -- where the beaches are. You reach them by your own boat, a rental or by sightseeing tour.
Ten miles south of Pine Island Center, overlooking Sanibel a mile across San Carlos Bay, is St. James City, a snowbird hub that was a teeming winter resort long before Palm Beach grew up.
The town today is RV-park friendly, with a low-profile style. Marinas, trailer parks and the island's least-expensive motels line town canals. The Waterfront Restaurant serves Pine Island's best seafood in a former school house.
Eight miles north of Pine Island Center, facing big Charlotte Harbor, is Bokeelia. In Spanish, the name means "little mouth."
An islet district cut off by Jug Creek occupies a few stylish blocks. It is tree-filled and tropical, oddly juxtaposing a couple of hidden-away RV parks and an upscale snowbird community with a few year-rounders. Homes range from fixed-up fishermen's cottages to two-story condos and houses, mostly white board and lattice with tropical plant accents.
Historic homes get recycled.
The island's first, from 1904, later the site of a post office, today houses a forgettable restaurant called Capt'n. Con's. A grander two-story house from 1914 supplies the best regional digs, the Bokeelia Tarpon Inn. Its heart pine interiors are outfitted in classy cane and wicker, with black-and-white photos of vintage sailing life and a room devoted to the art of fly-fishing lures.
Marinas, one housing the acceptable Lazy Flamingo restaurant, line Jug Creek.
People walk Main Street with their dogs, they jog and bicycle. Other folks relax with books on Adirondack chairs or in hammocks beneath shading palms by the seawall, where low tide reveals reddish flats, more sandbar than beach.
Sightseeing and rental boats operate close by. They head west into Pine Island Sound to the state park on Cayo Costa (no bridge to the island park) and to bijou Cabbage Key, laidback except for lunchtime when tour boats disgorge midday crowds.
Because the lack of beaches discourages day-trippers and because some folks come by boat, vehicle traffic is light along north-south, island-long Stringfellow Road. Palm nurseries and utility poles, some painted with island scenes, line the way.
What morning hour there is heads to Lovey's, a bakery in a high-ceilinged shack where cinnamon and fresh coffee aromas envelop breakfast guests. Big plates barely contain trencherman servings.
For eat-in or takeout, the women here turn out giant, sausage-stuffed croissants, a nutty sticky bun high as a cake and pecan pie bars.
* * *
The sign down a dirt road to Sunburst Tropical Fruit Nursery caught me.
The sign is softest green and mango colored. An old-time logo shows an island woman carrying a fruit basket on her head, in the style used on embroidered linens brought back from Caribbean vacations.
Nursery owner Gary Gorchowski explains that the other signs, which say Beware of Dogs, mean "don't run them over."
Gary sells guavas, lychees, mangoes, sapodillas, chutneys, fruit jellies. He cultivates land which for years was cut by timber interests that wanted the island's namesake pines. His wife, Nita, ties orchids to the trunks of mango trees. Together, they sometimes do "barn dinners," where visitors sit on orange crates at plywood tables and feed on pork chops with mango barbecue sauce and grits.
Nearby at McGowan's Farm, Chuck Koucky (pronounced Koo-sky) has moved his gallery up from Naples, which he says was "too expensive, too crazy."
The bushy-bearded potter took part in a recent Friday "art night" with popular island artist Mel Meo, cooking conch fritters and mullet caught by Mel's husband that morning.
A must visit in Pine Island Center is to the Museum of the Island. MOTI, to everyone on the island, holds a selection of area artifacts. Oldtimers used to present these to the former editor of the Pine Island Eagle, Elaine Jordan.
She is legendary from the days before MOTI when she carried one of those artifacts -- a whale skull -- in the trunk of her car. It used to scare the devil out of Winn-Dixie bag boys trying to put her groceries in the trunk.
Elaine tells how, soon after she arrived in the 1960s, she broke her hip. People who didn't know her drove her 10-year-old daughter to school and shopped for them both.
"The place still has a family feeling," says Elaine, whose books about the island are bestsellers.
* * *
Nellie Coleman was born in 1918 and spent part of her early years on outlying Cayo Costa.
Her dad was an angler -- she became one too -- and Nellie remembers as a kid being tied to the mast of his boat so that she wouldn't fall overboard.
"That was more scary than it would have been if I'd been left untied, because I had to look in the well of the boat where the fish were kept alive, and there were always big ones," relates Nellie.
She fell off anyway, "cracked my nose, split my lip, busted my chin."
If you ask Nellie about differences between those times and now, she says, "There aren't words to describe the change."
Devastation of the oyster beds when the mainland-to-Sanibel bridge went in and the banning of gill nets in 1995 left fishing mainly to leisure anglers. Yet Pine Island and its surrounding archipelago still supply a watery paradise.
People have sailed and fished here for about 2,000 years. Calusa Indians came first. Seafood sustained them until Spanish diseases and English slave trading destroyed them in the late 18th century.
The Calusas put their center at today's Pineland, midway on the water between Bokeelia and Pine Island Center. The hills in this area are Calusa mounds. Though many were plundered for road material, the Randell Research Center protects most that remain. The wealthy Randells were so impressed by the digs that they donated 53 acres for a permanent installation.
A section of road only three-quarters of a mile long snakes along the shore. Low hills drop to it. The drop is terraced and planted in gumbo limbo trees, Jamaica tall palms, poincianas and hibiscus.
The few houses are board, with screened porches. A little post office is white clapboard with blue trim. Close by, another old house supplies the modest office of a research center that studies the Calusas. (Please see related story, )
Black mangroves edge the water, with colorful kayaks tucked into the coves. A tiny beach opens, a sailboat passes, dolphins arc. The place satisfies a hunger for the tropics.
A second research center that studies the sea occupies a point that elbows into the water. Next is the low-scaled, 1920s but newly re-opened Bokeelia Lodge (serving the best food on the island). A Bible college occupies a few board buildings behind a white picket fence.
You can stand beside an astonishing canal the Calusas dug in ancient times. This 2.5-mile waterway used a series of locks to connect Pine Island Sound with Matlacha Pass. This let the natives paddle from Pineland up the Caloosahatchee River to trade with Glades Indians. The canal avoided Charlotte Harbor, where the afternoon chop still can trouble powerboats much larger than Calusa canoes.
Calusa legacy figures in the novels of Pineland resident Randy Wayne White, whose own legend registers for visitors at Tarpon Lodge. Framed covers of his novels dress up walls of the Doc Ford Bar -- named for White's fictional hero.
Fiction suits this place, which otherwise calls so little attention to itself.
 [Photo: Leona Lovegrov] |
| The island news is dispensed from this colorful bike basket parked at the Matlacha Art Gallery.
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If you go
GETTING THERE: Pine Island is just offshore from Fort Myers; take Interstate 75 south to County Road 78 and head west.
MATLACHA: This village lavishes a mile of tutti frutti between flavorless Cape Coral and vanilla plain Pine Island.
Though sweet any time, during Art Night -- the second Friday of each month, October through April -- art-seekers nibble chocolate-dipped strawberries while sipping cabernet. Mariachis and country bands play in the tropical patios of galleries alongside waterways off Matlacha Pass.
Six area galleries show mostly local work. Among quirky stuff are Leoma Lovegrove's coconut post cards at Matlacha Art Gallery that you can address, put stamps on and mail; postcards shaped like fish at Sistarz, and Barbara Luck's impressionistic Polaroids at WildChild.
Among the galleries, real estate offices and tour companies, a half-dozen restaurants occupy shacks. Any can turn out a decent meal, but Sandy Hook does so consistently.
Most evenings, sunset turns skies orange and purple -- like a Matlacha postcard too big for mailing.
CABBAGE KEY: This is Florida's ultimate gift to dress-down chic, sitting atop a Calusa shell mound in Pine Island Sound. A son of mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart built a house here in 1928, and Rinehart herself lived here awhile, churning out several pages a day, legend has it, to avoid Depression-era blues.
Like the often surreal and watery settings that marked much of her fiction, Cabbage Key feels untethered from its moorings. Its pine bar and back dining room are festooned in thousands of dollar bills left by guests; it looks like the world's sloppiest wallpapering job.
Among a handful of guest cottages, the one named for Cabbage Key's celebrity author shows covers of her books and black-and-white photos of Rinehart with her chef, maid and housekeeper. Wicker and cane furniture favor the 1930s look.
Rent a kayak to paddle the mile to Cayo Costa. You cross a patch of tropical forest and palm savannah before the dune and beach. Nobody's there.
Fiction doesn't get any better.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact the Lee Island Coast Visitor & Convention Bureau, 2180 W First St., Suite 100, Fort Myers, FL 33901. Call toll-free 1-888-231-6933; the Web site is www.leeislandcoast.com.
For information about Randell Research Center, Museum of the Islands, sightseeing boats, boat rentals, fishing charters, contact the Greater Pine Island Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 525, Matlacha, FL 33993. Call (239) 283-0888.
STAYING THERE: Lodgings (rates from low season to high season, excluding Christmas-New Year):
The Bokeelia Tarpon Inn, from $225 to $290. 8241 Main St., Bokeelia, FL 33922. Call toll-free 1-866-827-7662; www.tarponinn.com.
Jug Creek Cottages, $59-$69. 8135 Main St., Bokeelia, FL 33922. Call (239) 283-0015; e-mail tropiccruz@aol.com.
Tarpon Lodge, $110 to $189. 13771 Waterfront Drive, Pineland, FL 33945. Call (239) 283-2517; www.tarponlodge.com.
Water's Edge Motel, $55 to $109. P.O. Box 50, St. James City, FL 33956. Call (239) 283-0515.
Bridge Water Inn, $49 to $119. 4331 Pine Island Road, Matlacha, FL 33993. Call toll-free 1-800-378-7666, or (239) 283-2423; www.bridgewaterinn.com.
Matlacha Island Cottages, $79 to $149. 4756 Pine Island Road, Matlacha, FL 33993. Call toll-free 1-800-877-7256; www.islandcottages.com.
Cabbage Key, $89 to $239. P.O. Box 200, Pineland, FL 33945. Call (239) 283-2278; www.cabbage-key.com.
- Freelance writer Herb Hiller has lived in Florida for more than 30 years.
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111
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