Rescuing Mom

Head Waters of the Spring From Florida State Park Website

     Or How I Saved My Mother From Drifting Out to Sea.

     Itchetucknee Springs State Park is four miles northwest of Fort White in the northern part of Florida. The bone-chilling crystal clear water entices kayak and canoe enthusiasts as well as the hardy souls who ride the current in huge inner tubes. Our family was no different.

     My brother was perhaps seven and I was fourteen the summer we stopped at Itchetucknee for a tubing adventure. In 1972, about the time we were there, the head spring was declared a National Natural Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior.  It was easy to see why it was a popular place. The frigid water was just the ticket on a sweaty humid Florida summer day. 

     Dad rented huge inner tubes for all of us from a little beat up wooden shack near the side of the road on the way to the head spring. My brother and I perused the selection of innertubes as if there was a world of difference between any of the tubues in the mountain of rubber piled up beside the store. We debated whether or not it mattered that the number painted on the side of the tubes in bright yellow paint was a low number or a high number and if so, who got to choose the higher number. After finally making our choice, or more accurately, after Dad pointed to four and said, "We'll take those" we stuffed them in our Volkswagen van and headed to the park.

Florida State Parks Website

    Squealing and grimacing at the cold, we made it into the water and the family set off. The trip was long and slow as we meandered with the current.  We could see clear down to the white sand bottom and the fish that swam below us. The bottom was visible no matter how far down it was from our feet. The river gently turned us from one side to the other as we talked, laughed and splashed each other just to hear a scream. From the moment we entered the water, Mom cautioned us to keep an eye out for the landing beach.

Florida State Parks Website

     As you would suspect, the waters of the Itchetucknee attracted people to its shores way before the 50s and 60s when college students discovered the area and tubing became a big deal. There was a Spanish/Native American village in the area called the Mission de San Martin de Timucua. Built in 1608, it wasn't even the first. There appears to be evidence of humans in the area thousands of years ago. There was even a little town of Itchetucknee by 1884.

    After stopping on a nice sandy beach for lunch, we resumed floating, and my mother once again started warning us of doom if any of us missed the landing beach. "You'll just float out to sea. I don't know where we'd be able to find you" she'd say. Hours later, we saw the beach approaching in the distance. (See "Tube Take-out Point" on the map below.) My Dad, brother and I paddled our way toward the shore and slipped out of the tubes to stand on the mucky bottom. We then turned around and watched as Mom floated by with a look of panic on her face. She was heading toward the wetlands and the Sante Fe River. She was heading out to sea. I turned and looked at Dad who was looking at Mom and just shaking his head. My brother yelled, "Mommy! Mommy! Where are you going?"

     Junior life guard that I was, I bravely dove in the water and swam to her rescue. I grabbed the side of her inner tube and started trying to pull her to shore. Suddenly, the idea that SHE was the one who had missed the landing beach she had been warning all of US about for the last several hours struck her as funny and she started laughing. So, I started laughing. My father stood on the beach next to my starting-to-panic little brother, hands on his hips, with an I-can't-believe-this expression on his face as my mother and I shrieked like banshees celebrating New Year's Eve as we slowly drifted down the river.

     I couldn't tell you how far past the beach we got before we calmed down enough for me to swim her to shore. I did finally manage to bring her in, though. It was quite some vacation and the memory of Mom floating past us still causes snickers among family members.

     I went down the Itchetucknee River a few times after that while I was in college at Florida State University. The water never got warmer. It was always clear to the bottom. But I never did get to pull anyone else out of the river.

Florida State Parks.org

Back Roads to Cross Creek

     Just south of Gainesville, in a part of Florida I hadn't visited before, I found a piece of Florida that made my history-loving soul giddy. Most people, including myself, speed by on nearby Interstate 75 on their way to or from much bigger and seemingly more adventurous destinations. But this time, I had the great good fortune to be traveling with a loved one who indulges my inner history geek. We actually exited off of the interstate.


     It took twenty minutes or so of driving through North Florida countryside over two lane roads lined by trees with limbs dripping  spanish moss to arrive at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park in Cross Creek, Florida. The further we drove into the Florida wilderness, the further it felt we turned back the clock. By the time we arrived at the Park, we were in the 1930s.

     We parked the car on what one of the brochures said was originally Ms. Rawlings cow pasture. The brochure claimed that Rawlings said the cow "had an evil temper but gave the richest cream." (www.FloridaStateParks.org).  On foot, we walked through the gate and headed through what was a citrus grove. Not too many trees are in the grove now, but there are enough to tell how it might have looked. We passed the barn, reconstructed to look as if it had been standing solidly there for a hundred years, and the chicken coop, complete with chickens, to arrive at the house.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Farm House

     When Rawlings moved to this area in 1928, the house was actually three separate buildings that had been assembled gradually over the past forty years and connected with porches. The same brochure said that it was an "old board and batten house...constructed mostly of heart pine in the Florida Cracker style, with its raised floor, high ceilings and many windows and doors for cross ventilation." It's been restored and the Friends of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farms, Inc. are continually working on preservation.


     I could go on and on about the house and the surrounding property, but I have to tell you that as a writer, I was drawn to the screened porch on the east side of the house. This was where Rawlings did most of her writing at a cypress table with chairs made from palmetto palm posts and deer hide. The group has even outfitted the table with a typewriter from the period, an ashtray and a box of Ms. Rawlings' favorite cigarettes. To sit at that table and ponder how to write a particular scene while looking out at the little road and trees draped with spanish moss while the scent of orange blossoms wafts gently through the screen seemed to me to be a writer's idea of heaven.

     Possibly best known for The Yearling (1938), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published books from 1933 until 2002, despite having passed away in 1953. Several books have been written about her and Cross Creek and there have been been no less than three movies based on her writing. She knew how to convey the feeling of her little town and the difficult times of her era arguably better than most.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

     Ms. Rawlings perhaps described how she felt about her farm in Cross Creek best when she said, "It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. One is now inside the orange grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another, and after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home."

     May you find your own little corner of the world that surrounds you with this same feeling.

Copyright 2012 Ruth Hartman Berge