Meanwhile, over at the Weirsdale Community Cemetery

The 300 yards of dirt track that connect Forest Hill Cemetery (the "white" cemetery) to the Weirsdale Community Cemetery (the "Black" cemetery) were particularly overgrown on my recent visit. Not much traffic, it seems, heads to this very quiet corner of central Florida. As I waded through the grass and weeds I worried just a little about the coral snakes that inhabit these parts – Dad saw one out here once – but these potentially deadly snakes are too small and shy to be a menace. And it really is a pleasant stroll, even on a muggy late afternoon in August. To your left, the currently vacant cattle pasture with its seasonal marshy pond, greened up after the recent thunderstorms; to your right, the back yards of Stonecrest's comfortable and well-maintained ranch houses for the 55 and over. They enjoy their active lifestyle, with golf and pickleball, but I wonder how many appreciate the quiet beauty of their local graveyards.

Florida's hills are pretty humble, being flattened old sand dunes as far as I can tell, but the contours create their own micro-habitats. Forest Hill Cemetery, for example, on its little rise, is shaded by pines. The Weirsdale Community Cemetery, more flat and low-lying, is shaded by live oaks draped in Spanish moss. I'm an oak man myself. The mushrooms agree. 

The dead and the gone

On my recent visit with the parents, I dropped by the cemeteries located near their former house in Summerfield, FL. The folks have moved to a more convenient and accommodating apartment building nearby, but their old neighborhood beckons. Their house was located in the Stonecrest gated community, and, being gated, it is now off-limits to me. But the cemeteries lie just outside Stonecrest, with access via bumpy SE 170th St., which skirts the development's northern periphery and is maintained by... who knows?

Forest Hill Cemetery, the "white" cemetery, occupies a little slope up from the road's dead end just outside my parents' old back yard. For the roughly 15 years my folks lived there, a pair of bald eagles maintained a nest near the top of a longleaf pine in the cemetery and raised cohorts of eaglets. I say "a pair," but there was some turnover, as at least once the female apparently died from one cause or another, and the forlorn widower had to find another mate. Or at least, that's what the human eagle-watchers inferred. My parents watched them daily, if not hourly, from the back porch.

In recent years the pine died, and the enormous, untidy nest in a crook of the tree's skeleton finally succumbed to hurricanes and decay as did, ultimately, the tree itself. The eagles, who fed on fish from nearby Lake Weir, have moved on. It was some comfort to me that my parents departed before their beloved eagles... or around the same time, in one of those strange coincidences. 

Forest Hill has graves dating back to the late 19th century, and is still used today. Graves are fascinating, and sad, of course. On this visit, a couple in particular struck me, along with the memorial placed at the stump of the eagle tree. Mattie Barker's marker is in too good condition to be the original. One wonders who is maintaining the grave of an infant who died 136 years ago. It is only few miles from the location of "Ma" Barker's famous last shootout across Lake Weir in Ocklawaha... another coincidence.

Stonecrest, FL

Summerfield, FL

What could possibly go wrong?

My parents live in a central Florida retirement development quite close to The Villages, which bills itself as Florida's friendliest hometown and is now home to more than 120,000 folks, generally 55 and over. Thanks to Florida's Trumpian governor Ron DeSantis, as well as the freedom- and fun-loving population of the Villages, the lockdown seems to be over...

Town squares in The Villages heat up as Coronavirus caution cools off

My parents, being sensible, smart, and respectful of science, are not eager to join the fun just yet, and are venturing out as seldom as possible, wearing masks, etc. I hate to be melodramatic, but if the infection rate in this highly vulnerable population flares, Messrs. Trump and DeSantis will have the blood on their hands.

Weirsdale Community Cemetery after Irma

My parents live in Stonecrest, a retirement development in central Florida near the better-known and enormous Villages. Their house is on the periphery of the development, near two cemeteries that predate the housing tract. In this picture, the upper circle identifies the Forest Hill Cemetery, traditionally occupied by white deceased, and the lower one the Weirsdale Community Cemetery, traditionally for African-Americans. As you can see, the WCC has been surrounded by the encroaching Stonecrest golf courses and ranch homes, but for the catty-corner contact with rancher Frank Smith's expansive cattle land to the northeast...

From my parents' back yard, to make your way to the WCC, you pass the colorful flock of butterflies on their lantana and slip through the gap in the barbed wire fence that separates new from old Florida... from there, down a dirt track that skirts between the development and the cattle ranch...

A couple hundred yards along, you reach the cemetery– sparsely occupied and minimally maintained. The budget is presumably modest. A black snake may slither out of your path, a brown thrasher may make its presence known in one of the live oaks, or, Dad says, a pair of great horned owls may hoot to each other at dusk or dawn. Aside from these creatures, the bugs, and the background sound of a lawnmower in the distance, you generally have this peaceful corner to yourself and its quiet residents. Irma left some damage, but nothing that can't be fixed in time.

Postcards from central Florida

Well, I'm back in balmy, rainy Cali again, but I enjoyed my few days visiting the folks in sunny Florida. The lichens in Florida are nonpareil, the birds are plentiful (including the beautiful and curious purple gallinule), and the jello is bright blue, to complement the canned mandarins. As are the waters of Florida's threatened natural treasures, the freshwater springs.

Paradise Park

Today I made my second visit to Silver Springs, the old tourist attraction now run as part of a Florida state park. It is a fantastic place, about which more soon, but first: something I learned in the visitor center today. There was a nice wall of photos taken at Paradise Park, which the old resort opened in 1949 for "colored people," about a mile downstream from the spring. Blacks and whites swimming together in the crystalline spring-fed waters of the Silver River was not an option in Jim Crow Florida. In fact, Paradise Park would operate until 1969!

The photos make Paradise Park look like a pretty great place, and having seen those waters up close I imagine it was; this nostalgic feature article confirms it. Still, the symbolism of its placement downstream from the white folks was unlikely to be lost on the visitors. Perhaps it is nostalgia for that order of things that lies behind Donald Trump's refusal to repudiate the KKK?

Photo credit

Airplane mode

Nothing like a cross-country flight with storm delays for providing some extended pleasure-reading time... Not to mention the welcome distraction of an absorbing novel during the episodes of storm-related turbulence.

I made it through three novels in transit (including a little down time while visiting in Florida).

Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was recommended to me by my chain-reading friend and colleague, Michael Kevane. As I reported to another friend, it's quite a fine little novel. Very funny and deeply cynical. And rather creepy. It's short enough to be a novella, really, but that's just a function of the extraordinary economy of the prose. I can't recall ever seeing the movie version, but having finally read the book I'm not sure how they could have pulled it off: the book is full of time jumps and foreshadowings. Miss Brodie is very sharply drawn, but the true protagonist is her aptly named student, Sandy Stranger. She's strange for sure and, ultimately, a stranger, inscrutable.

Peter Carey's Amnesia masquerades as a cyber-thriller, hackers against corporate evil-doers, but it is really the family saga of three generations of feisty Australian women, and the journalist who chronicles their story. Carey is not an economical writer, but he is a good story-teller. Still, I found the book meandered a bit. One thing I learned is how woefully ignorant I am of Australian history. The CIA-backed Coup of 1975? I'll be damned.

When in Florida: Carl Hiaasen! Sick Puppy may not be his best, but it is packed with the usual screwball characters, local color, and funny set pieces. In the genre of comic crime novels, Elmore Leonard will never be surpassed. But Hiaasen is not a bad substitute, especially when one is heading to the Sunshine State, with which he has an obvious love-hate relationship.

A few days in the lightning capital of the USA*...

     * Central Florida (see map below)
... and an exasperating day of lightning-related travel delays getting home from there got me to revisiting a question that came up recently while hiking in a Yosemite thunderstorm: How many people are killed by lightning? Well, not many: In recent years, an average of about 33 Americans per year. And what are people doing when they are killed by lightning? Our man at the National Weather Service, John Jensenius, has the goods. From the Executive Summary:

From 2006 through 2013, 261 people were struck and killed by lightning in the United States. Almost two thirds of the deaths occurred to people who had been enjoying outdoor leisure activities. The common belief that golfers are responsible for the greatest number of lightning deaths was shown to be a myth. During this 8-year period fishermen accounted for more than three times as many fatalities as golfers, while camping and boating each accounted for almost twice as many deaths as golf. From 2006 to 2013, there were a total of 30 fishing deaths, 16 camping deaths, and 14 boating deaths, and 13 beach deaths. Of the sports activities, soccer saw the greatest number of deaths with 12, as compared to golf with 8. Around the home, yard work (including mowing the lawn) accounted for 12 fatalities. For work-related activities, ranching/farming topped the list with 14 deaths.

... Work-related activities contributed to 15% of the total lightning fatalities.... Farming/ranching-related activities contributed most (37%) to the work-related deaths. Other activities included construction (11%), lawn care (8%), roofing (8%), military work (5%), barge work (5%), and other (24%).

At the Orlando Airport, American Airlines workers stop loading bags if there has been a lightning strike within 5 miles during the previous 20 minutes. As I discovered, this can lead to pretty long delays taking off on a typical summer afternoon in Lightning Alley. Looking out the plane window as we sat on the tarmac, we could see the Jet Blue planes being loaded and taxiing toward takeoff. We were told over the intercom that "some other airlines" may not care as much about worker safety.

Giant asparagus report

Dad's giant asparagus has bolted...

They still have asparagus in Florida...

Asparagus season may be over in California, but it's still thriving in Florida, where the spears grow a lot bigger. Here's Dad standing next to this year's crop... hoping to win first prize at the Marion County Fair...

Florida's springs

I suppose when most people think of Florida's natural beauty, the powdered-sugar Gulf coast beaches or palms swaying in the Keys are what come to mind. But the state's inland freshwater springs are a real contender. The State, in its wisdom (?!), has been acquiring many of these great gushers and commissioning them as state parks--in a number of cases buying out defunct tourist resorts that were driven under by Disney or just changing tastes. A great example is Silver Springs, in Ocala. This venerable tourist destination (indeed, Florida's first tourist attraction, according to Wikipedia) was the home to a well-known fleet of glass-bottom boats that plied the spring and the Silver River, which runs for just five miles from the spring before emptying into the lovely Ocklawaha. After the state bought the attraction, it continued to operate as a concessionaire with the boats and a small zoo, until just last year.

The glass bottom boats still run. When I visited last weekend with my parents, we elected not to take one of those rides, but walked around the tranquil, grassy grounds. The zoo is being dismantled, at the expense of the former owners, but it was a day off and the place was peaceful, just starting to fill with strolling families and a small stream of customers for the boat rides. The tourist center, set back from the boat dock and arranged in an arc that echoes the spring's pool, was designed by Victor Lundy in the 1950s; it is a wonderful piece of understated postwar modernism that fits its surroundings perfectly and won an AIA merit award. Here's a picture from the June 1959 issue of Florida Architect:

The water that flows from the spring is really clear. In fact, "clear" does not do it justice. Underwater photographers often staged whimsical scenes to give a better idea of the clarity. Here's one:

(Source: State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/8878)

I took some pictures with my phone, but I failed to capture the watery color and play of the light. I did get up close and personal to this fine leathery person. She or he has probably witnessed the changes at Silver Springs with general indifference. The fishing is good, and one enjoys pleasant fantasies of grabbing a tasty little Bichon Frisé, should one stray too far from its owner...

Trayvon Martin

Given the law and the evidence (or lack thereof), it seems unlikely that the verdict could have been otherwise, as Ta-Nehisi Coates cogently argues in this post. It's not even clear to me that "stand your ground" per se was necessary to Zimmerman's self-defense defense. No doubt we'll see more of the same.

Postcards from Central Florida

Natural attractions include the beautiful Ocklawaha Prairie Restoration Area. Mom and Dad were disappointed that the lake was completely dried up, but I was not...

Along the way you spy what appears to be sea foam washing up alongside the trail, but you are in sandy pine lands far from shore... it turns out to be ground-dwelling deer lichen...

Speaking of lichen, I learned that Spanish moss are not lichens (let alone moss) but a kind of bromeliad, an air plant. Mom and Dad probably take their beauty for granted by now...

On the cultural side, on the drive home from Ocklawaha one should join the folks for a beer and burger at friendly Gator Joe's on Lake Weir...

 ... where the sun is always shining and the tats are enviable...

And plan a trip to the nearby Florida Carriage Museum and Resort, with its rather mindboggling collection of historical carriages and an authentic Poitou donkey, which is mighty friendly if somewhat flea-ridden...

I'm not sure what this is, but if you move to central Florida you definitely need to get yourself one...

Hat tip to LMK for photos!