RIP, Steve Bridges

I read today that Steve Bridges died. I hadn't thought about him in years, probably because I haven't watched The Tonight Show regularly in many years (since an entertainer named Carson appeared on it a lot). I would never have heard of Bridges, in fact, except that I happened to be at the right place at the right time to see him live. The man had talent.

"Impressionist Steve Bridges, who used prosthetics and wigs to turn into presidents and laughs to make a living, was found dead at his home, his manager said Monday," an AP article by Sue Manning reported late this afternoon. "He was 48. Bridges returned from China on Feb. 23 and complained to friends of 'super jet lag,' manager Randy Nolen said. Bridges' maid found the comic dead about 9:30 a.m. Saturday in his Los Angeles home, Nolen said."

In early 2004, I visited the Boca Raton Resort & Club, which was hosting a national convention of a prominent real estate trade association. We conventioneers were promised a headliner as entertainment one evening, but not told who it would be. As I later wrote, "everyone was waiting for the unspecified 'entertainment' mentioned in the program. Rumor was that Jerry Seinfield was going to show up -- plausible, since the apartment landlords of the nation could come up with whatever his astronomical fee would be.

"He was mentioned because people had sighted Larry David, Seinfield’s long-time writer, at the Boca Raton Resort & Club. In fact, my associate Anthony saw David as we walked through the lobby earlier that day. I wouldn't have recognized him, but Anthony was sure it was him.

"The entertainment turned out to be presidential impersonator Steve Bridges, and it was a spot-on impersonation of Bush the Younger, one of the best I've ever seen of any politician, and outrageously funny."

I was glad to read that Bridges had a larger career than just doing George W. Bush, since there's only so much mileage a comic's going to get out of any one politician (though he milked it well). "Sometimes, Bridges would do shows without makeup that were titled 'Steve As Steve' and showcased his 200 voices — from Bill O'Reilly to Rush Limbaugh to Tom Brokaw and all the presidents from Kennedy to Obama," the AP article noted. Bridges might have died young, but at least he had more professional luck than Vaughn Meader.

Item From the Past: Beaches of the Florida Panhandle

I didn't spend much time on the beach in Florida in early October 2007, when I visited WaterColor and Seaside. (See Seaside, Florida, Part 1; Goin' to the Chapel; and Last Photo Series.) Maybe part of the reason was an unwelcoming attitude on the part of municipal officials.

I found a public access path not too far away and accessed the astonishingly white beaches of northwest Florida for a few minutes, without encountering Security Enforcement. This summer, I wondered about these beaches, and how many tar balls might have found their way onto the vividly white sands in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon's noxious gift to the Gulf of Mexico.

It's hard to know exactly what has happened on exactly that small bit of the Florida coast, short of visiting in person at the right time. Check the Seaside web site and there doesn't seem to be a peep about oil, which is no surprise, since the site has a chamber of commerce vibe to it, even if no actual chamber is involved. The site's motto: More than a way of life, a way of living! Huh?

This interactive map suggests that some oil visited the 30A corridor, Florida 30A being the road that runs next to the coast in this area. It was published by ESRI to show off its GIS software. This Facebook page, The Oil Spill and South Walton/Scenic Hwy 30A, also offers some clues.

In any case, I visited the beach along Seaside three years ago.

The place certainly had its charms.

But even if I'd had a trip scheduled for this year, I would have gone. To see tar balls for myself, if there were any to be seen.

Florida Wrap

Downtown Tallahassee has a feature called the Park Avenue "chain of parks," which is essentially a series of long and narrow city blocks, end to end, given over to parkland but flanked by historic properties, such as the Greek Revival structure fittingly called "The Columns," now home to the area chamber of commerce. Tallahassee must also be a 9-to-5/Mon-to-Fri sort of downtown, so on a Saturday afternoon no one else was strolling the length of the chain of parks but me, even though it's a fine walk. A number of the Tallahassee homeless were present, especially toward one end of the chain. They weren't strolling, but instead on their backs. No doubt their day had had plenty enough walking.

Sportscaster Red Barber (1908-92) has a small monument in one of the parks. Apparently he lived a good bit of his life in Tallahassee. I'm not old enough to have heard him broadcast any games, but I remember his gravelly voice as Bob Edwards interviewed him on Morning Edition in the late '80s, when he was a link to old-time sports.

Only a mile or so from downtown Tallahassee is Lake Ella, which features a 0.6-mile walking path around a small lake, or a large pond. Unlike downtown, a lot of people were there on Saturday before sunset: walkers, dog-walkers, joggers, couples, families with little kids, even a wedding party having photos made at the gazebo next to the lake. One youngish guy, all in black and looking like an out-of-place Manhattan hipster, sat so still on a bench that I thought he was one of those hyperrealistic human-figure statues for a few seconds, until he scratched his nose. A lot of birds lived in the water. Mostly weird birds I'd never seen the likes of before, critters that looked like a cross between a large duck and a small buzzard.

Next to the walking path and squared in behind a fence was a Vietnam-era Huey (UH-1) helicopter, identified as 68-157848, with a red cross on its side. It was a memorial to the soldiers of Leon County who fought in that war. Their names were written on the side of the chopper. I've seen a lot of military monuments, but I think that was the first helicopter as part of a monument, rather than as war materiel display. Not far away was a smaller stone monument, something like a cylinder about as tall as my chest, weather-worn, stained and neglected. MERCI it said, in large letters. Also inscribed was: "aux soldats et au peuple Americains... 15 août 1944." Why Tallahassee got the thanks of France for its liberation, while it was still happening no less, I couldn't say.

Going into the trip, the restaurant chain Chick-Fil-A was something of a mystery to me. Maybe that brand was in Nashville in the mid-80s, but I don't remember it. I don't ever remember seeing it in Illinois, either. I imagined that Chick-Fil-A was confined to the Deep South. Maybe it was, once. But now there are more than 1,400 outlets in 37 states, including some in such bone fide Yankee states as Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan and Minnesota. I wanted to try it in any case, and did, in Tallahassee. Wow. That was some good chicken sandwich. All fast food should be like that.

One thing I learned during the trip that I would never have guessed: the Air Force tests drones in the airspace off the coast of the Florida panhandle. Tyndall AFB, on the coast east of Panama City, is a hub for this kind of thing. In fact, this part of Florida is the place for U.S. drone-testing.

Fairly early Sunday morning, I drove through Youngstown, Fla., on US 231, and next to road I noticed a cluster of police cars – in a town that size, maybe most of the force. Cops were standing next to the road on either side of two figures close to ground. At some distance, I figured it was an arrest. I got closer and noticed that one figure, a man in a white shirt, seemed to be holding on to the other, which was not a man, but an alligator. Animal control, Florida-style.

Port St. Joe & the Ghosts of Old St. Joseph

Apalachicola wasn't the only panhandle Florida town that I wanted to revisit. Though not as picturesque in that classic Southern style, Port St. Joe was also worth a second look. US 98, which runs from Washington, Miss., to Palm Beach, Fla., follows the coast closely while passing through Port St. Joe, which is a former paper mill town. The paper mill is gone, though a resin factory still endures near the highway.

Eventually, the town will be considerably larger than it is now (about 3,500 people, a little larger than Apalachicola), with the addition of new residential properties along the coast northwest of town, a good-looking development that I visited in 2007. But growth is stalled for the moment, of course.

St. Joseph Peninsula, a nearby barrier formation that includes Cape San Blas and a state park at the tip of the peninsula renowned for its beaches, probably would have been worth several hours of my time, but I wanted to go on to Apalachicola and then inland to Tallahassee, so I shorted my visit to Port St. Joe. Still, I spent enough time there to see an obscure strip of a park, just off US 98: Constitution Convention Museum State Park.

It was a pleasant, green park occupied by not another soul when I was there. The monument off in the distance of the photo above lauds the achievements of the first territorial constitutional convention, held at that spot in late 1838 and early 1839, back when the settlement was called St. Joseph. Somewhere, there's an official record of the meeting, but I suspect that besides official work, the event was also a chance for landowners from various remote parts of the territory to get together and drink heavily and otherwise entertain themselves during "winter," when the heat and mosquitoes wouldn't have been so irritating. A building at one end of the park, which I assumed housed early Florida artifacts, was closed.

The Florida State Parks web site has this to say about the old town of St. Joseph: "More than 150 years ago, St. Joseph was selected over Tallahassee (the territorial capital) as the site of the state's Constitution Convention because of antagonism between East Florida and Middle Florida and because of the efforts of boomtown promoters. St. Joseph, created in 1835, was a boomtown [competing] with the town of Apalachicola as a trading port...."

Shortly after the convention, however, things started to go badly for the town. Really bad. "In the summer of 1841, yellow fever reached epidemic proportions in the entire territory, and St. Joseph was especially hard hit," the Florida Parks web site continues. "The population declined from already fewer than 6,000 to 400 in less than one year. Many of the deserted houses were dismantled and shipped to Apalachicola for reconstruction."

Yellow fever wasn't quite the end of the town, but then, true to the one-damn-thing-after-another school of history, "the hurricane of September 1844 completely destroyed what remained of the town. The only thing left was the town's cemetery -- a grim reminder of a small town's struggle to compete."

Naturally, I had to visit that cemetery, too, before I left the modern town of Port St. Joe. It wasn't far from the park, but nothing is far from anything else in a place that size. This is the gate.

A plaque near the gate said: "The fenced portion of Old St. Joseph Cemetery constitutes only a small part of the original burial ground of the city of Old St. Joseph (1835-1841). Mass burial sites of yellow fever victims lie in unmarked graves..."

Also near the entrance is a list of people thought to be buried at the site, sometimes including their occupation as well as names, and it seems that yellow fever struck down the prominent as well as the humble. A brick walkway runs a horseshoe-shaped course through the property, and I followed it around. There are a few headstones, but mostly the cemetery is open space, except for a modern gazebo and handful of unmarked brick structures that must have been above-ground crypts. The Old St. Joseph Cemetery wasn't as picturesque as Apalachicola's Chestnut Street Cemetery, but it was more poignant.

Return to Apalachicola

I didn't have enough time in the town of Apalachicola, Florida, about a year and a half ago (see October 15 & 16, 2007), even though I spent the night there at the time. So I determined to go back and spend a few hours looking around, especially in the Chestnut Street Cemetery.

My photo only hints at the weathered stones and obelisks, rusting ironwork and crumbling fences, or the towering, ancient trees festooned with Spanish moss, or the weedy patches of ground, or the light humid quiet of the late afternoon, when I was at Chestnut Street Cemetery alone, except for the dead. Egbert, Hutchinson, R. Knickmeyer (Co. B, 4th Fla. Inf. CSA), Orman, Wise and Zingarelli were among the names I could read. A lot of names had been almost completely effaced by time.

Atlanta photographer Paul Clark took a lot better images of the place than I ever could, which are here -- but note that entirely fitting background music plays when the page of images opens.

The Florida historical marker at the cemetery says the following: "Chestnut Street Cemetery dates prior to 1831. Interred are some of Apalachicola's founders and molders of her colorful history. Also buried here are many soldiers of the Confederacy and victims of yellow fever and shipwrecks. Seven of the Confederate veterans served with Pickett at Gettysburg in the gallant Florida Brigade. World famed botanist, Dr. Alvin Wentworth Chapman, of Apalachicola died in 1899, and is interred here beside the grave of his wife."

A list of Confederate veterans in the cemetery is here. I didn't see Dr. Chapman's stone at the cemetery -- it would have taken quite a while to find any particular stone without a reference -- but of course I looked him up later, finding this eloquent obituary, which describes him as "the leading authority on the flora of the southern United States." He seems to have achieved that by force of intellect and a passionate interest, not by specialized academic training animated by credentialism.

I spent time among the living of Apalachicola as well, but on a late Friday afternoon there weren't all that many people wandering around the streets near the waterfront. The town fishermen, for one thing, had called it a day by that time, docking their boats within easy viewing distance for any passerby. Reportedly one in ten oysters harvested in U.S. waters comes from the estuary where the Apalachicola River meets the Gulf of Mexico, right offshore from the town.

Across the street (Water Street) from the waterfront is a block of brick structures in various state of repair, many of which had begun their existence as warehouses in the brisk cotton trade that used to be the mainstay of the town's economy. Now much of the block is part of the town's tourist infrastructure, as are other blocks near the water. But unlike some picturesque small towns, the town isn't wholly given over to accommodating visitors with eateries, small non-chain hotels, antique purveyors, galleries, boutiques, gift shops, nicknackeries and so on.

Most of the stores were closed by the time I got there, anyway. But I was glad to see the decades-old Applachicola Seafood Grill open for business. I had a feeling I couldn't go wrong if I had dinner there, and I was right. Best fried oysters I've ever eaten.

Ft. Gadsden State Historic Site, Fla.

Curious phrase, "the middle of nowhere." Everywhere is somewhere. Then again, few things are quite as satisfying as driving down a two-lane highway through the middle of nowhere. Even if by that we only mean through the ignored peripheries of human ken, places given over to whatever shape the wilderness takes on either side of the road.

Florida 65 runs mostly north-south nearly the entire way from the ocean to the border with Georgia. It's a passage through incredibly lush forests, including parts of the Apalachicola National Forest and the entertainingly named Tate's Hell State Forest (poor Tate, alive before DEET), connecting only scattered outposts of humanity. I'm not remotely qualified as a naturalist to appreciate the riches of the territory, at either high speed or zero mph, but I could still marvel at the many green hues, the twisted trunks, the bushy undergrowth and the swampy patches of earth even from behind a wheel.

"The Florida panhandle, centered on the Apalachicola River Basin and part of the larger Southeastern Conifer forest ecoregion, is a well-known hotspot for biodiversity," writes Brett Paben of WildLaw, a "non-profit environmental law firm." Though steeped in eco-speak, he seems to have a better handle on the natural history of the area than I do.

"It is home to the richest endemic plant life in the South and 75 percent of Florida’s plant species," he writes. "These longleaf pine forests and their wiregrass understory also provide habitat for a host of rare species... Tree diversity and endemism is among the highest of any North American forest, with more than 190 tree species and 27 endemics. The wiregrass community contains some of the most diverse herbs in the world, with a single stand containing as many as 200 species."

The road roughly parallels the Apalachicola River, which runs the from the Georgia border to debouch into the Gulf at Apalachicola Bay. The river also happens to mark most of the boundary between Central and Eastern time in Florida. If you consult either Rand McNally or Michelin road maps of Florida, you'll see a point-of-interest spot denoting Ft. Gadsden State Historic Site (AAA maps ignore it), though one map puts it west of the highway and the other east.

It's actually west of the highway, along with Apalachicola River, which was the highway back when Ft. Gadsden was an active fort. From Florida 65, you take a west-bound, unpaved road a few miles to another semi-paved road that leads south to the historic site. The forest is very dense there, and the site feels like few people ever visit. No one else was there last Saturday afternoon when I arrived, except maybe the shades of the people who died there in 1816.

ExploreSouthernHistory.com describes the event: "On July 27, 1816, at the culmination of an invasion of Spanish Florida, a pair of U.S. Navy gunboats attacked a powerfully built fort on the Apalachicola River. Built by the British during the War of 1812, the post was called the 'Negro Fort' by the U.S. government. Inside its walls were 300 African-American men, women and children and around 20 Choctaw warriors...

"Troops from the 4th U.S. Infantry, reinforced by hundreds of allied Creek warriors, surrounded the fort and demanded its surrender. The occupants of the 'Negro Fort' refused to give up... The gunboats closed in and opened fire. The occupants of the fort fired back. A massive battle appeared in the making, but disaster struck. The fifth shot from the gunboats, a cannon ball heated red hot to set the fort on fire, fell into one of the main gunpowder magazines.

"In a blinding flash, the fort exploded. The commander of the American troops reported that the 'explosion was awful and the scene horrible beyond description.' ... Of the 320 men, women and children in the fort, 270 died instantly. The rest were taken prisoner and most carried back to Georgia and returned to slavery..."

A longer description and pictures of the site are here. I got out of my car to look around. The forest seemed even more oppressively dense with rain clouds gathering overhead. The air was warn and a little steamy. All I heard was the crunching of my footsteps, the mild rush of the wind, the twitter of birds and, suddenly, the buzz of mosquitoes. Mammals as large as human beings must be a tasty treat for the mosquitoes of the Apalachicola River Basin, because they attacked with terrific speed and in increasing numbers. For all I know, there are a dozen kinds, part of the wonderful biodiversity of the area. I had no chemical protection. I'd forgotten to pack anything with DEET in it, and the TSA might have taken it away anyway.

I took a short look at an interpretive kiosk that had some artifacts behind glass, and another look at the Milly Francis marker, but within a few minutes I retreated to the car. A couple of the mozzies followed me in, but I managed to dispatch the bastards in a pop of my blood.

In Old Florida

I entered the old state capitol in downtown Tallahassee through the back entrance late Saturday afternoon and started up the stairs near the rotunda, but a gentleman coming down the stairs told me that the museum was about to close. He was a little shorter than I am, a little older, had more beard, and there was an ID pined to his shirt -- he worked in the museum.

"Is that the new capitol over there?" I asked, gesturing toward the office building across the plaza. I'd seen a sign on it that said it was the capitol, but I wanted confirmation.

"Yeah," he answered. "It was finished in 1977."

We talked a little about how that wasn't the best time for memorable architecture, and a moment later he invited me to look around the museum with him as he closed up. We went through a couple of rooms and the more we talked, the more eager he seemed to tell me about what I was seeing. He must have sensed my tendency to be a regional history buff of wherever I go, however cursorily or temporarily. Someone who works at a place like the old capitol surely has antennae attuned to opportunities to talk about what he knows.

We came to an exhibit room called "Great Events at the Historic Capitol." This was, he told me, the first exhibit he himself had designed for the old capitol. "Let me show you a few things I think you'd be interested in," he continued. Sounded good to me.

At this point, another fellow walked into the room, a visitor like me, and my impromptu guide told him it was closing time. But in short order the other guy proved to be even more of a buff than me, so he joined our little group, and the museum employee told us about a variety of items on display and conversed with us about Florida history. And Southern history, and the history of the War Between the States, and other kinds of history. The other visitor was taller and fatter than I am, which made him pretty tall and fat, and roughly the same age as our guide. I knew this because they shared memories of watching The Gray Ghost as kids, a TV show based on the exploits of John Singleton Mosby that first aired in the late '50s, a little before my time.

The guide pointed out a number of flags hanging in the room, both official and unofficial flags over Florida at one time or another, including some oddities. Such as this one from the time of statehood in 1845, which proclaims the motto, "Let Us Alone," and the more explicit pro-secession flag of 1861, whose motto was, "The Rights of the South at All Hazards!" The large three stars of that flag represent those states that had left the Union by the time Florida did, indicated by lettering for South Carolina and Mississippi, besides Florida. Presumably the other 12 stars are like popcorn kernels waiting to pop. Eight more states followed Florida, so the designers must have been hoping for the secession of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware too.

The flag of the ephemeral Republic of West Florida, the Bonnie Blue Flag, wasn't on display, and we talked a bit about West Florida. "They know a lot more about West Florida in Louisiana than we do," noted our guide. The subject of the Conch Republic, and its flag, didn't come up.

A howitzer of Civil War vintage is inside a large box whose sides were almost all glass, right in the middle of the same room as the flags. There was considerable discussion about it, including the fact that it and another gun had once set in front of the old capitol when it was simply the capitol -- and our guide remembered playing on it as a child. Much more recently, it had been his job to squeeze it into the box, and it looked like a very tight fit. The gun was not, in fact, used by Confederates. It had been a Union gun, possibly even at Gettysburg, and after the war had come south with the U.S. Army. Eventually the state of Florida got it as an antique.

We talked of these things and more. I have a new appreciation for Florida history. It actually has a history. The panhandle, now living in the shadows of central and southern Florida, is arguably the taproot of the modern state. The state's history is interesting, anyway, by which I mean violent, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. More about that tomorrow.

A Tale of Two Capitols

I have opinions about what state capitols should look like, more or less. One thing they should not look like is this:

That is an office building. Moreover, it's an office building designed in the 1970s. If rating decades means anything at all, the '70s are as underrated as the '60s are overrated, but many of the office buildings created during those years are hard to like -- uninspired at best, ugly at worst, though of course ugly office buildings were being built in earlier decades. Anyway, the photo above is the uninspired state capitol of Florida. It isn't ugly, especially. But it isn't much of a capitol.

Strictly speaking, a capitol is an office building for government workers. But it ought to look like so much more: a hub of republican government, a statement by the state that distinguishes it from all the others, and at best a fine work of architecture. It can even be a skyscraper and achieve those things. Nebraska's capitol, which I saw a few years ago, does that.

I'd didn't see the inside of the 1977 Florida capitol because it's closed on weekends, so I won't say it's completely uninspired. Maybe it is, inside. For all its exterior 1950s-ness, for example, the United Nations headquarters manages to be interesting inside. But the outside of the Florida capitol might as well be an office building anywhere, except for the unadorned domes on either side of the main office shaft, which lend the complex a certain masculine aspect.

The old state capitol, vintage 1902, is across a nearly empty plaza from the newer capitol complex, and is now a museum. The contrast is hard to miss:

Now that's a capitol. Even though I arrived just before closing at about 4:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, I went in, and was well rewarded for my efforts. More about that tomorrow.

View From a Runway

Last Friday was probably the one and only time I will ever stand on an airport runway. I've deplaned onto tarmacs, but that isn't what I mean. By "stand on an airport runway," I mean stand smack in the middle of a stretch of concrete that airplanes typically use to land and take off. And I don't mean a runway at some general aviation airport. I was on a runway that could land a jumbo jet.

I didn't break any federal laws to take in this peculiar vista, since the runway is part of an airport still under construction, and I was the guest of the airport authority, so I could look around and write about the place. Write about it again, actually. To quote myself from an article I did about three years ago:

"Built it and they will come. Occasionally that happens in real life, and in the case of Bay County, Florida, it's about to happen in a big way... 'It' in this case means a new international airport in Bay County -- the first major airport developed in United States in years. 'They' mean home-buying retirees from the Midwest and Northeast, time-sharing vacationers, beachfront aficionados and spring-break revelers, real estate investors, developers, speculators and flippers. The rush is just beginning."

The rush might be delayed by the current state of the economy, but the airport's going to be ready for them when they eventually come, as they surely will. People familiar with the project told me that construction will be done in about a year. When I was at the new Panama City airport on Friday, only part of the the skeleton of main terminal building looked finished, and none of its exterior was; the control tower was just a stump; and an enormous pile of asphalt stood near the runway, waiting to be used in some part of the project. Workmen here and there attended to parts of the project. A couple of cranes were hoisting things. Earth movers were scraping away earth.

Still, the basic structure of the runway was there, long and flat. Flatness in both lengthwise directions, so far that it almost extended to the horizon. A thin rim of greenery marked that horizon, which was sandwiched that day between a bright blue sky with puffy white clouds and the reflected brightness of the white runway surface. As the picture shows, the surface sported a lot of tire marks.

The surface was still unpainted, so I saw no alphanumerics or other symbols known best to pilots, but I did notice that the surface was grooved, for traction. Our guide said that the slight slope to either side directs the rain off the runway, and I couldn't help but think of way Roman roads deflected water, even though the comparison is probably off. There was no threat of rain on Friday. It was sunny, and it was Florida in mid-May, yet the spot wasn't quite as hot as I'd expected. Could be that the whiteness of the surface bounced some of the heat away.

So even if I hadn't seen anything anything else on this latest trip to Florida, I'd count it as a success, in terms of novelty. But I did see other things between flying down late last Thursday (to the existing airport) and returning early Sunday: parts of Panama City and Tallahassee, long stretches of state and national forests lush with the Southern summer, a couple of small-town Southern cemeteries complete with ancient trees and their Spanish moss, a pair of capitols, the site of an explosion heard 100 miles away in Pensacola, docked fishing boats smelling of recent cargo, a lighthouse, a delightful city park that included a Huey helicopter, and this item:

This statue can be found near a small office building at E. 1030 Lafayette St., Tallahassee, Florida. No indication of why it was there, but I suppose it was because the property owners wanted a statue.

News & Update

News From Afar: My old friend Nancy, who lives in Austin with her husband Jon, is expecting a child toward the end of this year, her first. Some context: I've known her since 1976, during her freshman year in high school and my sophomore year. Congratulations and best of luck to them. Fewer and fewer of my cohort (more or less) are producing children, though I suppose there will be a trickle for many years yet.

Update: Geof Huth, who had open-heart surgery earlier this year, seems to have made a strong recovery. In any case, he's sending me a steady stream of postcards once more, including a goodly number from his recent destination of Englewood, Florida, on the Gulf coast between Sarasota and Fort Myers. Including one depicting a trail in Oscar Scherer State Park, a place I was previously unfamiliar with, though in planning our '05 Florida trip I briefly considered the nearby Myakka River State Park as a destination. I would have happily skipped Disneyworld for it.

"We spent part if the day," Geof wrote on April 14, "--enough of it to sunburn my neck--walking the trials of Oscar Scherer State Park, parts of which are remarkably prehistoric in their feel, though the park's gift shop is careful not to include any postcards that accurately portray that character of the park."

There aren't too many places in North America any more with that prehistoric feel, I'd think. Wouldn't park management want to play that up? Come for the nature trails, stay for the hunting/gathering.

Next Time, I'll Get a Jar

A big storm was promised for Thursday evening, and from the looks of distant lightning, someone got it. All we got was winds and fast-moving clouds. The winds were brisk enough to inspire me to store foldable chairs and other backyard items in the garage, to prevent them from becoming flyable chairs and other backyard projectiles. I'm going to need those windows on the house intact, when winter actually comes.

One more bit about Florida. I didn't have time to hunt down any tupelo honey there in the capital of tupelo honey. No time to look around for it, but it turns out that you really don't know what you're getting anyway, something like dragon well tea. I asked the clerk at one of the shops at the Tallahassee airport whether he sold tupelo honey.

"No, and I keep calling them to buy some, because a lot of people ask me about it, but they never call back," he said. "I tell them I could sell a lot of honey here."

He didn't say who "they" were, but I guess he meant one of the famed purveyors of that honey, maybe Peter Fonda's outfit.

There and Back

About two weeks before I went on my trip, I read an article about regional jets. Sure, jumbo jets are getting jumbo-er, but apparently airlines are taking to regional jets in a big way as well. In fact, the article promised that you too, reader, would be flying on one before long.

Sure enough, only weeks later I was on an ERJ-145, a regional jet built by Brazilian aircraft maker Embraer, for an American Airlines direct flight from O'Hare to Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. It is the smallest jet I've ever been on, so small that while entering I had to duck my head. After that, the ceiling of the aisle was barely tall enough to accommodate my full six feet. There were single seats on the left side of the aircraft -- I don't know that that qualifies as a "row," since you'd need at least two seats to make a row -- which is what the rows on the right side had, two seats. I sat in one of the single seats. In terms of take off, flight, and landing, the ERJ-145 might have been small, but the flight experience didn't really feel that much different than that of larger jets.

When checking in at O'Hare, the counter clerk said, "Ft. Walton Beach? I didn't know we flew there. Now what's the airport code?" It was a rhetorical question, since she was looking it up when she asked. The answer: VPS, which must have originated with Valparaiso, Florida, another town near the airport -- which is actually called the Okaloosa County Airport.

You have to like an airport with a name like that, and one at which you get off the plane using a steps down to the tarmac. Eglin Air Force Base is nearby, and various Air Force jets, which I took to be trainers, were parked here and there within sight as we taxied toward the Okaloosa County Airport terminal. It is a new terminal -- 2004, a sign told me -- and refreshingly small. There were only two conveyor belts for baggage, which didn't mean that I couldn't wait for about five minutes next to the wrong one.

The aircraft and the airports weren't so novel on my return, which took me from Tallahassee to Atlanta to Chicago, though I did note that it's not the Tallahassee International Airport, but the Tallahassee Regional Airport (TLH). Nice to know that they're not putting on international airs, but I bet if Cuba ever opens again to US commercial air traffic, "international" might be right. (Then again, there's no reason flights couldn't go from Tallahassee to Mexico right now, and earn that coveted international status.) I liked Tallahassee's airport, because it reminded me of the former, simpler configuration of the San Antonio airport -- or the old Midway, for that matter -- to which you could just drive up to, get out of the car, and check in.

Apalachicola

I enjoyed just saying Apalachicola. Say it distinctly, ap-a-lach-i-cola, lingering over each syllable like you might a peaty sip of Lagavulin. What a fine place-name.

It sounds like a place where King Cotton passed through on the way to the mills of England, only to be strangled by a Yankee blockade, a place with a square block of a cemetery dotted with worn stones and populated by prominent oaks bearded with Spanish moss, and also a place with some working boats -- fishing boats -- docked in sight of stone warehouses now slowly being transformed, as a group, into restaurants and other attractions.

It sounds like a place that had a post-war revival (and I mean the Civil War), this time based on lumber, which left behind a stock of Victorian and other housing styles treasured again in the late 20th century -- when the renovations and the return to the houses' former colorful exteriors began in earnest. But it's still a small town, the sort of place that has one street with traffic. On a Thursday morning, the other streets are empty enough to bicycle down for a few minutes without too much worry, using the bright yellow bike provided by your hotel. People are out walking their dogs down the middle of these fairly empty streets.

Room 8

I had about three or four waking hours in Apalachicola, Florida, earlier this month, and it wasn't nearly enough. But they were high-quality hours, so I can't say I left town unhappy. In the first place, we stayed at the Coombs Inn (aka the Coombs House), and I had the splendid Room 8 all to myself. That by itself was worth coming to town for. I didn't take pictures, but the Coombs House has a web site with photos, including Room 8 -- the former master bedroom.

Wow. Such elegant appointments made me, a creature of the informal classes, feel a little out place. But that passes quickly. The room and its decor had only one flaw, I thought, one feature that didn't fit (not visible in the photo): an HDTV. I didn't touch it. It wouldn't have been right, and might have even bothered the shade of Mr. Coombs, in whose bedroom I was staying.

The Last Photo Series of Seaside, Florida, Taken With a Camera I Hadn't Quite Learned How to Use

One more posting on Seaside. After the retail district and the church, I wandered down a few residential streets. Seaside isn't actually a town in the sense that people live there most of the time. For all its New Urbanist fame, it's still a resort town, meaning that many owners reside there a only few weeks out of the year, along with renters who come and go. Summer's supposed to be fairly busy, as is Christmas and spring break.

In early October, the town felt empty. But the place was lush, and the houses marked by colorful variety, grouped close together to promote high density and walkability. It promoted walking in my case, anyway. I saw only one or two other pedestrians, a couple of bicyclists and one car drive by in the hour or so that I spent on the streets, looking at things and taking pictures.

Pretty soon I noticed that each of the houses had a name, most whimsical, though I'd made a mistake in not taking a pen or paper with me, since I can't remember any of them except a pink bungalow called -- not something I would call my house -- Dreamsicle. Unlike much of Seaside, I understand that house-naming wasn't part of the plan, but spontaneous. Some of the houses were tucked away further from the ocean were fairly modest (in size, not price), such as this one. (Looking at the photo very closely, I see that the house's name is The Panhandle, Circa 1983.)

Others, especially closer to the ocean, were larger. Just daring a hurricane to come along: "C'mon, ya want a piece of me, huh, punk storm?" Actually, hurricanes Opal in 1995 and Dennis in 2005 did hit near Seaside, and from what I've read, the town itself held up fairly well, though the beaches suffered temporarily. Below is a larger structure, with an emblematic Seaside tower, evoking the widow walks of New England:

I liked this tower:

Below is half of a narrow boulevard, lush with growth in the center. Note the picket fences, which are standard in Seaside. Porches are too. Does that made the town phony somehow? No, I just suspect that some people have ridiculous standards of "authenticity," especially as it applies to places they don't live.

This is the other half of the boulevard.

Seaside, Florida, Part 1

Seaside, Florida is a cool walking town. Of course, it was built to be a cool walking town, or at least a town that you can traverse on foot without much strain -- compact and with smallish houses that sit pretty close to one another. Last week I walked around town for about an hour and a half, which is how I spent most of my precious free time on the press trip to Florida.

Sea kayaking was another (theoretical) option for that free time. Call me eccentric, but I didn’t want to jam a new sport into such a short period. I did want to see the granddaddy town of New Urbanism, however.

Seaside radiates a few blocks in each direction (except into the ocean) from a community green along its main road, Florida 30A. On the green is a post office almost small enough to put in your back pocket, and ringing the green is retail and (I think) office space that’s somewhat larger, up to four stories tall. On the beach side of the road is a complex of beachy restaurants and shops: places to eat cheeseburgers and drink beer al fresco or shop for colorful dresses or sandals, not so different from other beach retail.

Below is the Seaside post office. If I'd had anything to mail, I would have gone inside.

Next is the cheeseburger-in-paradise joint: Pickles Snack Station, serving among other refreshments, Land Shark Lager, a Anheuser Busch Co. brew pretending to be from Jacksonville and having something to do with Jimmy Buffett. Beyond the beach retail complex is the beach itself, preternaturally white, and mostly only accessible to residents of Seaside and their guests, though I found at least two public access points.

And below is some of the larger retail ringing Seaside’s green. I understand that it’s fairly new, and after I got a look at the rest of the town, I too felt that it was out of scale with everything else.

More tomorrow.

Panhandle Fauna. Bugs, Mostly

At first I noticed the butterflies. Monarchs, which are hard to miss, flitting around the astounding variety of flowers at Cerulean Park – see yesterday's description of the flora. I must have walked past dozens of monarch butterflies, and then began to notice the less-brightly colored butterflies, which were numerous as well, and the yet smaller but equally numerous other bugs darting around.

Occasionally, I'd see bees almost as long as my thumb, glistening black with dashes of yellow. Up north, we have more compact bees. Even in Texas, I never remember seeing bees of this size, curling wicked stingers in reserve, but most occupied with pillaging the flowers. Africanized killer bees? If I were going to design an Africanized killer bee, these bees would fit the part. Or maybe they're just friendly ol' Panhandle bees who've been making tupelo honey since the time when the Creek lived here.

Mainly, however, I encountered smaller insects in the panhandle. Mosquitoes, of course. Rising out of the wet Florida biomass to dine on warm blood, they were active enough to target me a number of times, which says something, since I'm normally only moderately interesting to mosquitoes (they like Yuriko better, it seems). Then there were the biting black flies -- October is the season, I heard. One of the other fellows on the press trip went for a swim around around sunset and said he met the black flies in some number.

"Love bugs" (Plecia nearctica) were a different matter all together. Though native to the Texas Gulf coast as well, I'd never heard of these black, innocuous-looking bugs. Early October seemed to be their season, too, and while they don't bite, they swarm. In premodern times, they probably went completely unnoticed, but in our time, they're numerous along the roads of the Gulf coast, and die in large numbers on car front bumpers and windshields. I can attest to this, from seeing front bumpers and windshields on this trip. There they were: more bug splatter than I'd seen since we drove through rural South Dakota in high summer. I was told it's good to wash them off your car frequently, not only for aesthetics, but also because they're slightly acidic.

Up the coast, some miles east of the Apalachicola River estuary, we walked on a boardwalk near the ocean, though the intermediate lands between the pine forest and the dunes. Such land holds a wealth of creatures, and it was there that I saw most of the trip's larger animals, including lizards, pelicans, sand pipers, egrets and a lone bald eagle, partly hiding in a tall tree. I've probably seen more eagles in Florida than any other state, which only means I need to get out west more.

Cerulean Afternoon

Shortly after arriving at my first Florida Panhandle destination last Monday afternoon, I did what I always do at a new place if I can -- take a walk. It was about an hour before sunset and an hour and a half before we were slated to meet for dinner. I had already been impressed, driving in, by the town's design and its subtropical landscaping. I wanted to see more.

Practically outside my front door was Cerulean Park, a long strip of land, intensely landscaped, running most of the way through phase one of the town. I don't know landscaping, but I know what I like, and I was immediately taken with the park. I'd describe it further, but Landscape Architecture, the magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects, has already done so, in its December 2003 issue. The Byrd quoted in the article is Warren Byrd, a principal of Susan Nelson-Warren Byrd Landscape Architects of Charlottesville, Virginia, who designed the park.

"A narrow canal, 340 feet long, extends almost the entire length of the park's west side. It runs parallel to an 8-foot-wide, crushed-shell walking path... Flanking the canal are gardens planted with flowering annuals and perennials. 'One place we have allowed introduction of nonnatives is in Cerulean Park, because we are trying to make it more of a botanic garden and give it color,' Byrd notes. 'Some of the annuals and perennials are not necessarily native, but they are not invasive. And they're great because they not only provide color but also really draw the wildlife—the butterflies, birds, and bees.'

"The narrow canal, or runnel, originates in a small basin where a large granite cup gently overflows like the natural springs found in the region. Its water cascades through a series of shallow falls down the gradual slope into a large oval pond. Embracing one side of the pond is an arc of native water plants, and slicing across it off center is a wooden footbridge that provides an ideal vantage point for watching the variety of koi that move hypnotically beneath it. The pond serves more than a decorative function: It doubles as a catchment and storage area for stormwater.

"East of the canal, an expanse of lawn is planted with a drought-resistant, salt-tolerant 'seashore paspalum' grass. Oval-shaped islands of native vegetation are scattered throughout the lawn, allowing the preservation of significant native trees and masses of ground... Indeed, the contrast of the grassy plane against the sculptural forms of the sand live oaks and vertical spires of slash pines makes a special event out of the native species. Woody shrubs, masses of saw palmettos, and beds of grayish reindeer lichen form a textured carpet beneath the trees...."

At one time, the dream of landscapers was to reach worldwide for exotic plantings, the bigger the variety the better. Now the thing must be local sourcing. As the article mentioned, friendly expat plants dwell in the park, but mostly Cerulean flora are a greatest hits collection of the Florida Panhandle. Also, to update the article, there were no koi in the water. Maybe they didn't thrive.

Follow the park path for a distance, and you arrive at a footbridge across a small lake. I managed not to take any decent pictures of the park, but I did stand on the bridge and shot the following.

The shapes jutting upward are made of glass, and I think they're supposed to evoke cattails. There were more of them in the upscale restaurant in which we had our first dinner that night.

Florida Panhandle ’07

Last week I took a press trip to the Florida Panhandle. Though I’ve been a member of the press for some years, this was my first honest-to-God press trip, which consists of a sponsor taking journalists around somewhere, feeding them, and showing them something. Later, the same journalists write about that something, which is typically related to the press trip sponsor – an example would be a tourist board showing its destination off. It's a common m.o. in the travel writing business, I understand.

I suppose a journalist could take a press trip and then not bother to write about anything he saw on it. I suspect nothing bad would happen to him, except he wouldn’t be invited on any more press trips.

The sites we saw were real estate developments – perfectly appropriate for me. But I won’t go into details about the trip sponsor or its developments here. That’s for elsewhere. Enough to say that I appreciate the effort and expense they took in showing us around. They treated us right, and they’re developing some interesting properties.

On October 1, a regional jet took me from O’Hare directly to the small airport near Ft. Walton Beach, which is near the better-known Destin, Florida. Then one of the organizers of the trip and I drove in a rental car partly down Florida 30A to a town near the famed Seaside, Florida, where we stayed two nights with the other journalists at one of the sponsor’s developments. People buy properties there mostly as second homes, but actually the property I stayed in was large enough for a family to live in full time.

On October 3, we headed east in a small convoy along the coast on US 98, eventually arriving at the wonderfully named Apalachicola, Florida, for the last overnight. The next day we saw one more property up the coast, and then I caught a flight back to Chicago, via Atlanta, in Tallahassee.

In terms of weather, it wasn’t much of a transition from northern Illinois to northwestern Florida, since it’s been a warm early October up here – and still is, in the upper 80s today. Otherwise, it was quite a switch. A switch to light traffic along two-lane highways through miles of slash pines, dunes so white they were albino, and places with cheese grits on the menu. Most days, I don’t feel like a white seersucker suit and a Panama hat or a straw boater would be anything but strange on me, but it would have been just the thing on the humid balcony of the century-old Coombs Hotel in Apalachicola, overlooking enormous trees and their Spanish moss. Most nights, I can’t see that many stars or smell the sea, but I had that pleasure the first night, so much so that I didn’t mind being lost on foot in the little town for a few minutes.

On the whole, my traveling companions were intelligent company, and the people who showed us the various properties were knowledgeable about local matters, so I heard about things I probably wouldn’t have on my own, even if I didn’t experience them firsthand. Such as the intense interest in sport fishing for redfish along that part of Florida coast, or the creation of an enormous artificial reef south of Pensacola by the sinking of the decommissioned carrier Oriskany last year, or the nether world of countless dead cypress stumps in the remote Dead Lakes region of the panhandle. Or my own favorite, the Worm Gruntin' Festival of Sopchoppy, Florida.

50% Off, Come 2015

Exceptionally busy today. I think a regular job would be less work, all things considered. Had a job interview, an article to finish up, an interlude during which we thought Ann was going to be seriously ill. Fortunately, she seems to be better now.

Finally, at last, it’s unambiguously warm, the way May should be. This means that we’re certain to be blasted by a cold front next week. Call me a pessimist. I’ve lived here long enough.

Another letter from Best Western came today. This one was from the hotel we actually stayed at, with its distinctive parrot-decorated return address. It was from a new general manager, one Laurie Ward, who apologized again and offered us half off our next stay, upon presentation of the letter.

When will that be? Who knows? Five or ten years might be reasonable estimates, if then. But I have files. This letter will find a home in my files, and if the time ever comes, I will take it to Florida and demand my 50% discount.