As I write this blog I am listening to a Dueling Banjos vinyl record I picked up at the last Friend’s of the Gainesville Library book sale. It was a great event. I picked up numerous books and a few decent Lp’s. The album I am listening to is a mixture of honky tonk and twanging banjos. It includes classics like ‘Dueling Banjos’ and I must say that its not bad considering I paid only a quarter for it at the book sale.
The album makes me think of this weekend. This weekend was one of those weekends I will just describe as a bluegrass weekend. A bluegrass weekend is one of those weekends where you just basically take it easy and cruise around through the country looking at all the sights and sounds with bluegrass music playing as your soundtrack. My music of choice on this trip was a mixture of Old Crow Medicine Show and Yonder Mountain String Band. Bluegrass music was fitting for my journey this weekend, because when you journey down 441 heading south from Gainesville you start to see what Florida is all about. Gainesville is a great place to live on many levels. There are great small grocery stores like Ward’s, there are weekly farmer’s markets, great local eateries, and so on. But in the end it is your typical modern city. There’s traffic and lots of people. Sometimes I like to get a glimpse of what Florida may have been like in the old days before endless sprawl. One benefit of living in north-central Florida is that sprawl has not consumed the landscape to the same degree that it has like in Orlando where I grew up. While it may just be a matter of time before sprawl further spreads to this region of north Florida I greatly appreciate the opportunities that currently surround me. For one thing I am very close to Payne’ s Prairie. This is a great place to hike and to sort of unwind after spending time in the city. I also have places like Micanopy which is within a short drive of where I currently live in Gainesville. Micanopy is a place that in my opinion has been lost in time to a certain degree. When walking down the streets of Micanopy you will notice the occasional Cracker home tucked underneath majestic Live Oaks. These cracker homes are well shaded in Micanopy and I bet back in the day before air conditioning this was a great feature. These homes also seem to fit into the landscape something I can’t say about the super sized McMansions I commonly see while in south Florida. The cracker homes in Micanopy are simple, yet they have character that makes me wonder why we no longer make homes in this style. Instead will build homes that are sterile and are placed inside subdivisions as if they are a monoculture of agricultural crops. When you walk down the streets of Micanopy you can’t help wondering to yourself why did we change our ways. A downtown like that found in Micanopy makes you feel as if you are part of a living town. The buildings are smaller, the community is more fused together, and as a result nature seems to take less of a secondary role as it does in the urban concrete jungles where skyscrappers touch the sky and row crops of houses stretch to the horizon. Micanopy is nothing like the before description. It is small. There is not much going on there. There are only a handful of parking spaces. People sit on front porches and rock in rocking chairs. There are a plentiful number of trees, especially handsome Live Oaks and stately Southern Magnolias. Micanopy is old Florida.
This weekend was great. The sights and sounds were perfect in Micanopy, but the real reason it was great was because of a special lady that accompanied me on this weekend adventure. We set off relatively early on Saturday morning in search of a good time. The first stop was at Lake Wauberg. Lake Wauberg is bordered by Payne’s Praire on one side and the majority of it is fronted by property owned by the University of Florida. We drove in on the University of Florida side because we were wanting to use some of the free boats. We were debating on whether to sail or kayak. We’ve sailed here before and I must admit the Hobie we took out onto the lake was a blast. Luckily she new more about sailing than me. I am more of a paddler myself. This time around we took out a tandem kayak. The kayak was the typical recreational sort. It was slow but it was still time spent on the water and we were lucky to see a number of alligators, who if we paddled towards would slowly sink like scaly submarines. After paddling we worked up quite and appetite and went on down the road a bit towards the fine town of Micanopy.
In Micanopy we parked outside a used bookstore, which is among a number of other book and antique stores. We at a small deli-style restaurant. They had a front porch with people sitting outside and I thought to myself its nice to see that people still use porches. I ordered the special which on this Saturday was red beans and rice. The lady behind the counter asked if we’d like fresh lemonade and we both took her up on the offer. Good food, but more importantly a great atmosphere. After grabbing a bite to eat, we crossed the street and hung out in a old bookstore. There were thousands of books in this old wooden, dusty building. I must say they had a excellent Florida section. There were a couple of copies of Bartram’s Travels and numerous books related to Florida’s ecology. After this we decided to further walk off lunch by taking a stroll down the main stretch of downtown. We were impressed by some of the homes we saw. I was very impressed with a particular Live Oak that was massive in size. I remember questioning whether or not Bartram may have sat under this tree. Now that I think about it John Muir may have slept under this tree on his journey to Cedar Key. We sort of stumbled on to this little store called Mosswood Farm Store. From the outside it looked like an old fashioned general store. Inside I was suprised to find an entire section devoted to bluegrass. They had books on organic farming, books on sustainabilty, and a few books by local authors. They sold plants and seeds too. I bought some Cilantro. They also had a variety of other items. Most of their stuff was environmentally friendly. It was a great place. They had a couch on the inside for people to chill out and read books. It was a very relaxed setting and so different than the typical chain bookstore. Micanopy was fun but I was determined to slowly head on down the road.
Our next stop was Majorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. I have always been familiar with Marjorie’s varied works. I remember as a kid knowing about the Yearling, but it was not until recently that I become interested in her work. A few weeks ago at the Hippodrome I saw the documentary “In Marjorie’s Wake”. It was a great film and a great addition to the week of Earthday. The film has sparked an interest for me. We took a tour of her house and the surrounding property. It was nice walking around the fragrant orange groves. The house was interesting too. I felt on some level that I was experiencing authentic 20th century rural Florida. The tour guide mentioned some interesting facts about Marjorie. I thought it was funny that the neighbors would tease her about being Yankee. I think I have grown to like Marjorie because it seems that she understood ’sense of place’ long before anyone else. She loved Cross Creek and basically Florida was like a dream place for her. She seemed to have great respect for her surroundings and the Earth at large.
“It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. It gives itself in to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers, and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all to time.”
-Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek
After our visit to Marjorie’s house we slowly drifted back to Gainesville, bluegrass playing in the background, eventually passing over the great Alachua Savanna.
