"Don't even think," said the canoe livery service guy, pointing to a stretch of land in Citrus County, "about getting out of your canoe here. The people who own that land are real funny about trespassers, and they have guns."
But isn't there something about the banks of a navigable waterway being public right of way up to the mean difference between the high- and low-water lines?" I asked.
"You be sure to explain that to the first shotgun barrel you see," he said.
That day, some years ago, I marveled at how much of what used to be everybody's Florida no longer was.
And Jeb Bush just saw to it that what was left of it got 82,573 acres smaller when he used his line-item veto to get rid of funding for the Gulf Hammock Wildlife Management Area and three others like it.
Oh, it will still be privately owned, public managed land. Get that, PUBLIC? You just won't be able to use it without one of 400 permits for $275 each that will be issued annually now that the state can't afford to pick up the garbage and maintain what it calls roads.
How then, exactly, does that make it public?
"Yes, sir," someone in an official capacity will soon be telling a guy in a pickup truck full of kids some day soon, "I know you only make a little money and packing up the wife and kids to come out here for a day of hiking and a picnic was one of the few pleasures you could still afford since you had to take out a second mortgage to pay for your kid's braces, but if you don't have a permit you'll have to go somewhere else. Where? Why, anywhere that you don't see a condominium, a gated community, a NO TRESPASSING sign or houses with those god-awful little lawn jockeys in front of them."
Florida used to be a great state, but it is getting to where you can't get there from here, even if here is there.
When I was a kid, there were two beaches we used to hang out at on Key Biscayne. One, fairly public, was near the end of the island where the lighthouse was, and the other, which we thought of as "our" beach was hidden away across a mangrove swamp and a little stream that we didn't know at the time was the treated water runoff from the sewage disposal plant.
When I was in Vietnam and wondering if I would ever have a real job (thank heavens journalism came along instead) I always knew I could go live on the beach, fish in the surf, eat coconuts from the thousands of palm trees and get along just fine.
By the time I visited again in 1967, the beach by the sewage disposal plant was cordoned off with barbed wire. When I went back in 1969, the entire end of the island near the Nixon compound was like an armed camp and the chances of sleeping on the beach without getting very up close and personal with some guy in sunglasses talking into the cuff of his off-the-rack suit were pretty slim.
But Florida still had miles of beach where you could walk unimpeded without having to step over lawn chairs and umbrellas and argue with homeowners who think, incorrectly, that they own the beach and without having to be in places like the Pinellas beach community where they once tried to prosecute people for drinking (gasp!) coffee on the beach.
Beach access was just that, not tiny hidden alleys between towering hotels and condominium buildings and you could still scratch up a pile of driftwood and build a campfire if you felt like it.
Truth is, I sort of gave up on the outdoors when I got out of the military, but I have been thinking about using some of my upcoming retirement time to grab a backpack, a couple of sandwiches, a few books and (only where legally permissible, of course) a bottle of wine and visiting some of the spots I have been driving past for the past 30 years.
But not, apparently, without a permit.
At least I am lucky enough to be living in Pasco County, which has a nice public park system where there aren't too many rules, the employees are friendly and the word "public," still means pretty much just that.
