Florida man, 95, grows old with sprawling, gnarly banyan tree

Willis Underwood isn't about to change, even as progress - and a banyan tree - encroach on his little slice of Old Florida.

By Jeff Klinkenberg, Times Staff Writer
Published February 3, 2008

	"That tree is something, isn't it?" says Willis Underwood, approaching his home on Terra Ceia after a morning walk. His house is slowly being engulfed by the tree's long roots that wrap around the house.
[Scott Keeler | Times]

TERRA CEIA - Old folks aren't supposed to sleep well. Willis Underwood, 95, sleeps fine unless he hears things banging around downstairs after dark.

Inside his lonely old house - a two-story Cracker job dwarfed by an enormous and spooky banyan tree - the man everybody calls Willis sat straight up in bed.

"Somebody's sure enough here to rob me," he thought, and then, still in the dark, grabbed his shotgun. Willis is of the generation, and of the disposition, that doesn't necessarily reach for the telephone in an emergency. He's a country fellow, one of those men who knows how to do things, whether it's smoking a mess of mullet without making them salty, growing black-eyed peas in bad soil or shooting a varmint bothering the chickens.

Clutching his 20-gauge, he tiptoed to the staircase and cocked his good ear.

The burglar rummaging through his stuff in the living room acted mighty careless with the noise. Trying not to breathe, Willis crept down the staircase, his finger itchy on the trigger of the Remington.

At the bottom of the stairwell he clicked the light at the same time he swept the barrel across the room as if shooting skeet. It took his old eyes an instant to adjust to the light.

There was no burglar in his living room.

On the table, near the chimney, stood a very large owl. Apparently it had abandoned its perch in the bewitched tree and somehow flown down the chimney.

Nature!

Bad enough that civilization is closing in on him and his precious 4.3-square-mile Florida island near the Sunshine Skyway - civilization in the form of development, trophy homes, city folks always talking on their cell phones and walking the streets while listening to iPods with impunity.

Must nature declare war on him as well?

Must the owls be against him? The tomato-exterminating nematodes, the snakes, the raccoons? Must the Tree, west-central Florida's most aggressive banyan, a banyan that belongs in a Stephen King novel, test his boundaries, too?

Well, because eight decades on the island have taught him to endure, he doesn't spend a lot of time on self pity. But a little bit is okay.

"One night" -"night" in his buttered grits accent sounds like "na-at" - "I wake up to go to the toilet. Now I happen to turn on the light. What do I see? There's this big old rat snake stretched across my hall. I guess it come out of the banyan tree and down the chimney. Anyway, I liked to have died. It scared me more than the owl."

Speaking of the owl, what happened?

We're going to relate this story the way Willis tells it, which is kind of slow. You will find out what happened, but in the Old Florida way. Willis serves no story before its time.

- - -

When he tells stories he likes to sit on the porch of his 113-year-old home in his rocking chair, wearing a yellow shirt, basketball sneakers and blue jeans held up by suspenders, his eyes shaded by a ball cap that might say "Git-R-Done."

Through the porch screen he can see a root - actually the once wispy root has grown into a veritable trunk - that dropped down from the crazed banyan tree that was planted on the other side of the house.

Read that again. One, the limbs from the massive tree in the back yard shade even the front yard. Two, roots from the limbs have slunk to the ground and grown into new trunks. One day the house will be enclosed by the tree as if inside a cage.

Nature!

Willis doesn't know the age of the old tree. It was there when he moved into the house nearly a half century ago. Willis believes one of Eben Dole's young 'uns might have planted it in the 19th century. The tree has shoved its belly against the western wall of the house. The tree has pushed the wall away from the critter-friendly chimney.

Every year, there seem to be fewer of them: the ancient trees, the dusty Cracker houses and the Florida old-timers with their stories about a time and place that is almost gone.

Even with the tree pushing and shoving, even as it drops roots, snakes and owls, the house is likely to hold on. Built of yellow pine, impervious to even termites, it knows how to endure. Hurricanes. Floods. Lightning. Woodpeckers. Rat snakes. Mildew. Algae. Rot. All of it is still here, like Willis.

He was born in Georgia, one of the 12 children brought into the world by sharecroppers Carlos and Donny Underwood, who moved to Plant City in the 1920s. "Big families back then. They raised kids to be field hands. We never went to school more than a few months at a time. When the strawberries come in, we all quit school to pick."

The Underwoods settled onto a Terra Ceia Island farm during the Depression, when humans were scarce but rattlesnakes were many. Willis remembers the time he was clearing a net of mullet and almost touched a thick rattlesnake coiled across the mesh.

"I liked to have died. Rattlesnakes, they was everywhere."

He rocks in his porch chair and stares at the palms lining his yard just in case a rattler shows up.

"Just down yonder, near - what do you call it? Miguel Bay - this guy, I didn't know him, but I heard about him, he was meeting a married woman one night in the orange groves for a little, you know, well, some romance, and he got bit by a rattler. The woman, she found him dead in the groves. I wonder what she told her husband."

Willis got married; his wife died at age 30 of consumption TB, like yellow fever and rattlers, made Florida less than hospitable. In World War II, Willis served in Newfoundland. The first time he marched across a frozen lake in the Canadian maritime and heard cracking he ran for his life. "Ah'm a Florida boy," he told other privates. "Florida boys don't know nothing about ice."

Willis married again; she died, too. As the oldest resident on the island he is now the oldest widower. Once he tilled his field on foot behind a mule; now he tills behind a 1955 Ford tractor. He is poised to put in a crop of black-eyed peas. He has a lady friend - actually he has several lady friends - who enjoy his conversation and his peas.

He also likes to gift them with prized mullet. His battered smoker is an old Tropicana juice dispenser, rusty, aromatic. His recipe: salt, but not too much, pepper and chunks "of the saltwater tree, buttonwood."

During the Depression, and after the Depression, when everybody on the island was poor, his family ate so many mullet their stomachs fluctuated with the tide.

Willis doesn't eat mullet anymore. Nor does he sup on raccoon, once an old Florida staple. "Dark meat. Gamey." However, he allows a friend, another old-timer, to catch raccoons on his farm.That old gentlemen believes 'coon tastes better than anything he can get at Publix.

- - -

Terra Ceia, like almost everywhere in Florida, is changing. The island is fast becoming a bedroom community for well-to-do folks from Pinellas County and from Bradenton who want a touch of country life. Willis has more neighbors than he ever did. Some live in mansions. The island's population over the last decade has exploded from a few dozen to 459. Willis misses the old days when there were just a handful of families on the island, but at least he has new people to listen to his stories now.

He lives off the pavement, down a shell road shaded by oaks, guarded by bees that swarm out of the nearby hives when visitors approach his homestead and gaze with wonder at that house-gobbling banyan and then seek out Willis on his porch to hear about the night that owl came down his chimney.

"Look here at this finger."

The barred owl - about 15 inches high with talons the size of a goodly man's hands - took a divot out of his left index.

"I don't know why, but I grabbed him, and he got me good. I got loose of him, and I come at him again, and this time I tucked him under an arm like a football and held his wings shut so he couldn't hurt hisself.

"I carried him out the door and he flew away in the dark. I went back upstairs and went to bed so I could get some sleep."

Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at klink@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8727.

[Last modified February 1, 2008, 12:53:02]