Camping in Florida

1

FOR several years after the First World War my wife and I rented houses and made long stays at Palm Beach, then a much less sophisticated resort than it is today. I had a model T Ford station wagon that had been rebuilt for camping purposes. On one side of the car, where one would normally step in and out, there was a wonderful wooden contraption of little cupboards, each with its door. These contained staple groceries and such items as onions, sweet potatoes, and other vegetables which were not particularly perishable. There were slings for our guns under the top of the car; and in the place where the back seat would have been, we had stowed a tent, camp cots, folding chairs, and a folding table in such a way as still to leave room for a dog.

I drove, with our friendly guide, Frank Carlisle, beside me. In the second seat, often, was my wife, accompanied perhaps by one of her sisters, her father, or her mother, who were frequent visitors. Our usual procedure was to drive north up the Dixie Highway, then a narrow black road, where at times it was difficult for two cars to pass, but now the great boulevard, route U. S. 1, with its dreary vista of billboards and hot-dog stands.

At Jupiter we usually stopped for a visit to Bowers’s store. This was a typical country store where one could buy anything from iodine to sweet potatoes. We liked to trade there because the people were so kindly and it was such fun to sit and spin yarns for a while, occasionally reaching out for the prune box or the cracker barrel. Then we would turn inland on the narrow sandy road to Indian Town. When the water in the woods was not too high, there were many places where one could drive far off the road to the north or south, penetrating what was known as Hungryland or the Loxahatchee Marsh. Here quail abounded, there were still lots of turkeys and plenty of deer, and one seldom met a soul.

There was a ditch beside the road where big bass congregated during dry weather, no doubt because the water stayed cool in the deep holes. If was only a matter of minutes after Frank and I had got back from our morning hunt to where Rosamond would be sitting in the shade in our folding Livingston chair, probably knitting, before we kicked off our shoes and got out our little seine. We each took an end, and kept the seine taut by putting the toes of one foot through the mesh at the bottom, and holding up the upper corner. Then, by scuffing along, we worked the seine around one of these big holes.

In less than no time we’d have half a dozen twoor three-pound bass flopping about on the sand of the roadside. I believe Ros would agree with me, though she holds no brief for camping in general, that those bass, fried immediately, were succulent beyond exaggeration, and the particular type of sweet potatoes which we chose, when sliced and fried, could be eaten out of hand just like a hard cracker. They not only were savory but they stayed by one very satisfactorily.

One day, while we were at lunch, we looked out through the woods and saw two little gray foxes walking along across a wide stretch of short grass. I wanted those foxes for the Agassiz Museum and Frank knew just how to get them. We jumped for our guns and Frank started to run towards them, letting out bloodcurdling whoops. One fox did what he expectcd both would do: squat down flat in the short grass. This one was easily gathered in. The other one ran into a little bay head about an acre in area in the midst of a shallow needle-grass pond. I ran around, plowing through the water, and got to the other side of the head. Frank went in where the fox had entered, and started to light up some dead limbs and a few dry palmetto fans which happened to be right where they were wanted. In a jiffy the fox came out on the run in easy range for my old beloved Bradell twelve-gauge, and we had our two specimens.

We often met up with Dan Parker, a handsome young Indian, and his pretty bride, one of the Tiger Tail girls, she being loaded down with yard upon yard of brightly colored beads about her neck to show the magnitude of her aristocratic inheritance. Occasionally they lunched with us. We frequently tried to camp near where Billy Stewart— another Indian — had his clan hunting. Then, if any trifling cracker came round with theft on his mind, some Indian would be sure to see him and tell us about it. The Indians never entertained such ideas themselves.

You may wonder why I use the word “cracker.” I wondered myself for many years. The name is applied to what may be called the poor white natives of Georgia and Florida. Reading Bartram once supplied the answer. He said, as I remember it, “I journeyed now into the land of the corn crackers.” As the world knows, the crackers’ staple food is hominy grits and gravy, and grits, of course, are made from cracked Indian corn.

2

ONE winter while John Phillips and I were enjoying the hospitality of Charlie and Louise Choate at Palm Beach, there was a good deal of water in the flatwoods and we decided to make a rather ambitious hunting excursion. I suspect we were lazier than usual by pure “ happenchance,” to use an old localism. We picked out three good-looking and husky and, as it turned out, very skittish horses, and arranged to have their owner deliver them to us at an appointed rendezvous a good many miles west of West Palm Beach.

We set forth at the crack of dawn, reached the appointed spot soon after day broke, and found the horses waiting for us. They had been on the move all night. I mounted one horse, Frank another, and a colored boy whom we had decided to bring along to look after our steeds mounted the third. John Phillips drove the car; he never liked horses anyway.

We moved along about five miles, and all the time it became more and more obvious that my nag was utterly unreliable. I was riding across a prairie pond when he suddenly got wind of a good big water moccasin. One prodigious buck burst the girths and left me, and the saddle, in the pond — as a matter of fact, pretty close to the moccasin. The horse started straight for home. I shook myself off and got into the car with John. Through the open woods we could see our horse going like a bat out of hell. We felt that this was good riddance.

Several miles farther along, Frank’s horse apparently simply decided that he wanted to go home too. He bucked Frank off, which required no great effort, and then we had one horse left. One horse had no well-defined use; so, after a day or two of debating the matter, we sent this beast home too and settled down to a singularly pleasant and peaceful sojourn.

We found an area of flatwoods which was high enough to be well drained, an excellent camp site. There was fat pine wood near at hand to cook with. Quail were plenty, the coveys big and the country of such a character that after we shot on the covey rise and the birds scattered, there were no thickets or swamps for them to escape into, and the singletons were easy to pick up one by one.

I had taken a double boiler from town, because grits are easily burned on a fat pine fire, and personally I hold that they are infinitely superior when they have been cooked a long time. We peeled our quail and poked them down into the grits. They cooked through and were deliciously moist. They would have been just as succulent cooked in our Dutch oven, but that was usually occupied by a pone of hoecake bread.

We ate lots of things besides quail and grits. I had stopped at Eau Gallie before John Phillips came south to meet me, and I picked up some gopher turtles. There were always a number of these around Grandmother’s grove. These tortoises dig enormously deep burrows in the sand. They are easily caught if you find one abroad, but when they will emerge to graze seems wholly unpredictable. I used to take a box, dig a hole in the sand, right in front of the burrow, sink it down, and cover it with a sheet of thin newspaper, sprinkling a little sand on the surface. I never had to wait more than a day or two before Mr. Gopher came along, broke through the paper, and landed in the box.

Grandmother taught me forty years ago that gopher turtle stew is just as good as diamondbacked terrapin. Moreover, if you don’t have sherry or Madeira to flavor it with, a half cup of whiskey is a most excellent substitute, although the idea would, I think, have shocked Grandmother. Nevertheless it was taught me by a great and good epicure who moved to Eau Gallie some-years after Grandmother’s death. This was Dr. Samuel J. Mixter, the world-famed surgeon of Boston, who occupied her home, “Walden,” on a number of occasions before he built his own house only a few hundred yards away.

I will not say that we never ate a robin, for we did, and a good many doves. These are both better birds to eat than quail. Moreover it was often possible to pick up a few gallinules and the native Florida dusky ducks. These are all superior victuals, and when washed down with Frank’s coffee — my mouth waters even at this late date.

One day we followed a single quail into a bay head of tall, scrawny cypress and made a discovery. The trees were probably sixty or seventy feet high. In the very center of this head, which we had to wade into, there was a deep, dark pool of black water about fifty feet across. It was obviously an old gator hole. I suspect the place probably owed its depth and excavation to the fact that it had been stirred up and dug about by big gators since time immemorial. John and I often went to this pool, after our discovery, to rest in the shade. There was a fallen cypress tree which provided a delightful place to sit.

We knew that it was a roosting place for some sort of bird, but in daytime it was completely deserted. One day we moved camp and left Frank to prepare supper while we waded in and sat down beside the pool, late in the afternoon. We had been there less than half an hour when white ibis began to pour in. They came in flocks of from ten to fifty, circled around once or twice, and then settled down in the trees. I have never forgotten the snowy white birds with their sharply defined black wing tips silhouetted against the azure sky and, far more spectacular, their reflections in the black water of the pool.

The next day John brought his big Graflex camera, but the scenes were impossible to photograph. We saw no gators and we caught no fish in the pool, though we tried to do so. There was just the one attraction — the arrival of the ibis. They treated us every day we remained there to one of the most attractive spectacles that I ever have had the good fortune to enjoy. And any spectacle of this sort is made doubly memorable when it is observed in the company of one who is at least as thrilled as you are yourself.

3

A MAN in West Palm Beach had a scow with a house built over part of it. This I hired from time to time for trips to Lake Okeechobee. It was not luxurious, but the roof was tight and there our canoe rested. Inside there was plenty of room for our Gold Medal cots. Dr. Leonard C. Sanford and Lord William Percy, both ornithologists and our house guests, made several trips in this craft. Frank Carlisle was guide and very much philosopher and friend also. We used to go out the West Palm Beach drainage canal to Canal Point and so to Pelican Bay on Lake Okeechobee, then as wild and untouched as any spot in Amazonas. Having anchored our “houseboat,” after a leisurely but not picturesque journey of six or seven hours between the high ditch banks, we lazed away the days hunting, fishing, and observing nature generally.

Set lines, put out in the evening, provided an abundance of delicious catfish, ducks were plentiful, hearts of palms were easy to get, and from these Frank produced a good mess of cabbage, cooking them with side meat, which is white salted (not smoked) bacon. I remember to this day the taste of a young hen turkey cooked to a turn in our old iron Dutch oven that stood in the open fire in a big box of sand on three short legs and had a tight lid on which coals and embers were heaped. Thus none of the juicy vapors emanating from the bird during the process of roasting escaped. We certainly lived well.

One evening I heard a chorus of frogs that made the very welkin ring, though apparently only one species was calling, which I am sure was Rana sphenocephala. Frank and I shoved out in the canoe with a powerful headlight to see the show. To our surprise not a single frog was to be seen in any direction. I am sure these frogs were resting on the sandy bottom of t he lake, which was very shallow where the chorus took place. Passing air from their lungs to their great blown-up throat pouch, back and forth, they thus produced the chorus under water, while respiration was taken care of by their wet skin.

One day Frank and I were out to garner a mess of coots which, though Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings apparently doesn’t agree, Rosamond and I consider to be one of the most delicious birds of North America for table purposes. Their singular combination of the flavor of the shore birds with that of the best of the ducks makes them a real delicacy.

We were shooting coots when all of a sudden one of us did something, for we are both pretty big and clumsy, which capsized our canoe. I could just barely touch bottom, and I was over six feet five in those days. Frank was shorter and could not swim. He kept his head, however, and clung to the canoe, which I righted and steadied while he climbed back aboard. Bailing with his shoes, he managed to empty most of the water and then, moving to the middle of the boat, he continued the process of emptying while I ducked down, groped about, and finally recovered our guns. Frank then returned to the stern and paddled slowly, while I clung to the bow, holding on to both sides. Our paddles luckily had not floated away. He had to push only a short distance when the water shoaled; I then had no difficulty in getting aboard.

For hunting in the woods during the dry season, which coincides in part with the open season for game, a tent is hardly necessary, and it is very pleasant to scoop out the sand and sleep beside the fire. It will be just cool enough toward dawn to make a light blanket comfortable. This is the time of year when the owls are in a romantic frame of mind, and one docs not have to be an accomplished owl mocker to bring one to a pine tree right up in the firelight, where it will sit, bowing up and down and peering about, avid to meet the sought-for mate.

I know some people who dislike what they call the yelling of the birds in spring, and I must confess that on moonshiny nights the mockers do sing pretty loudly, but I consider it well worth staying awake to hear them. I think, however, that the greatest fun of all is to wake up half an hour or so before daylight anywhere in the South in springtime and to hear the birds as one by one they wake up themselves and begin to sing.

I remember one particular night in India when Ros and I sat up all night on a little spidery platform in a tree, hoping a tiger would come to eat the goat which we had staked out for him. He never came, but in the morning the birds, from peacock and junglefowl to the rollers and the bulbuls, were compensation enough for the cramped and uncomfortable night we had put in. Perhaps the most interesting amusement of all was contributed by the awakening monkeys with their ceaseless bickering. Certainly all our wildlife neighbors woke up in rare good form on this particular morning.

4

BUT to return to Florida; rattlesnakes are not sufficiently abundant to be bothersome by snuggling up against one for warmth as they do in certain localities in the Southwest. Frank and I never thought of snakes or paid any attention to them when we were hunting; in fact, I often traveled in canvas sneakers, without socks, because these were cool and dried out quickly. I think perhaps this was foolish, and I should not do it if I were hunting again today, though wet leather boots are mean footgear to tramp in.

The best quail dog I ever had was a cross between a setter and a spaniel. Finally, hunting one day, he was bitten by a snake, and although he recovered, he was never any good thereafter. Why this should be I know not, but I have heard of many other persons who have had the same experience with dogs which have been snake-bitten. I suspect the reason he did not die was either that the snake was a small one or had recently emptied its poison glands. If an animal is bitten by a snake only a short time after the snake has killed prey for its own consumption, the amount of venom resecreted may be relatively small in quantity and do little harm.

John Phillips disliked snakes particularly, and I never could persuade him that one did not need to pay much heed to cottonmouth moccasins when they were swimming about. A snake afloat can catch a fish swimming right next to him, but a strike at a wader’s leg is quite a different matter. The water provides no substance which will back up the strike. But coiled up on a little tussock or on a floating log the reptile at once becomes dangerous, and here I naturally give one just as wide a berth as John or anyone else. A snake usually takes notice when one is some little distance away. You can tell that he is alert by the way he tips up his chin. If you get too near him he will stretch open his great white mouth — hence the name “cottonmouth" by which moccasin snakes are uniformly called throughout most of the country where they occur.

I always had a good time in camp with John Phillips. John’s plaintive musings over the discomfort of red-bugs, the scarcity of quail, the probability of a thundershower, the heat, and a thousand other little matters, many of them dietetic, were a constant delight. He was so delightfully whimsical and amusing, and indeed philosophical, as he uttered his observations, that one was ever waiting for his next word. I wish we might have had more trips together.

We had some grand canoe rides down the Loxahatchee River, beginning ‘way at the upper end where the trees arch completely over the stream of black, deep, still water. There was an enormous gator which we saw regularly when we paddled our canoe to what we called our upper landing. Farther downstream the banks open up, the river grows wider, the ospreys wheel and call as the canoe passes near to the trees where their nests are built.

Often, holding on to the bushes on the bank down where the stream begins to be quite brackish, we stopped to watch the manatees, the most satisfactorily prehistoric-looking of all the wild creatures of our country. A big specimen is eight or nine feet long, with gray hide like an elephant and a gigantic round, flat tail, with which it can drive itself forward with astounding speed. It has queer little crooked under-front flippers which play little part in locomotion but a great part in gathering grass together on the bottom, to be consumed by the strangest mouth in any animal I know. The mouth opens, to be sure, as any other mammal’s does, but the upper lip, cleft far deeper than a rabbit’s, opens out in a most peculiar way, which aids in tearing the grass loose and helping to work it into a rather small mouth cavity for such a gigantic animal.

Manatees now are closely protected, but they are so delicious to eat that most crackers find it hard to refrain from taking one into camp when the opportunity offers. Not long ago a friend of mine had a conversation with an officer of one of the blimps on the coastal patrol. The officer reported that from high in the air he had seen some thirty manatees in a day while flying over the shallow waters of Biscayne Bay, right near Miami.

5

FRANK and I, when we were out alone and when we were well off by ourselves, frequently never bothered to put up our tent, taking a chance that the weather would stay fine. In early spring there are not many mosquitoes. But if we were going to be in one spot for several days, we always had a tent standing near-by whether we used it or not. For camping in warm climates the open-front tent is far more serviceable and comfortable than an A tent. The big front flap can be tied up to trees or poles to make a shady porch, or dropped to make a mosquito screen, which is highly desirable.

In localities where malaria is prevalent, I always cut heavy poles and lay them along on pieces of heavy canvas stitched to the sides of the tent and the bottom of the drop bobinet front. This arrangement prevents the entrance of mosquitoes on all sides. The best material for the tent is balloon silk treated with paraffine. This makes a light tent, one which can be rolled up into a relatively small compass and which is really 100 per cent rainproof. These matters may not, at first sight, seem to be important, but be it remembered that there are parts of Florida where malaria is not only prevalent but may be very severe.

A light floorcloth to one’s tent is also extremely useful. This, with four wooden poles laid on the three wide cuffs turned in, as it were, from the side walls and back of the tent and along the bottom of the mosquito screen drop front, makes a really safe capsule in which to sleep. I have often used a piece of balloon silk, in the form of a square about sixteen by sixteen feet with unbleached muslin sewn to it so that it hangs down two or three feet, and then have sewn on a fouror five-foot wide strip of bobinet. More unbleached muslin below this strip makes a screeed-in dining room or writing room easily erected simply by hanging the contraption between conveniently placed trees.

Mosquitoes that buzz and hum do not carry malaria. The Anopheles stand on their heads while they bite silently, so that you can recognize them if you happen to see them. Their sting has a peculiarly fiery quality, as if you were touched with a whitehot needle — a glorified sand-fly bite, in other words.

Happily, even in the most dangerous region not every Anopheles mosquito is a carrier of malaria. But where there is malaria and Anopheles are relatively few in number, the probability that they may be infected is distinctly increased.

Anopheles begin to fly at dusk, so that whenever I was in the country where malaria is prevalent, at the times of year when the sportsmen may be camping out, I habitually ate a very early supper and then got behind my mosquito netting. At daybreak we always waited until we observed that the Anopheles resting on the bobinet had all flown away, and then we emerged.

For this overcautious regime, planned to protect an old hypochrondriac, I have been laughed at on many occasions. I recall once at Garachine, in Panama, a Mr. Bibbins, a lumber cruiser who intended to take a jaunt into Darien to see what trees he could find capable of being worked up into valuable cabinet woods. I left him in this little town and came back there, several weeks later, to replenish our supply of rice. I asked Juan Lee, the Chinese who had a tiny store and who acted as our banker, about Bibbins. He walked me out a short distance to the little Campo Santo and pointed to a grave. It was decorated by a broken chamberpot in which a bunch of magnificent Cattleya orchids had faded. Poor Bibbins had scoffed for the last time at taking precautions against Anopheles.