BACKROADS AND BOBTAILS
TIME BY NATURE'S CLOCK
by Bob Kornegay

The historic St. Johns River winds its way up the western edge of the Florida Peninsula from the tidal marshes of Indian River County toward the final leg of its northward journey through the teeming environs of Jacksonville. There, it dies as it was born, in the warm southern Atlantic.

Along the mighty stream's unchecked pathway, this "river of lakes" moves inexorably past riverine bank boundaries that have through passing decades become inevitably pockmarked by telltale scars of mankind's "progress" and its self-justifying biblical dominion over all things natural and pristine. Man, you see, has long worked and played there, and it shows. River towns have boomed and sprawled, and riverfolk have taken both fair and unfair advantage. The results of the former are gentle and kind, the latter's intrusions ravishing and glaring.

Still, there are places. Ah, yes, special places along the St. Johns where all seems right and good, fast-disappearing God's-in-his-heaven-all's-rightwith the-world places.

One of these is where I now find myself, where the river flows through the western reaches of Volusia County. Here along a 10 or 12-mile stretch, the St. Johns and much of its natural canal/slough system is, thankfully, bounded by lands controlled by state-managed wildlife management areas and a sizable National Wildlife Refuge. Help also comes a few miles upstream from the sprawling Ocala National Forest. For now, at least, the wetland merits some measure of protection from the ravages of modern civilization.

This is a river corridor where time, as measured by Mother Nature, at least, has passed largely as she intended. This is a place where "development" means alligator nests and heron rookeries, black bear habitations and bald eagle "fishing resorts." Largemouth bass, chain pickerel, and venerable old bowfins reside in floating pennywort "subdivisions" and tough-rooted spatterdock "condos." Ospreys commute between high-rise cypress "penthouses." Here, a creature walking upright, with hide devoid of fur, feathers, or scales feels and is, in fact, every bit the intruder.

Here walked John James Audubon and William Bartram. Here, save for the absence of the huge, towering cypress trees lost to past-centuries logging, one sees things as they did. Old Florida, the good Florida once deemed worthless by human standards. Did Audubon ever view a long-dead grandfather of the manatees I saw earlier up a river slough? Were some of his famous paintings inspired by bloodline links to the limpkin and blue heron over there in the reeds? Did Bartram one day long ago lean wearily against an ancestor of that regal sabel palm growing near the bank?

A man feels privileged here in this somehow sacred place, blessed even, as if he's reaped some measure of divine, undeserved reward, not for anything given or accomplished, but just because some Magnificent Magnanimous Ruler perhaps recognized a deep-core need and said, "Come, look here. I want to show you something. This is what I intended."

My, such fabled flights of fancy. Hey, where did that sudden chill come from? And why are my eyes misting up? I'm a hardened, unemotional old outdoorsman, aren't I?

Well, maybe not today. Come to think of it, I've not touched my fishing rod for the past hour. Good bet that I won't pick it up for the rest of the afternoon. Not that I feel guilty, mind you. The fishing is good, and fishing here seems noble somehow. I just don't want to right now.

Right now I'd rather watch the eagles and the ospreys and the herons. They're the real fishermen. Compared to them, I'm a rank amateur. And compared to their fishing spot, I am so insignificant.

I'll leave here soon, but a part of me shall remain. It's a part I'll return to rejoin as soon as I can. If it's a part of my soul, so be it. If a man cannot spare a little piece of soul for residence here, he had not much of a soul in the beginning.