The Peace of Blue: Water Journeys

Introduction

If there is magic on this planet,

it is contained in water.

Anthropologist Loren Eiseley

I went down to Rock Cub spring the other day to see if it was still flowing. We’ve been in a prolonged drought here in Florida, an event that aids in the progressive destruction of natural landscapes around us. The effects of that drought are magnified by the great thirst of resident Floridians and by the millions who come to visit as tourists every year.

The springs are inside a state forest not far from my home. Although land around it is in public ownership, the delicate balance of its ecology is in jeopardy because the private land far beyond its boundaries affects its health. Our Florida springs are recharged by rainfall seeping through the porous uplands. There’s already a massive storehouse of this water down in the aquifer below. But most of it was accrued long before modern growth and its caffeinated promotion set in. It’s easy to have a functioning aquifer in a state with 2 million people—which is about how many lived here in the 1950s. But when that population is multiplied nine or ten times, the native stasis that nourishes these springs is thrown all out of whack.

Limestone boulder in the shape of a bear cub that sits in the middle of Rock Cub spring.

Indeed, the vitality of both our surface and groundwater in this sea-level state often depends on the kindness of strangers upstream—and the strangers have not always been kind. We have worked diligently over the last century to uproot our rare and naturally bountiful places—dredging, draining, and burning to make way for fantasy worlds and walled, upscale developments and glitzy resorts. Now, periodic droughts and the fires that follow in their wake continue that human-driven work. It was only logical that I should worry about the health of a tiny spring.

Rock Cub is actually a series of four or five separate seeps that splay out of the bottom of a high bluff. The topographical map that first led me to it a few years ago showed the landscape dropping dramatically forty to fifty feet down a sloping terrain. At the bottom, the slope leveled out onto a blackwater swamp. The first time I walked down to the little springs, I had to hang onto the limbs of small water oaks and bay magnolias, grabbing the occasional frond of a sabal palm to keep from falling on my butt. There was no path here, not even one made by animals, and my only trail marker was the hope that the bluff would, sooner or later, flatten out into the swamp below.

My most recent visit was more of the same—an ungraceful slow-mo freefall down the seepage slope, dodging the prickly catbrier vines and the finely woven webs of the golden orb spiders. At the bottom, the springs still streamed from the base of the limestone bluff. The outflow was only a few inches deep, but it was enough to polish the fine grains of silica and shell and lime rock in the spring run so they glowed luminously when shafts of sunlight hit them. A limestone boulder in the shape of a bear cub sat in the middle, and the ether of the clear water flowed up and around it.

I have visited this boulder and its springs during different seasons—by winter, with no foliage canopy to provide shade, it is stark and bright, the rock itself bare and gray. By summer, with the thick crown of sweetgum and tupelo and oak above, and ferns, lichens, and mosses below, the scene changes: bromeliads spike the branches of the water oaks, and the bear cub grows a rich coat of jade-colored mosses. The springs, insulated by the thick, surrounding jungle, seem to actually resonate, each refolding itself into a gentle gurgle, as if the lime-rock bear itself has taken life and is sipping from them.

I wonder at the sheer timelessness of such places, of how swamps and seepage slopes that sometimes feed them are among the least changed features of the landscape. If they have not been mechanically dredged and excavated and destroyed, these relic shards of nature can be portals to an ancient world. What I see today is not dissimilar to what other humans must have experienced when these springs first began to flow here eight to ten thousand years ago.

In this way, swamps and marshes function as time machines, places that that can transport us back to a very real, water-driven wilderness. If they afforded no other benefit, that alone would be worth the price of admission. But they allow a multitude of riches—storing and filtering water, keeping our climate and landscape moist, and housing a vast biological storehouse of animals and plants.

Our flowing rivers—whether they arise from a waterlogged swamp or marsh or as the collective outflow from scads of springs—function in a similar fashion. The larger rivers also served as aquatic roadways, allowing early Native Americans to navigate what amounted to a subtropical rainforest sitting atop a saturated sponge of water in Florida’s dense interior.

But the pervasiveness of water doesn’t end there. The Gulf of Mexico and the southern Atlantic swash the shores of most of peninsular Florida, creating what amounts to a flat, linear island tethered to the mainland by a slab of undulating sandy terrain.

Water is the singular feature that has made Florida what it is today. Add a warm, temperate, and subtropical climate to that, and you find a place where the diversity of animals and plants soars, both under the water as well as atop the landscape nearby. And, as the scientist Edward O. Wilson has astutely observed, the greater the biological diversity of any place, the greater the cultural diversity. Perhaps that’s because humans who occupy a more complex landscape acknowledge the capacity for multiplicity on some deeper level. If that is so, then maybe the variety of habitats expands the cultural vision to include all those provincial behaviors that have radiated out to fill the many niches in the landscape.

Geographically, the islands of the sprawling Caribbean are considered a subregion of North America. But if you reverse the ethno-territoriality of that perspective, you will also see that Florida is regarded as part of the Caribbean Basin. Currents that sweep through the Caribbean often brush up against our shores. Indeed, plants and other living organisms of the Caribbean—including Florida’s official state butterfly, the zebra longwing—have also alighted here over time. Many have ridden prevailing currents of air and water for hundreds and thousands of years in this way. Politically, Florida may be a world apart from the thousands of islands of the Bahamas and the Antilles, but biologically, these places are deeply intertwined.

Like any highly diverse bioregion, our Florida watersheds should be managed in a way that keeps them healthy and sustainable—by using the higher truth of ecological realities rather than political ones. Although the mouth of a deep, wide river may seem vastly different from its distant soggy genesis, a mature understanding of the entire natural gestalt of that waterway is needed if it is to be fully understood.

Many of my excursions in this book take place in this Florida because that’s where I’ve spent most of my adult life. But some stray into the Caribbean because that’s where I’ve sometimes gone to report on expeditions, or other scientific projects that have to do in some way with water.

For someone trying to get a feel for water, the larger bioregion of Florida and the Caribbean is surely a great place to begin. The ocean, springs, rivers, and lagoons are generally blue—when not busy being turquoise or tannin, cobalt or gray. But a deeper, more personal look reveals another side, one that goes far beyond color and form, sometimes even skirting the edges of the great ecological unconscious itself. And once that blue is breeched—both physically and metaphorically—there’s no telling how far the perspective may roam. If we’re lucky, during the very best moments of a water experience, we might even come to know a very real peace.

While I’ve done my share of expository reporting early on, my natural inclination is to personally chronicle the observations and feelings and actions that imprint themselves onto a life. After all, as a little boy, the larger world first opened itself to me when I sat on my grandmother’s lap as she read stories to me from books. And as an adolescent, I grew up in a relatively isolated countryside where so much of the culture still relied on storytelling for information.

By the time I was well into adulthood, I realized that the comforting childhood fondness for allowing a narrative to explain life had traveled along with me. And I found that some very astute authors were explaining the dynamics of this. Everything is held together with stories, the nature writer Barry Lopez has said. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

In this same way, my childhood life in the then-remote peninsula of the Eastern Shore of Maryland where we lived was also defined by nature—which was acknowledged by playing outside, sometimes roaming for miles across a rural countryside veined with creeks and rivers and dotted with lakes. If I appreciated the notion of story on a fundamental level, I felt every bit as strong about nature because it had left such an enduring mark on my life. When I began to tease apart the many ways this environment has been meaningful to me as an adult, I found one very potent universal thread—and it was water.

And so, in this collection, I have tried to illustrate this connection in as many ways as possible. As a result, it may be realized by paddling a kayak in the full darkness of night, scuba diving or snorkeling, hiking in the bottomlands of a remote swamp—or simply walking with my little sheltie along the shore of a domestic lake. It may also be evoked when I immerse myself in the ancient, desert-like scrub and sandhill communities that exist because they were once shoals and islands and sandbars when the peninsula that is Florida first emerged from the sea.

While you may find pragmatic data about water woven into many of these narratives, I hope that information won’t overwhelm the story itself. Although I do explain scientific aspects of the water equation now and then, I leave the more detailed abstract writing to others who excel in the expository approach to earth science.

The essays of The Peace of Blue are not intended to be polemics that attempt to herd readers into water advocacy. Rather, they are one man’s experiences in trying to fully inhabit a place. In doing so, they rely as much on our sensibilities as they do on anything else. As the Pulitzer-winning author Richard Rhodes has advised, The great benefit of experience is that your senses gather information directly and you feel it. No collection of documents is as ever as rich in detail as experience itself.

It is direct experience that helps each of us understand our landscapes more fully. In doing so, we acknowledge the emotional boundaries of a place—realizing not just the lineage of its culture and its science, but expressing how it makes us feel. In this way, the full knowledge of a certain place can also sculpt our identity in profound ways. Even if water seems to play only a minor role in creating the milieu for a story that may not dwell on its presence, it’s still there—and it still embodies a universal and elemental dynamic.

I do hope these chronicles will illustrate how blue in all of its many incarnations might play a role in the dreams and memories of our own human lives. If we’re fortunate, it might function as a portal to lead us to a vernacular experience in nature, one that’s inextricably intimate and real. After all, the energy of water will be there, and we will know its power on some deeper instinctual level. Why not alert the conscious to what the great yawning unconscious already knows? I’m figuring that Carl Jung might raise his paddle high to that possibility.

When I finished assembling the essays that reveal my own personal toehold on the sway of blue, I actually wondered if I even needed to write an introduction explaining the primal and everlasting power of water in our lives. Certainly, water is the solution of our freshwater springs and rivers, bays and oceans—indeed, it is the element that covers three-fifths of our planet, the driving force of a true global reckoning. It is where our distant ancestors were first nurtured into life, where our fetal development mimics the progression of the water-bound life form that has gradually and painstakingly become terrestrial and human. After all, with over 70 percent of our bodies occupied by water, we are not just surrounded by it—and bred to it—but we are virtual walking vessels of it.

Nonetheless, in our era of überspecialization, we linear-minded moderns tend to see the water-driven environment as a place apart from ourselves—a place maybe in need of tinkering, exploiting, or even restoring. Yet, a more whole approach—such as that still found in many native cultures—helps us realize that it also lives inside of us, literally and otherwise.

My intent is not to create an intellectual précis about water, but rather to describe some of the excursions that have informed my own life. In doing so, I’ve tried to be honest about the true intimacy of place. As the writer David James Duncan has frankly noted, The rivers that have moved me are those I’ve fished and fallen into and canoed and swam and slept beside; those I’ve lived on, nearly drowned in, dreamt about, sipped tea and wine by, taught kids to swim in, pulled a thousand fish from, and fought to defend.

A corollary of this truth also explains why otherwise well-meaning eco-advocates sometimes miss the boat by immersing themselves not in the heartfelt experiences of nature, but in the strident rhetoric of intellectual righteousness.

As for me, I’ve carefully banked my own water memories since I was a little boy. They date to when I first heard the crash of the ocean on the sandy beaches of the Atlantic, when I learned to fish and crab with my family—and where, as an adult, I have had some of the greatest adventures anyone could dream of. As a kid, I simply loved being around water. As an adult, I have found inspiration, discovery, and a generous dose of Loren Eiseley’s magic there.

All great love stories have a beginning, and my own relationship with water was launched when I looked through a mask for the first time as a seven-year-old in a swimming pool and found that another world existed just under the surface. It wasn’t a natural world, and the lower bodies of the others standing there in the shallow chlorinated pool water didn’t make it any more so. But it did leave me with the ingenious notion that I could take that mask—and others like it—to just about any place where there was water. Once there, I might actually see through to another dimension, to the other side of blue.

A few years after my first underwater satori, I found myself using another mask to join Danny, a childhood friend, in a hunt for an old millstone in a lake near our country homes. The small lake was fed by an upland creek, and when the pond water flowed over a little waterfall, it tumbled down into another, slightly lower stream. The subtle gradient of the landscape would transport that swamp-bred water away to a deeper and wider river, until finally, it reached a massive bay and then the sea itself.

I was in my early teens then, and it struck me that the terrain itself played a large role in how water moved—or how it stayed relatively still. It was the gradient, after all, that made this lake particularly useful since the local business of grain farming could be more fully realized by a water-powered grinding mill.

The mill was emblematic of a time when mechanization was first harnessed to do the work that historically had been accomplished by brute strength. But the availability of electricity and an improved transportation system would eventually spell an end to the old mills. Most were simply abandoned, with the picturesque wooden mill houses left to slowly rot away, and the massive round-flat granite stones left to fall into the waters of the lake or stream where they had once held such vital sway.

Danny had done his own exploring on and under the waters of that little lake, and one day he had been rewarded with the discovery of the millstone itself. By the time I was invited to visit and fin out to the submerged stone, Danny was certain of its location. It was only a hundred yards or so from shore, near the place where the lake still spilled out into a lower creek. The water was as murky and cold as any I would later experience as an adult, and my visibility from inside the little mask was only a few inches. Still, the thrill I first experienced when I found the stone and ran my hands across its rough granite surface far exceeded any discomfort or cold or murky water.

These early discoveries were springboards to the adventures I would later have as I traveled as an adult to other water-infused landscapes. I soon learned that if I were curious and stubborn enough, I could prevail over just about any unpleasant challenge that might be looming there in my cherished world of blue—whether I experienced it underwater or on land.

Water—often just the memory of it—helps jar me out of that technological trance that our prosperous American society keeps trying to lull me into. And that has been reason enough to do what I can to connect with a landscape in which fresh or salt water has played an essential role in the human experience. Geographers sometimes use a term to describe our particular affection and caring for a certain place. It’s topophilia, and if you’ve spent any time at all chasing after landscape-driven experiences, you’ll know what this means—and, if you’re really lucky, you’ll know how it feels.

If I’m going to stray down this philosophical slough, I’ll also need to consider a broader perspective about the peace of blue. Water may be managed in a great many ways by us humans. But the ultimate truth is that water is a timeless and essential force all by itself. As such, it exerts its own very real management on the human race, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Some of this energy surely has to do with enchantment—and with our never-ending human infatuation for it. But there’s something very primal going on here as well. We are air-breathing mammals. And regardless of the clever methods we’ve invented to take us across and under the water, the aquatic world will never be as directly accessible to our senses as a terrestrial habitat. It is no wonder that astronauts in training for space learn fundamental behaviors by being submerged in a tank of water. Since we cannot breathe underwater without an artificial aid of some kind, any liquid habitat will always be less known, less explored, and less understood. It is and always will remain truly wild because of this.

But there is more. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Water is probably the only natural resource to touch all aspects of human civilization—from agricultural and industrial development to the cultural and religious values embedded in society. Although it doesn’t use the term sense of place, the WHO does note, The way water is used and valued constitutes an integral part of a society’s cultural identity.

So while you’re unlikely to find any essays here that deconstruct the notion of a cultural identity, I hope that the shards of emotional information in these stories will help reveal that connect-the-dot rationale we humans often seek when we roam about in nature.

I may rant a bit every now and again at how wealthy scoundrels and their political toadies are sucking the liquid blue out of our landscapes, and how—if allowed to continue—they will destroy the very nature that first drew humans to any given place to begin with. While I surely advocate a sustainable approach to water use, I take great satisfaction in knowing you will find a very informed and eloquent library of both journalism and literature elsewhere to help you understand what is happening with our shared water commons—and why you should not allow it to continue. You’ll find excellent advocacy-based case studies in books ranging from Cynthia Barnett’s contemporary Blue Revolution to earlier works by Rachel Carson and Henry David Thoreau, all of which reflect commonsense discourses dating to the ancient Greek philosophers.

Similarly, I won’t be expounding on any higher economic value of fresh- or salt water. Certainly, I do understand that folks sometimes must resort to that argument when making a case to save a stream in a wooded park, a freshwater spring, or a river. Our Western world is very good about assigning arbitrary values to material things and natural places—because that’s the only worth some folks will understand. Still, I feel that by playing that game, we validate it in some way and that validation makes it more difficult for others to bond with the full emotional and spiritual energy of that place.

Consider this: the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has been practicing meditation and mindfulness for more than seventy years. By most accounts, he radiates an extraordinary sense of calm and peace. Thay, as he is known to his followers, says the current trend that puts an economic value on nature is similar to layering plaster on a gaping wound. I don’t think it will work, Thay told the Guardian in 2012. We need a real awakening, enlightenment, to change our way of thinking and seeing things.

Thay says change will happen on a fundamental level only if, instead of assigning an economic value to our springs and coral reefs, we fall back in love with the planet that birthed and nurtured us. You carry Mother Earth within you, says Thay. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

And, really, the notion of topophilia arises out of an earnest caring for a specific place—just as a topographical map is created to chart the contours of a particular landscape. Technology and its diagrams may help lead us to a place—indeed, its many moving parts may power a plane or boat or scuba tank. But these are simply tools to understanding the water-crafted landscape and not ways to dominate or exploit it in a more efficient manner.

To fully appreciate the value of sense of place, identify the most predominant and enchanting natural feature where you live, or where you most love to travel. Then imagine what that place on earth would be like if that feature were to vanish. There’s no dollar figure in the world you can put on such a loss. It goes far beyond the economics of waterfront real estate and retail sales and seafood landings, and strays into the desolation of loss-driven despair.

Certainly, introducing readers to any commodity of blue is not intended to arm them with covetous and arcane information. Instead, it encourages bonding with a place on earth, one invaluable emotional contour at a time. From that bond, a real-world ethic may sprout, even flourish. After all, as the ecologist Aldo Leopold once advised, We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

Properly informed with our own personal discoveries, we might then resist the narrow perceptions that our so-called modern Western culture often places upon a liquid, organic world that is still wonderfully alive with wisdom and discovery and light.

1 A Florida River at Night

The Incredible Lightness of Being

We drive down a dirt road atop a massive pre-Columbian Indian midden, bleached and knobby snail shells packed tightly just under the patina of grasses and fresh, white, modern gravel. The river is flowing ever so gently just as it has for thousands of years, and the midden slopes down as if to greet it.

Paddling under large bow in a tree limb. Photo by Michelle Thatcher.

I park as close to the shore as I can and undo the straps holding our kayaks on the car roof. My friend Michelle is with me, and she works the straps on one side of the cab while I do the same on the other. The sun will disappear below the horizon in an hour or so—but it will hide behind the tree line of cypress and sweetgum and bay before that. The residual light of day is a luxury now, and it allows us the clarity to get our small boats down and into the water without stumbling or otherwise losing context. When we return to this shore later in the night, it will take much longer to reload in the dark.

We’re here for the rising of the full moon over this subtropical Florida river, an event that will take place in a few more hours. The sight of a full moon over water has always fascinated me; there’s something comforting in the way the pale light glows as it’s reflected in the dark liquid. Almost as if it marks a place, for just now, where the heavens and