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Mere miles from Tallahassee's quotidian bustle, Wakulla Springs and the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge shelter the secret beat of nature.
By DIANE ROBERTS
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 12, 2000
The quiet around St. Marks is an ancient quiet, a deep, humid, elemental quiet of sea and grass and sand and pines. It is not silence, mind you: The cicadas hum, the gulls shout, the mourning doves cry, and sometimes a red-tailed hawk will come screaming across the sky. The wind combs through the palmettos, or an anhinga might dive into the river, making a little dinner-gathering splash.
Then the stillness returns.
The St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge on the gulf coast, about 25 miles south of Tallahassee, is almost a place out of time, a piece of the old Florida before the condos and the theme parks, before the strip malls and the interstates, before the ancient wonders of the peninsula were paved over.
It is not completely untouched by human hands, of course: St. Marks is a park, so it has a visitor center and a gift shop, public restrooms and a picnic table or two. It even has a road for those who prefer to experience nature from inside an air-conditioned car.
But if you venture out on one of the salt marsh trails or walk deep into a hardwood hammock, the land probably looks pretty much the way it did 1,000 years ago, when the Apalachee hunted in the sand hills and fished in the creeks, and the way it did in the 17th century, when the Spanish built the fortress of San Marcos de Apalache at the confluence of the St. Marks and Wakulla rivers.
The St. Marks preserve is old as parks go, established in 1931 to provide winter accommodation for migratory birds. It is big, too: 66,000 acres of flatwoods, swamps, pine-oak uplands and marsh. Almost 32,000 more acres of water in Apalachee Bay have been included in the refuge.
There are two ways to get there: You drive on Highway 98, the old Panhandle road that takes you across through the archetypal piney woods from Perry. Or you come down from Tallahassee, through great pieces of the Apalachicola National Forest -- another good-size tract of protected land -- past Wakulla Springs, with its turquoise water and Spanish-style lodge.
The nearer you get to the gulf, the more the trip feels like a journey to a secret place. Everything human is slower and smaller; the natural world suddenly teems and looms large. The roads, the little fishing villages, and the beaches are blessedly empty.
Before you ever get to St. Marks, Wakulla Springs is a good place to get introduced to the ecology of the northern gulf counties. It is now a state park but was once the private estate of Ed Ball, the legendary financier and meddler in Florida politics who used to raise his glass of bourbon and say by way of a toast: "Confusion to the enemy!"
Ball believed in hanging onto some of wild Florida and so kept a large chunk of the Wakulla River for posterity.
The blue heart of the spring at the head of the river pumps about 400,000 gallons of water a minute, drawing it up from the Floridan Aquifer. There are caves down there decorated with relics: the bones of prehistoric animals and maybe the people whose name we do not know who began to hunt the animals in the Florida savannah 10,000 years ago.
Ball's Wakulla Springs Lodge (which is now a restaurant and a hotel) runs boat tours called "Jungle Cruises" up and down the Wakulla River. The guides will point out alligators, deer, water moccasins, rare plants and rare birds galore.
"Everything you see here is real," the guides say, steering their boats into the middle of the river. "There are no wind-up turtles, no battery-operated alligators -- this is the real Florida."
The guides even show you the tree Johnny Weismuller swung from as Tarzan in the movies that were filmed here in the 1930s.
And inside the lodge, where you can get a good fried fish dinner, there's a huge glass case housing Old Joe, a 200-year-old, 12-foot-long alligator. The plaque on the case says he "was murdered by assailant unknown on Sunday night, August 1, 1966. Had never molested man, woman, child or pets." There's still a reward of $5,000 for Old Joe's killer.
Further south, down to the St. Marks Lighthouse, there are fewer concessions to humankind: You must guide yourself.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service makes it pretty easy, though, with a visitor center at the entrance to the St. Marks Refuge where you can get information on the 52 species of mammals, 40 species of amphibians, 66 species of reptiles and 274 species of birds you might see at any given time.
Endangered or threatened species include the red-cockaded woodpecker, the loggerhead sea turtle, the Eastern indigo snake, the peregrine falcon and the Florida black bear.
Any being that scuttles across the path or takes flight before you may be miraculous, a peridot-bright tree frog or a marsh rabbit or even a Brazilian free-tailed bat. St. Marks rewards quiet, slow movement and a light step.
The main thing is watching -- standing still, and watching. Kent Nelson, a noted eco-fiction writer and birder, said of St. Marks: "You can stand at the edge of a pond or salt marsh and look out or look up and it's like there's an avian show happening just for you: egrets, eagles, cormorants, ducks. An all-star bird cast."
The best time to see the most bird celebrities is in the fall or the winter, when the migrants move in like snowbelt tourists flocking south. Blue-winged and green-winged teal fool around on the tidal pools, tricolored herons and great blue herons step daintily in the marshes. It is like a bird metropolis -- or maybe a bird mecca -- a congregation of beautiful, gem-colored creatures at home in their world. We are the intruders.
The St. Marks Lighthouse stands on a point of sand as fine as confectioner's sugar. Beyond it lie the green waters of the Gulf of Mexico, open sea all the way to the Canal de Yucatan. The lighthouse is not the most elegant of its kind, but there is nonetheless something beautiful about it, taller than even the tallest pine, barrel-bottomed but rising to a slender, almost classical column.
It was built in 1831, partly from limestone blocks carted from the old Spanish fort at San Marcos de Apalache. The reflector lens came from Paris and looks like a crystal pineapple.
During the Civil War, the lens was taken out by the Confederates and hidden in the salt marshes -- at least so the story goes. What is certain is that in 1865, Federal troops landed at the lighthouse and marched upriver towards Tallahassee, the last unfallen Confederate capital east of the Mississippi. But a collection of old men and teenage soldiers from the West Florida Seminary (now Florida State University) met them at Natural Bridge near Woodville and turned them back. It didn't matter; the war was already lost for the Confederates.
Standing at the thick, luminous limestone base of the lighthouse, which is at the dead end of the St. Marks Refuge road, you can imagine what it has been through: the hurricanes, the storms, the cruel tides.
In 1843 there was a near-perfect storm when waves inundated the coastline around St. Marks, drowning the river mouth, washing away every extant building -- except the tower. Most people in the vicinity drowned, but the keeper's family clung to the garret floor at the top of the lighthouse and lived.
It is automatic now, the great light, maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard, shining out over the deceptively gentle waters of the gulf.
Around the point, up the river, lies the little town of St. Marks; the sign at the city limits reads "Established 1527." The remains of the ancient Spanish fort lie nearby, but present-day St. Marks is mostly a marina, a couple of shops, a pizzeria, a bed and breakfast inn and several fish shacks so renowned that people drive in from Tallahassee and from Thomasville, up in Georgia.
For postmodern redneck charm, Posey's is the pick of the litter. The "topless oysters" wear hot sauce; the waitresses, young women just this side of the border from surly, wear T-shirts declaring "I Spent a Wild Week at Posey's One Night." The wooden walls of the place are papered in scribbled-on dollar bills, and there is a collection of exotic, though empty, beer cans from all over the world, enough to make a fraternity boy weep with envy.
But the reason to come to Posey's is not the coastal wit (the poster behind the cash register reads "Shirt and Shoes Required; Bra and Panties Optional") but the seafood.
The grouper is landed locally, the mullet, too. Posey's smoked mullet is about the best in the Panhandle: dark and sultry. Still, the oysters -- brought to you by the nice lady with the Loretta Lynn hairdo shucking like mad under the Miller Lite light in back -- are the crown jewels of the menu.
Sometimes the oysters are brought in from Louisiana, Galveston, Perdido Bay, and they are always pretty fine. But when you can get Apalachicola Bay oysters, indulge yourself. Raw, they are pearly and firm, the biggest, sweetest oysters in Christendom. Even if you prefer them cooked, they are still magnificently flavorful, North Florida's gastronomic gift to the world.
It used to be that visitors to St. Marks would have to stay all the way up in Tallahassee or at least in Wakulla Springs. But now there's the Sweet Magnolia, a little inn set among pines in a pretty seaside garden, which is only a few feet from Posey's and only a few miles from the St. Marks Refuge.
This place was built in the 1920s as a boarding house but did duty as a brothel in World War II -- at least according to one of the proprietors. And, to tell you the truth, there's still something a little sybaritic-looking about its gauze-draped rooms and flower-crowned beds.
But no matter how late it is in St. Marks, it always seems too early to go to sleep. The salt-scented darkness of a clear autumn night is as full of nature as the brightest day. The river still dances with birds, and the bats fly among the trees.
There is hardly any light pollution, and so the Milky Way stretches overhead like a bridal veil, and the bright coming constellations of winter, many of them mythic representations of the birds and mammals of the gulf coast themselves -- Cygnus and Aquila, Cetus and Delphinus -- wheel overhead in a blue velvet sky.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact the following:
St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, P.O. Box 68, St. Marks, FL 32355; call (850) 925-6121. Open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends. Admission $4 per car.
Posey's Oyster Bar, 55 Riverside Drive, St. Marks, FL 32355; (850) 925-6172.
Sweet Magnolia Inn, 803 Port Leon Drive, St. Marks, FL 32355; bed and breakfast costs from $85 to $115; five-course dinner cruises on the Sea House One up the St. Marks River begin at $12.95.
Wakulla Springs State Park and Lodge, 550 Park Drive, Wakulla Springs, FL 32305; (850) 224-5950; rooms are $69 to $90; breakfast, lunch and dinner are available.
Former Times staff writer Diane Roberts is now teaching at the University of Alabama.
Carlton Ward Jr. is a graduate student at the University of Florida.