THE MUSIC COMING AT ME

They say it's the visual music of spring--these red, winged seeds (R. Baxter's photo) on the maples, high against the sky. Heard a preacher say this morning that mockingbirds and pecan trees are also signs of spring; not only the legendary groundhog. And as gray and cold as these sunless days are lately, one could almost wish for spring to be here tomorrow. Except for one thing: as the poet A. E. Housman put it in this poem below, every spring that comes is one less left for me to experience.

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of your little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
But ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

A.E. Housman

For my part, I'd rather it come on a little more slowly. I'd rather spend a few more weeks contemplating the severe black lines against the sky that are bare limbs, those "tangled bine-stems" of Thomas Hardy's poem, "The Darkling Thrush."

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

For green, today I settled for the loblolly pine,a line of Christmas tree shapes near the end of the driveway. I snatched a handful of needles, crushed them, and held them to my nose; yessir, just as I thought, the scent hauled me back to the holidays when I was small, when my sister and I crawled on our hands and knees into the glorious scent of that magical time. Pinus taeda--

INTRODUCING MAGGIE RIDER & FRIENDS

North Florida Center for Documentary Studies, Inc.
PRESENTS THE BOOK
THE SALVATION OF MAGGIE RIDER: Stories from Nokofta

SUNDAY 2:00 p.m. 20 FEBRUARY – ALACHUA LIBRARY

Alachua native and author of Florida Book Award Winner SOUTHERN COMFORTS Sudye Cauthen
Music --Refreshments
Readings from Maggie Rider, Southern Comforts, and her
next book, Voices from the Place of Our Remembrance
North Florida Center for Documentary Studies, Inc. – www.sudyecauthen.com - 386-397-1284 – cauthen4196@earthlink.net
Visit us on Facebook and at sudyecauthen.blogspot.com

NOTICE OF EVENTS: 12 FEB - ALACHUA, FL LIBRARY

WRITE. WRITE IT NOW!
Tips, Tricks, and Techniques for the Writing Life

This is a workshop about incorporating writing into our busy lives: how to keep the words coming, whether poetry, fiction, or nonfiction; exercises to sharpen skills of observation; openings and closings. The creation of memoir and its rewards, syntax, tone, flashbacks, and the centrality of yearning. The value of timelines, recognizing soft underbellies, and feeding the muse. We will come away excited about language.

SOUTH, TO BREVARD: SAMARA, SAMARA, and BLUE SKY

I was gone 3 days, 2 days on the road, 450 RT miles of road construction, devastated countryside, highways, interstate traffic, road repair, subdivisions, McMansions crowded like peas in a pod.



Florida was a beautiful state once and I suppose it still is, in places, for those who fly in and stay on a beach but I, and thousands of others, who live in the interior, have to fight one another’s cars for access to our waters and legendary sunsets, for the sight of Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis)

the Red Snapper (Lutjanus campechanu)

and Great Barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda)

. The roads I traveled were thick with cars driven by some who live here, some who merely visit, and those, like me, who realize what we are seeing as we rush up and down the state isn’t what we came for. It’s not the Florida that’s advertised and it’s not the Florida that used to be, most assuredly not the one where my grandparents wintered on Marco Island in a little fishing cabin lit by oil lamps.

Driving U. S. 1 toward the "Space Coast," I passed through many small communities decorating each end of their city limits with imported palms: Are they importing the Everglades and Florida Silver Palms, the Florida Royal, the Washington Palm, bringing the "Florida look" of advertising north? Every time I observe this replacement of natural landscape with palms, I wonder who has connections at the road department. Palms have, I suppose, become synonymous with “Florida,” but, honestly, we do have other trees.

Mostly, I saw cars, traffic lanes, food franchises, and gas stations, but I did twice pass over the vast blue of the St. Johns River; and, oh! how I'd like to travel its length with Bill Belleville, author of RIVER of LAKES: A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River. I also drove twice through the

potato fields of Bunnell where, on either side, rows of green plants alternate with rows of black soil, one site on this route that’s stayed the same over my lifetime. Someday, I’ll drive Hwy 100 and see condos in those potato fields; maybe actors decked out as Timucuans, paddling their dugout canoes in the St. Johns, posing for tourist photos.

I made this trip—averaging 30 mph on the way down to Brevard County—to see a convalescing friend, my father-in-law, Lee Covell, who came with Northrop to FL from California for the Snark Program of the 1950s at (what was then known as) Cape Canaveral. When Covell helped build John Glynn’s capsule for the first manned flight, he and his coworkers made history. I briefly worked in the space program myself, long ago during its early, glorious first days. I watched Neil Armstrong blast off on his trip to the moon and in 1967 I stood, transfixed, in my infant son’s room, hearing on the radio that astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee had just died in a fire on the launching pad.

It happened that during this recent visit I was in Brevard on the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, that day in 1986 when, on the TV screen, a space capsule in a smoky sky broke in half. This week, in between news reports of street demonstrations in Tunisia and Cairo, commentators repeated the names of those who died in the Challenger; again and again, I heard Ronald Reagan say of the astronauts that they had “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”

Covell is still verbally quick and humorous, but he’s fighting for what’s left of his health and independence; shuttled to appointments on weekdays, he falls asleep with his head on the dining table, suddenly, in the middle of a sentence. For his country, he fought in the Pacific during World War II, and considers himself lucky to have been hit by a grenade, awakened on a hill some distance away, and sent home, alive. I wonder what he would make of world events now--the riots in Cairo today, the tank that swung into view on the TV screen as I ate my restaurant breakfast.

I am overwhelmed by the sense that history's tides routinely sweep me onto a beach, pull away, then lift and drop me again. Lee Covell’s memories of Titusville, Cocoa Beach, and Melbourne in the early 1950s are even older than mine. He was there when beachfront went for $35 an acre, before the Indian and Banana River bridges were cluttered with traffic and motels mounted fake satellites on their roofs, when the Apollo 12 astronauts drove Corvettes, and Covell’s grandson was allowed to order speared hummingbirds at Bernard’s Surf.

I was young once and so was my father-in-law; in fact, I realize now that he was still young when I thought him old, when we first met in 1961. The old could tell the young how beautifully the land once lay before us, the rattle of palms in the wind and the plop of large fish off starboard. Though I saw no ocean and very little natural landscape, as I drove I did look up as much as I could into the swath of blue above the road and on both sides saw the silver tops of bare trees interspersed with red samara, the winged seedpod of the Red Maple.

Those scarlet flags were everywhere I went, silver, red, and blue, above and on either side of me, up I-95 and inland on 100, all the way home. Over all those cell phones, the torturous traffic, airplanes, construction equipment, and moldy roadside motels, I am firmly imposing the memory of those maples flashing their red tops against a pure blue sky.

BRRR COLD FOR MY BIRTHDAY

It’s brrrr cold outside, but I decided to walk, anyway. No time to look for my gloves. I just wound the mauve cashmere scarf my friend Eva sent around my neck and stuck the red hat on. Down to the mailbox and back with a load of mostly worthless mail; a birthday card from Frank Martin, showing an old lady leaning on a stick with a donkey trailing along behind her; the card read, “Just because you’re old, doesn’t mean you can’t have a fine ass.” That’s debatable, but it’s true tomorrow is my birthday. I figure this is as good a time as any to resume blogging.

After the mail, I gathered the laundry from the line by the river which, below me, was all black and white—and cold. I’m certain it’s cold down there. When I glanced toward my squirrel proof (new, 8’ pvc slathered with petroleum jelly holding up a pizza pan) bird feeder, I noticed at its foot a rock that seemed to be moving. Or a shape within the rock was moving. No, flexing his wings, a pigeon precisely the color of fieldstone stepped out of that rock and began to peck up bits of corn at the foot of the feeder.

Down what I call old river road (meaning it was here a hundred years ago, well before paved CR 25A), I found what I’m always looking for, the tracks of deer. In this case, the deer wasn’t crossing from left to right or right to left as I usually see but, instead, its tracks proceeded straight down the middle of the dirt road, headed toward the dead end, right where people often enter the Florida Trail. I wondered if she had been racing away from something, perhaps a vehicle or even another animal. I got pretty cold, following along and, finally, when her tracks veered off into the woods between the old road and the new, I started back.

There were winds in the trees, the old road completely shadowed and as cold as I cared it to get. For some reason, I looked to the left where the tracks had entered the woods and saw there, in the shadows, the shape of the head of a deer. That head lifted, then stared. For a moment, the beloved was watching me.

A USUAL DAY - 25 AUGUST 2010

He--or she--and I'll never know which--lived almost long enough to see tonight's silk sloughing of the sky, how its rinsed-out peach color fades as it falls below the tree line on the west.

As I started out in the car this morning, I saw the body of an infant white-tail deer--the smallest I've ever seen that close--at the side of the road, clipped, I assumed, by a car as the babe attempted to follow its mother across County Road 25A No blood, no guts, just a precious small brown and white creature, only its face on the pavement's edge.

The shoulder of the road is steep right there, no place to pull over. No cars in my rear view mirror so I pulled into my nearest neighbor's driveway. Off she went, my friend, Khrys Kontarze, to drag that baby away from the road, from those who would hit it deliberately, just as they do turtles and snakes, just to be hitting it. Yes, that happens.

Not long ago a buck was left lying half in the road, his antlers removed, two bloody stumps where they had been sawn off.

This morning's precious deer, brown and white, slender-legged and just a baby, really; he undoubtedly saw the yellow partridge peas that dot these woods, must have seen those red and yellow leaves drifting down and surely caught the scent in the air that presages what Floridians would like to call autumn.

The deer may have noticed the red seeds in the browning magnolia pods, the pointed yellowing stars of the sweetgum. If he were here now, he'd hear the owls calling, catch sight of an orange-red flash that's a cardinal launching off the pear tree. He could see now that the sky in the west is all burning coals behind the green lace of water oaks and blackgums.

This morning he may even have seen the vehicle that hit him. I hope it was quick.

HERE I AM, AFTER ALL

Book Cover for TSOMR by Artist JOHN RICE of Live Oak




---

HERE I AM, AFTER ALL--AFTER SIX WEEKS OF ABSENCE and what is my excuse? Make that plural: besides my all-embracing disaster with the old computer (which included the loss of 3,000 photos), I offer the explanation that I was supporting a new venture, the launching of The Old Florida Journal by native Alachuan Will Irby and his sidekick Tate Mikell of Archer. You can get to OFJ online (http://www.oldfloridajournal.com/ and quite soon its second edition will be out. "Mostly True, Always a Good Story," we read on the journal's cover, a painting with the feel of Art Deco, one created by Tate's brilliant sister, Grace Mikell (see the OFJ cover online). OFJ's second edition features the Plant City area and its annual strawberry festival. The first featured the area around White Springs and here's what I contributed:



WHITE SPRINGS: “A little town with a little river washing by its southern skirts . . . .”

Turn off I-75 and enter the town by way of CR 136 or alternatively, come north from Lake City on US 41 (or south on US 41 from Jasper). In the fall of the year in damp, roadside places, the cypresses turn bronze; Magnolia grandiflora’s seedpods redden. And maples and sweetgums scatter leaves of apricot, flame, and plum over the frost-browned shoulders of the roads. In February, Grandfather Greybeard flashes white along the river’s banks and the winged seeds of the maple drift into pink puddles that hint at the coming of spring.

Many years before I arrived in 1995, the late artist Theron D. Gaulding came this way with his notebooks and paints and a singular ability to see into the past He captured in nineteenth-century style a sense of White Springs that lingers yet. Copies of some of his works are displayed under polyurethane on the tabletops at the Suwannee River Diner:

I wandered the world over, seeking my meaning . . . . And then,with faltering breath I came upon a little town, with a little river washing by its southern skirts, and Live Oaks with beards of moss and birds nests lining its main street. And I started breathing deeply of fresh country air. The years passed, and the world drew farther away.

One hundred years ago this nondescript north Florida town was crowded with pilgrims whose coming for the healing waters of the sulphurous spring inspired the construction of a three-story bathhouse and 15 hotels, 14 of which burned in town fires. Only the Telford Hotel remains. Like Gaulding, I sometimes feel that:

My horse and buggy mind would have fitted more congenially then than now, but destiny brot (sic) me here.

Today, beneath its surface of shops—antiques, a grocery, four eateries, a Dollar Store, and Suwannee Hardware—lay stories rich in detail and implication. And like Theron Gaulding, I can squint and see the moving shapes of long ago. One particular story illuminates my own deepest reason for being here. Although the “miraculous” waters of the spring account for a relatively recent and busier time, it’s an ancient story that speaks subliminally to all of us Legend has it that for untold years Native American held sacred all terrain within a seven-mile radius of the spring. Within this area no one could be hurt or mistreated in any way because, it was said, Timucuan Indians pledged to protect with their lives anyone, even the occasional stranger, who entered there. They called this space “the peace ground.”

In more recent times, thousands of people have come to White Springs for the ritual Florida Folk Festival, the oldest state-sponsored folk festival in the country. Here local churches and civic groups offer up buttermilk and sweet potato pies, chicken pilaf and barbeque, cornbread, biscuits with cane syrup, mustard and collard greens, perhaps a taste of venison, and the sweet iced tea with which southerners haven’t yet kicked the habit of washing everything down. The festival, like the coming of hopeful invalids to healing waters, is also a ritual of connection and restoration. We in White Springs most certainly live in a sacred place. And I’ve hardly mentioned the river, the foremost reason anyone ever stopped here.

The Folk Festival is reincarnated in abbreviated form on one Saturday of each month when a large room set up with chairs at the Telford grows thick with locals and visitors arriving for our “White Springs Folk Club.” There musicians like Jeanie Fitchen, Rod MacDonald, and Pierce Pettis extend the tradition of Florida’s famed troubadours Will McLean, Gamble Rogers, and Don Grooms. And on the first Saturday of each month, Stephen Foster’s “Art in the Park” and evening coffeehouse open for visitors and performers whose arts and crafts, music, stories, and jokes not only amuse, but more importantly, draw us into community. The churches also get people together and to some extent, so do the Hamilton County Commission meetings up at the county seat of Jasper. Gaulding, too, spoke of people coming together, of hearing:

. . . . the little sounds of a little town all these hundreds of years . . . the unchanging life . . . [The river which moved along] to lap the sandy fringe of a little peninsula and hear the joyous carefree laughter of boys swimming.

Last year’s Christmas parade wasn’t as sizeable as others I’ve seen, but what’s amazing is the number of people lining the main drag meeting each other for the first time. Ride down Spring Street and you’d estimate the town’s population at 500. Come to the parade and you’ll rub elbows with nearly half of the 14,000 who live in Hamilton County, most of whom trail the parade into the park with donations (two canned goods or a toy). There for all to see is a splendiferous show of small, white lights stretching from the top of the carillon’s 97 bells (the world’s largest tubular bells) to the ground 200 feet below, encircling stout live oaks, and illuminating the path from the entrance gate to Nellie Bly’s kitchen where free hot dogs and Cokes are served up along with the music of people like May Frances Marshall—God’s singer if ever there was one.

Gaulding never mentions Cokes or hot dogs, but reserves his greatest admiration for the nonhuman:

Gnarled Live Oak . . . beautiful to behold . . . dark green lace against the sky . . . heralding the warm Southern spring with its blaze of crimson . . . . The trees, as in human vanity, not content with beauty enough, drape themselves with breeze-blown ribands of Spanish Moss. And amidst this quiet, gray-green loveliness, birdsong . . . a river unchanging in a world of change. A little respite from the headlong rush.

The river’s movement is:

Like adolescent youth’s mixed eagerness and apprehension at sudden venture into the strange, the uncertain. It knows not yet of the winding course awaiting.

Evidence of the river’s power abounds: at the post office and in farmers’ fields, the ever-changing depth of the river is discussed. Though we most often speak of its soothing powers and of the peace found in watching “water that’s always, always moving on,” there’s nothing like six inches of rain or the advance of a hurricane’s winds to change the focus of talk from the river’s peaceful properties to its destructive ones. Whatever the river’s level today, in as little as a week many of us could be canoeing in and out, or worse, find ourselves submerged. At flood time, we count trees, doors, dead animals, the red-striped backs of canebrake rattlers that float in on the river’s currents.

Our county that abuts the Georgia line boasts Big Shoals, Florida’s largest whitewater. It offers biking, hiking, and camping trails watched over by barred, screech, and barn owls. The ubiquitous titmouse, chickadee, and wren are joined in spring by the yellow-washed Pine Warbler. Opossum, armadillo, cottontail, squirrel, coyote, otter, sometimes black bear, and the ghosts of panthers scamper and lumber through our woods. In the dark of night the guttural voice of the tree-climbing Common Gray Fox proclaims his finds; in the daytime the woodpeckers—red-cockaded, pileated, red-bellied and downy—do their work. All of this and most beautiful of all, the white-tailed deer, belongs to the Suwannee that was once called “River of Deer” by Spanish conquistadors.

This body of water that arises in southern Georgia’s Okeefenokee and curls its way over to the Gulf was earlier named River of Echoes by Native Americans. Its current name was chosen by Stephen Foster for what became Florida’s state song. “Suwannee” means something particular to all of us and yet, the same to all. For like many of the planet’s bodies of water, this ever-changing river is a place where modern-day Theron Gauldings sense the numinous, the mystical meeting of inner and outer that (depending on the individual mindset) offers a sense of peace or sends chills up the spine. The river anchors our stories and earliest memories; it is the water into which our children leap from rope swings, the key to our welfare, an ever-changing reminder that we are subject to forces larger than ourselves.

Gaulding saw behind the folk festival and the turn-of-the-century tourist trade; imaginatively, he retraced the very creation of the land itself:

Through . . . years of primeval mist . . . a world before people . . . . a watery vast . . . dotted with small islands, ancient pines and gum-trees protruding up out of flush underbrush . . . when Florida was still under the Sea, the Gulf Stream, swinging from farther westward, and those millions of hurricanes from out of the southeast corner of the Continent . . . all those millions of years ago . . . a little spot of Earth forever unchangeable. I’ll close my eyes and see Dinosaurs wallowing in the murky ooze, and perhaps a Sabretooth Tiger . . . .

The Suwannee’s tannin-tinted waters and the white sulphur spring that flows from the springhouse are givens. Though residents can go for weeks without actually looking at the river, we move within its cloud of meaning, our deepest reason for being here this force that brought musicians, invalids, Native Americans, Theron Gaulding and many others—including me—to a place in the Suwannee River Valley just lately called White Springs.

Old Florida Journal is available online and by subscription -- 12 issues for $25--at http://www.oldfloridajournal.com/

AMONG OTHER WONDERFUL DISTRACTIONS IS THE PROGRESS TOWARD PUBLICATION OF The Salvation of Maggie Rider, a fictional work to be published by THE NORTH FLORIDA CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES, INC. The book's expected out by the time we gather at the High Springs Branch Library in September to deliver a copy of SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place in honor of Elbridge G. Cann, High Springs' esteemed editor/publisher from many years ago. El's modern-day counterpart, editor Ron DuPont, has just purchased the HERALD. Congratulations, Ron! Congratulations, High Springs! TSOMR's manuscript is in the mail on its way back from NYC copyeditor; local prizewinning artist John Rice has created a cover for this new book; see the cover at the very top of this entry.

scauthen
www.sudyecauthen.com
386-397-1284