From nearby roads, the high flood control dike shuts down any view altogether. It's one of the most known natural wonders in Florida.įar from the lower coasts and their expressways, the Seminoles' 'big water' remains the center of slow-changing Florida. The shore curves away among small towns, canefields, cattle pasture and orange groves. Even from atop the high bridge that comes alongside in Port Mayaca, the fullness of Florida's largest lake resists beholding. Lake OkeechobeeĮyes squint in the futile scan for the far side of Lake Okeechobee. Everywhere, vultures hovered above dry ponds. Only the tops of cabbage palms ruffled the horizon. I found the husk of an armadillo and the bony hinge of a cow. A turtle submerged, fish splashed, a bullfrog sounded. Beyond any trace of road, the river pulsed with life. Young pines rose from beneath the low car and strummed its undercarriage. Windmills from former ranchlands, their blades long gone, towered above cattle pastures.Īlong tracks of sand, grass and sections difficult with holes, I drove toward the Kissimmee River. Midsummer breezes danced across fields of wildflowers. A great blue heron lazily lofted itself above spatterdock lilies.Īt Seven-Mile Slough, gators, spooked, submerged in palls of turbidity. Even without binoculars I sighted crested caracara, deer, gopher tortoises, rabbits, red-shouldered hawks and wading birds. Twenty-five miles northwest of Okeechobee off CR 724, I drove across the largest remaining expanse of Florida dry prairie, the 54,000 acres of the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve. Down-home restaurants along these forgotten shores today induce small talk over platters of catfish and crab. Still others supply weekend party sites.īefore trains and cars, when settlers explored south on riverboats, the backs of today's shore towns were their fronts. Springs empty for miles down pencil narrow paddling streams others run for just yards and harbor manatees in winter. Because its descent barely exceeds an inch a mile, sometimes the river flows backward, seasonally filling Lake George a hundred miles upstream with shrimp sought by netters from everywhere. Its 310 north-flowing miles reach from shallowest marsh west of Vero Beach to the Atlantic east of Jacksonville. Though the river has its issues, the way to its embrace is playfully. On other nearby islands, you can step from a kayak onto isles of whitest sand and walk to the ends of old bridges, now fishing pier, or horses for hire will carry you beside the sea. Low causeways cross creeks once poled across by islanders. In Little Talbot Island State Park, on the north end, driftwood pruned by wind and salt lay about like elk antlers left hopelessly entangled after battle. Johns on the car ferry named for Jean Ribault, leader of the French expedition. History abides, too, in ways of getting around.

On Fort George Island, the restored Kingsley Plantation is the oldest still standing plantation home. Augustine, where Jacques Le Moyne's drawings leave us first impressions of Native Americans. They call the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve 'Jacksonville's Central Park.' Its 46,000 acres of creeks, rivers, marsh, wetlands and islands exceed New York's great park by more than five times.Īlmost a half-millennium of history abides here in re-constructed Fort Caroline, a settlement attempted two years before St. Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve The entire area is one of the most scenic places in Florida to visit. At the western end of Santa Rosa Island, Fort Pickens, one of three forts that once guarded Pensacola Bay, forms an outdoors museum. Coreopsis and goldenrod yellow the roadsides.Įast of Gulf Breeze, remnant live oaks in a section once used for shaping the hulls of early American sailing ships stand preserved, known as the Naval Live Oaks Reservation Area. Waves crash, their wake pecked by sandpipers. They were 30 feet off shore, then 20, whipping their tails, chopping away, rising up supremely!īeneath the sun the sea becomes a sequined image. One spring, I stared at the sea when a pod of dolphins suddenly barraged into a school of food fish. On such long beaches, we experience the joy of walking just to lose ourselves. Families enjoy some last swims before winter. Children mimic the monarchs' caprice, jumping with winged animation. The air flaunts orange and black tattoos against white sand and emerald waters. In fall, the migration of monarch butterflies from Mexico pauses along the Gulf Islands National Seashore near Pensacola.

Florida scenery