It’s been an eventful few months around here. A dissertation finished and defended and a somewhat unexpected extended trip overseas, capped off by a family vacation in Maine. A really fabulous, remind-you-how-lucky-you-are kind of summer. And it even feels good to be back here in Tallahassee, enjoying home. The thing about Tallahassee is that there is no big reason to come here, nothing in particular to see or do that would lure anyone to what I sometimes at this time of year can’t help but think of as the armpit of the south. But this is part of what makes this bit of north Florida so great. It has nothing to flaunt, nothing high-profile. So it’s very unpretentious. Which means that even though some of the beaches here rival any in the world people don’t tend to crow about it. They’re just part of life on the panhandle. It also means that there are lots of what a friend calls “pockets of cool” to be discovered. This past weekend we went blueberry picking and, finding the great spot we visited last year to be picked out, we went to a new place in Wacissa.

North Florida has fantastic dead ends. Roads sometimes delta into the Gulf or a river somewhat unexpectedly. This is how we arrived in Wacissa, as the asphalt ran out at a small parking lot by possibly the most charming swimming spot I’ve ever seen. A pocket-size beach on a cool and clear spring-fed river, a cement platform with a large tree and a rope swing: utterly iconic American summer. No life guards, no evidence of any real regulation (except a port-a-potty hidden in the woods). Just a bunch of dripping kids swinging, dropping, and swimming. Sadly, we didn’t have our suits. The kids swam in their underwear but we had to be content with wading.

At one point the group of swimmers schooled together on the platform to watch a very large snake sidewinding the  river bottom. Speculation pegged it for a water moccasin, which led a few men to reel of some fish tales. One thing about a southerner is that it’s usually pretty easy to get them talking about most anything (we call my Kentucky dad “chat man” for just this quality). I love this easy prolixity and think a little is rubbing off since when we were traveling I found myself suddenly confident enough to strike up a conversation with just about anyone, even given my shallow grasp of the language. As my mother would say, I could talk to a lamppost.

So the group’s general desire to talk up the dangers of the water and my obvious interest meant we got some local knowledge. Our amateur herpetologists turned out to be just that, as the woman who owned the blueberry farm laughed when I recounted the snake sighting saying that he had been living in those rocks for weeks. Apparently it’s a banded water snake. This suspicion was mostly confirmed when a man on the far end of too many PBRs recently yanked the poor thing from the water and wasn’t bitten. But it did secrete a foul, milky-white funk, which was less than the man deserved.

 

If the rope swing biology lesson was questionably accurate, we did learn that Jefferson county has no stop lights, just a blinking yellow, and is too poor to have oversight of every swimming hole. This time of year, when cities across the country are closing public pools for budget problems, it seems particularly fortunate that Wacissa, whatever its struggles, has such a lovely and free place to be on a hot summer day.

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