American Sabattical 77: 3/23/97
DeLeon Springs
3/23-25.. Fountain of Youth.
My lizard is uncurling down here, folks. I'm almost willing to believe I won't be needing
those longjohns I've got packed. Maybe go shopping for a pair
of shorts and some sandals.
| Sunday morning the Owlcrew stuffed their E-mail down the pipe
at 9 o’clock and spun rubber for DeLeon Springs. We’d contacted
Sheldon by phone late the evening before, and he had a date to
meet a ladyfriend at the art show in Winter Park at noon. We’d
been yodeling in the wrong crowd yesterday, and now were booked
to join him for today’s date. We felt that St. Augustine was a
wine barely sniffed, but the mob scene there had diluted the aroma,
and Sheldon promised that Winter Park had the vintage stuff. |
DeLeon Woods
|
These are new latitudes for us, south of Ensanada even, and we
were beginning to feel the angular acceleration, not to mention
the heat. Sunday was gratefully overcast, but we had all the vents
and windows wide to blow-dry the occupants. Barreling down old
Route 1 we were almost by ourselves, except for churchgoing locals.
These superseded throughways don’t disintegrate in the frost-free
winters, but the tourist infrastructure has been converted to
thrift shops and selfstorage and low income housing, and the grass
is creeping out along the seams. Road maintenance isn’t a big
item on municipal budgets.
Turning inland south of St. Augustine, the roar of the snowbird
corridor fades, and the palms and palmettos run rank under pines
and hardwoods of untold varieties, like in a dream by Rousseau.
Ranches and orange groves and field crops appear beside us. Approaching
DeLeon Springs the pavement actually starts to rise and dip noticeably.
Ooo Ooo. Our first hills since we went down into the low country
in Virginia. The land lifts to 40 feet above sealevel up here!
And down a shady side street off a back road there’s Sheldon’s
house, a rosy pink cottage, trimmed in white, neat and trim, finished
inside in varnished cypress and pale salmon plaster, the image
of a sailor’s roost.
Camp Flamingo
Sheldon has a First Engineer’s ticket in the Merchant Marine,
and ships out with SeaLand on the big container ships. A Mainer,
he has a house in Portland and a winter home here, and spends
3-6 months a year at sea. We met through mutual friends, and because
he’s a lover of the arts (especially dance), we keep bumping together
at performances and exhibitions. This chance to get to know him
better on his turf was kindly offered, and gladly received. One
look at Flamingo Cottage and we know we’re kin.
Prize Winner
|
Into his Saab (he pranged the Datsun-Z two days ago), and away
we whisk to Winter Park and the Orlando orbit. He and Peggy get
talking about unions as we break out of the palmetto idyll and
upramp onto the highroad. He gets all his assignments through
his union (see John McPhee’s Looking For A Ship), and sees the
demise of unionization as the deathknell of the American middle
class. Unions lifted our grandfathers and fathers into the middle
class, and it was a long hard fight for economic equity. Now no
one remembers or believes in solidarity, he says. He attributes
much of the ship owners’ flight to flags of convenience to a search
for cheap labor. Sheldon admits that unions have often been stupid
about change, but says his union is still fighting for fair wages
alongside automation. When he started shipping out he was crew
on 1000 ton vessels with 50 men aboard. Now he ships on 10,000
ton vessels with 20 aboard, and says that arguments about productivity
increases cuts no ice with management. He thinks that safety and
ship maintenance suffer under flags of convenience. |
We Swedished past the half-acre Old Glories fluttering over the
auto dealerships, and offramped into stopandgo in Winter Park,
gave a kid $3 bucks to park in a shady lot beside the Amtrack,
and tripped along the ties into the art show. It was mobbed. Which
was the better show, the mob or the art, was a toss-up. It isn’t
that fashion is dead in America, it’s that every fashion there
ever was is still alive and flaunting here, and some just invented.
There seem to be more ways to present protuberances and expose
flesh down here in the sultry, and the toos and piercing get a
better showing. The crowd was democratic (no gate) so everything
from tailored linen to studded biker was strutting up and down.
Cowboy costumes with pink frillies and white boots, the Lovecraft
Look in black with eyeliner and green hair, elaborate layered
vestments that only reach down to mid-pube alongside fanciful
silver inlaid trousers and bare torsos, skin-tights and tenting
tonights, chunky gold braggadocios and plastic foolery, I was
grinning all over.
| The art was jes fine, too. This is peak season in FLA, and lots
of artists come out of the cold to mix a little business with
a thaw. Spending all those years at the Maine Festival, with its
provincial bias, I hadn’t been exposed to the full spectrum of
gypsy art on grass. But the ambiance was totally familiar. The
reek of trodden grass and rented canvas, mixed with scents of
tangy grill-smoke and hot dough. The hollow-eyed exhaustion of
self-peddling artists on the last day of a fair, and their near
catatonic indifference, or frenetic babble. The ebb and flow of
blank-eyed tire-kickers murmuring hollow praises, and moving on. |
Aht
|
As usual I engaged in shoptalk with some of the obvious old pros
and some hot young Turks. The old guard told me this was usually
one of the 3 best moneymakers in Florida, but had seemed slow
this year, although the dealers had been out in force. The hotshots
were hustling new wrinkles and coining money. We were especially
taken by the composite photos of a Chicago artist, portraying
children looking into fantasy worlds through windows, or adults
seeing their dreams. My favorite image was from behind a photographer
aiming his camera out a skyscraper window. He has a bunch of gigantic
bananas on the sill, and King Kong is peering in the window. There
was some powerful representational sculpture in steel, and I spent
a while with a clay sculptor who conjures mythic animal crosses
in black and white costumes, with red details. She’s right out
there on the dream edge and we nodded familiarly. I bought two
of her clay mask pins for our hats, and to count coup on Winter
Park.
Backstage
|
The selection at arts and craft shows goes in cycles. Right now
there seem to be more watercolorists getting juried in than anything
else. One oil painter, from New York, was in evidence, and he
observed that he couldn’t sell a still life to save his soul,
but landscapes were hot. An abstract sculptor from New Mexico,
whose work was a carnival of colored feathers and quills in vibrant
compositions, said that this crowd only wanted representational
work, but he was in it to maintain dealer recognition. There was
more glasswork than I expected, and the jewelers, as usual, were
doing just fine. The food vendors may or may not have been disillusioned
artists who saw where all the money gets spent, as is true in
Maine, but they were more imaginative in their offerings. There
was even a salad vendor. Amazing.
|
We did bump into a Mainer we knew, who was making his first attempt
at selling his photography at this fair. He’d gotten skunked.
He’d done a quick mounting job on his less expensive prints the
night before the show, and they’d all buckled in the humidity.
Not an auspicious beginning to a new career. We told some horror
stories of our own, and wished him well. I’m truly glad to have
decided that 25 years on the grass was enough. I was tempted to
think about sunland shows like this, for about half an hour. Then
I heard a hopeful artist make the same polite pitch in answer
to the same question for the third time, and my brain began to
fog. It was all very familiar, and the hustler’s rush buoyed me
around the grounds. Old carneys never die.
| They go back to the Fountain of Youth to sell souvenirs. We stopped
at a healthfood outlet and got takeout, ate it under sprawling
oaks at a theater complex in Winter Park, and Saabed back to DeLeon
Springs. Turns out that the springs in question claim to be Ponce’s
destination resort, and was once spa of choice for the better
sorts.. circa 1900. Now all the traffic is along the coasts, and
the springs are closed for renovation. Sorry, folks. The Fountain
of Youth is closed for rejuvenation. |
After drinking the water
|
Our sort awoke rejuvenated on Monday, and continued the Sheldon
Tour of North Central Florida. Hate to say it, but some of us
are going to have to eat serious crow about Florida. Off the tourist
track, where it hasn’t been paved over, this is beautiful country.
Track
|
Our first stop was about a mile from Sheldon’s at the Spring Gardens
Ranch, where the trotters are undergoing spring training, and
the dressage pros are perfecting their moves. We arrived at the
two-mile track around 10AM, with the sun just starting to bite,
and the ponies at the peak of their pacing. Spectacular horseflesh
in fluid motion. While Peggy and I sketched, Sheldon regaled us
with tales about his years sleeping in the barns and working the
horses. His knowledge of the intricacies of the sport, and this
subculture, brought an unknown world into vivid relief. It also
revealed yet another chapter in our host’s story, an odyssey we’re
discovering indirectly from this quiet and self-contained man.
|
| We chatted up some of the stable crew, and admired a Maine woman
who was working with a big dressage stallion, 17 or 18 hands..
the horse was splendid, too. But the rays were beginning to muddle
us, so we ambled back under the oaks, and down back roads to check
out the local agribiz. FERNS. This is the fern capitol of the
nation. Traditionally raised under canopies of live oaks, the
maidenhair and other decorative ferns you get from your florist
mostly come from DeLeon Springs and environs. Now they tend to
be grown under shadecloth. We drove past acres of understory in
tents, and stopped to ease our eyes at an old style fernery, shady
and cool. This is Sheldon’s cycling turf, and I’m envious. Too
many untimely frosts have made havoc of the citrus business up
here, but we did see some orange groves, and got our teeth into
some fresh fruit. Better than crow, by far. |
Ferns
|
Dressage
|
Next up was a visit to DeLeon Springs Park where the bulldozers
are arguing with mythology. Our guide contends that the springs
were a place where the Indians came for healing, and they certainly
are a balm to roadweary spirits. When Ponce asked what they had
of value, he was brought to this magic curative spot, and translated
the shamanic handbills as “the fountain of youth.” Then Europeans
and natives spilled blood over ownership for a few hundred years,
followed by the spa developers. Now Sheldon gets to bike over
to this backwater refuge and take the cure daily, when it’s open. |
| The pool was closed, but the Old Sugar Mill was open, where the
Spaniards once crushed cane, and you can now enjoy an organic
repast looking out on the lake. The unique speciality of this
house was a room full of grill-tables where you could make do-it-yourself
pancakes. Electric grills set into the middle of four-man tables
seemed more apt for March in Maine than this sunny place, but
the griddlecakes were as hot as you could stand them, and delicious,
too. |
Visitor
|
And another
|
After filling corners we didn’t know we had, we decided to walk
the nature trails in the park to counteract the effects. Sheldon
had arranged for a full show. A skink danced out into our path
as we entered the shady groves of pine and palmetto, magnolia
and palm, pignut and gum. The lizards are finally revealing themselves
to me, whatever that means. There were strange ferns fronding
up along the path and climbing on the live oaks. Suddenly a wild
pig trotted into the path behind us. A solid black porker, who
busily went about his business in the undergrowth, and disappeared.
We were charmed.
|
The spell wasn’t broken all afternoon. Sheldon picked up one of
his swimming buddies, Chuckie, and they toured us through DeLand,
the county seat, which has added a stage theater and a library
to the local amenities in recent years, indicating a dangerous
decline in cultural values. Our destination was yet another park,
Blue Springs, where we could rejuvenate without impediment.
William Bartram positively bubbled in his description of the huge
freshwater springs which boil up out of the limestone strata in
Northern Florida. How you can look down into their crystal waters
and see wildlife rising and falling from subterranean rivers,
unknown to man. Blue Springs is one of those fonts, gushing thousands
of gallons a minute into the St. John’s watershed, and our guides
had brought us to swim up into the boiling outlet.
A lifelong hydrophobe until Bagel taught me how to swim in Merrymeeting
Bay, I’m hardly a strong swimmer, or an eager one. But this sweaty
afternoon I was hot for the game, and Peggy, of course, is part
seal. We climbed down into the chilly waters (76 degrees year-round)
a hundred and fifty yards or so below the springs, and began breasting
the current. You could hardly make headway. Chuckie and Sheldon
kept churning steadily, as did Peggy, but I got pooped quickly
and made for the shallows where I could thrash upstream shanksmare.
The bottom was fine sand, embedded tree trunks, and coarse limestone
fragments, alternately. After a while Peggy joined me on the hike,
and we’d swim a dozen yards or so, then struggle forward afoot.
Tall palms towered straight above us, while drooping hardwoods
leaned over to touch the water. Palmettos did their fandance to
the river’s edge, and pushing through the sparkling fresh current,
around the baroque green bends, was romantic to the Nth.
Spring Water
(Sheldon Skofield Photo)
Surprisingly few of the bathers who got in at the access points
actually struggled up to the springs, and we felt like superior
beings when we could finally dive into the upwelling fountain
and look down into the distant depths, like into a Jules Verne
scenario. Maybe 20 yards across, surrounded by limestone walls
30 feet high, this is a bubbling spring to beat all imaginings.
Floating and swimming downstream was a glorious reward, and we
fetched up at the entry steps thoroughly doused and completely
wrung out. Do this every day and you’ll prove old Ponce’s promise.
We all hummed home, concocted a tasty feast, and fell on our faces.
Tuesday we lay around the shanty and pounded on puter until we
were up to date. A first for this outing. Tomorrow it’s back out
into the weather, if we can stand it.
