A FROSTY MORNING IN FLORIDA
It was out of a moonless night that the frost came--a night whose sky
was velvety black and seemed to hold no stars. Instead they had slipped
moorings and on slender cables, I do not know how many thousand million
miles long, were swung down toward the earth, quivering with friendly
yellow fires as if to warm as well as light it. In a Northern December
night the stars are diamond dust, splintered in keen glints from a
matrix of black onyx. Their shine is that of scintillant spears of
electricity. Here they are radiant golden globes swung just above the
treetops. The wind out of the north was hushed and in the stillness the
frost sprites that had soared gleefully upon it far beyond their usual
habitat fell to earth, motionless. They were very young and adventurous
frost sprites, and the sudden dawn found only their feathery white
garments resting on exposed surfaces; the sprites themselves had already
evaporated into invisible mists in terror of the coming fervid sun.
The first rays of the sun licked up these gray, feathery frost garments
and only in the shadows did you still feel the chill the night had
brought. Only the sweet potato vines seem to have been harmed by this
wee frost. Down on the river’s brink the tangle of convolvulus still
shows great white blooms as large as the palm of the hand. The river
radiates warmth all night and it is a bitter cold that reaches the
blossoms on its brim. In the gardens the roses, red and white and
yellow, did not seem to mind. Dense walls of thick foliage had kept the
cold from them and the jasmine whose yellow blooms seem to glow with
their own warmth. The slim, pointed buds of the jasmine are to the open
flowers now as a million to one, and not a bud even had been harmed. The
sweet potato vines, however, were not so fortunate. Their heart-shaped
leaves turned black and shriveled when the sun struck them.
Out of the sudden gray of dawn came the sun, a glowing ruby in a sky of
clear gold. To look at this sky was to forget the chill and bathe in a
rich warmth which seemed to distill from it invisible gold dust as the
day advanced. By nine o’clock summer had come back, and all the open
spaces in the wood were wells of this sky-distilled gold, through which
you saw all things in a subtle haze of romance, as if the frost sprites
had brought in their train all the joyous people out of fairyland. To
walk through narrow forest roads where the sand made all footfalls
noiseless was to glide forward without seeming effort, and in this rich
atmosphere of vaporous gold surprise Oberon and Titania kissing beneath
the mistletoe, to note the quiver of oak leaves as elves frolicked along
their mossy boughs, and to see Puck starting forth to put a girdle round
the earth in forty minutes.
To be sure, if I watch Oberon and Titania long enough with the glass I
shall perchance find them but a pair of redbirds, beauteous in crimson
and olive green. The elfin train may become a flock of kinglets and
warblers quivering in and out along the limbs in search of breakfast,
and Puck be but a roguish red-headed woodpecker. These December birds
are as elusive and as full of vanishings and roguish tricks as any fairy
train in Christendom.
Florida roads have the same elusive quality. They part and bow to one
another, meet and touch hands and glide away again as if dancing a
minuet, leading you in a mazy dance hither and thither to the most
delightful surprises. Here a tree has fallen before the wind or under
the ax of a careless woodman, and blocks the way. Little does the road
care for that. It leaves itself with an airy flourish of sandy ruts for
good-bye as if just to avoid the obstruction. Then it may wander a dozen
rods among slim trunks or along catbrier tangle, quietly seeking stray
blue gentians or golden tufts of St. Peter’s wort, and saunter gently
back to itself, or it may swing a wide corner and leave you at some
man’s front gate, to admire his cherokee roses and negotiate with his
dogs as best you may. To the traveler eager for some definite
destination this quality may have its vexations. To the wood wanderer
seeking but to find the true heart of a golden haze, conscious most of
the mystic quality of all untrammeled nature and unexplored places, it
is but an added delight.
If on such a day the birds of the bush have their elfin quality most
strongly evident, those always fay-like creatures the short-horned
grasshoppers are not to be forgotten. In the still haze of the yellow
pine forest their shrill voices seem to make the stillness audible, to
give it pitch and quality. Here on a leaf sits one, catching the full
heat of the sun twice, once direct and again as it is reflected from the
leaf’s gloss. His antennæ are short and brown, arched most delicately
from a straight brow that seems to denote dignity of thought. His long,
brown wings fit neatly to his brown abdomen and his legs have the same
shade. He seems cloaked in the soft, delicate color from head to foot,
yet you can but suspect that this is a domino, which he will later cast
aside and appear a glittering sprite.
[Illustration: “A wilderness where deer and bear still linger”]
Of those fairy creatures which attended Prospero on his island of
shipwreck this well might be one in a fitting disguise. None of the
flitting bird-fays is more beautifully cloaked than he in this exquisite
brown. As I watch him the sun glints in a lenticular eye, and I know by
this that he is full of laughter at my ignorance. Not one of the airy
sprites that plagued Prospero’s guests could be more demure or more full
of roguery than he. From the bushes beside the path as I pass, other
fays of the true locust clan flip into the air on long, shimmering,
silver wings and vanish after flying along in level flight for a hundred
yards. And here in the grass at my feet is Caliban.
He is a clumsy and stupid lout, this Caliban whom some people call the
lubber grasshopper; the very dolt of his class. He is huge, longer than
a man’s finger and bigger than his thumb, and he has ridiculous short
wings that I am sure he cannot use. They are beautifully mottled and
gauzy with pinkish shadows, these wings, and seem as much out of place
as those of the loveliest tiny fairy of the Christmas pantomime would on
a pig. He moves his greenish-yellow body as slowly as Caliban did his
when going sulkily to his heaviest task and Trinculo and his fellow must
needs be very drunk indeed before they would sleep beneath the same
cloak with him. On first seeing the lubber grasshopper I wondered that
anything so fat and clumsy should continue to exist in a country
swarming with insect-eating birds, but even the barnyard fowls will have
none of him.
At the start on this morning of gold born of white frost my path led me
down the river bank under arching live-oaks. All to northward the pearl
river was of glass that softened and melted into a blue haze where,
miles beyond, the farther bank hung as indistinct and unreal as a dream,
an illusion through which glided a white phantom of a turpentine
steamer, kicking up frothing hills of water behind it, a sea-serpentlike
line of humps whose head was the great stern wheel. There is a quiet and
solemnity in these high-vaulted paths beneath the river oaks that seems
to withdraw on the one hand from the witchery of the pine forest and the
glamour of the river on the other.
Something of the England of the middle ages seems to have drifted over
seas and down the years to this spot. A monastery should be just beyond,
and, though perhaps he does not know it, Jones, the postmaster,
traversed monastic aisles as he walked his mile this morning to the tiny
post office. Far beyond in the open beneath the big pines I hear blue
jays blowing clarion calls of challenge to the lists and the tramp of
hoofs as knights in armor ride the winding paths to be present at the
tourney. There are days down here when I know the charging hoofs to be
those of razorbacks scuttling through the underbrush and the amble of
palfreys is but that of half wild cattle going down to feed in the river
flats, but not on a morning like this. The gold haze of stillness after
frost has put a spell upon all things.
The great Florida heron that frequents my favorite swamp and with whom I
am beginning to feel neighborly intimate takes on goblin traits with the
rest of the witchery. Out in the shallows of the pearl river was a new
stump, gray and waterworn, with a long branch sticking straight upward.
Something uncanny about this stump made me watch it long. It was the
deadest gray stump I ever saw, evidently a swollen cypress root with the
bark long worn off. By and by this stump grew a head and the wood
changed to gray-blue feathers in the twinkling of an eye. Thus goblins
arrive from underground and dryads step from trees; but what should a
rotten cypress stump produce? Here was a chimera of a bird with a neck
three feet long, a bob of a head and a body like that of a gray goose
that did not sit on the water but was suspended just above it as a
mirage sits on the desert horizon, separated from everything by a gray
mist of nothing. Then the bob of a head wiggled, turned, I suppose, and
a big, sharp beak came into view, and my heron who was simply standing
to the very top of his high, waterproof boots in water began to wade
along.
Then I laughed, and I suppose that broke the spell, but it was enough to
make anyone laugh, for the Florida heron, wading leg deep in the St.
Johns River, has the same self-conscious dignity, the same absurd
rhythmic hesitancy of motion as a wedding procession going up the aisle.
I have seen a great many grooms wade in and I never saw anything a bit
different.
The high road and high noon and I met in the heart of a pine wood where
all things had forgotten the frost in a midsummer temperature, and
short-horned grasshoppers made merry all about. In the thin treetops was
no motion, not even the quiver of a bird’s wing. The long wood swooned
in the golden haze that seemed impaled and held motionless on a thousand
million spears of palmetto leaf points standing chin high, a motionless
sea of deep green. The tall palmetto is a beautiful tree with the
columnar trunk of a palm. It aspires and has sturdy dignity. The scrub
palmetto crawls on its belly like a snake, its trunk strangely and
horridly like one, though when you observe it closely enough you see
that it roots all along this boa-constrictor trunk, as if it had changed
its mind after all and decided to be an elephantine
thousand-legged-worm. Then as if ashamed of its fallen and misshapen
appearance it rears its head and spreads a great rosette of
long-stalked, stiff green leaves to hide it all.
You can find no more distinctive Florida scene than this; the endless
procession of rough-barked columnar trunks, topped with sparse limbs and
tufted with needles a foot and more long, and beneath the lake of deep
green, scrub palmetto with a surface infinitely diversified with the
spatter of the split leaves. The three-foot stems of these leaves are so
woody and the leaves themselves are so stiff that to ford the lake is
difficult and your progress through the palmetto is accompanied by a
wooden clatter that is like a parlor imitation of stage thunder.
Breathing deep the aroma of the pines, resting in the golden warmth and
quiet of the place I saw little of wild life moving. All nature seems to
take a mid-day siesta, even in winter, here. The place seemed to lend
itself to dreams for which all the mystic witchery of the morning had
prepared me. How deep into these I sank I cannot say, but I was aroused
from them by the approach of a beast.
“The jabberwock with eyes of flame
Came whiffling through the tulgy wood
And burbled as he came.”
I think it was his burbling that I first noticed, a grumbling undertone
as of something with a deep throat and very large teeth that talks to
itself. Even here within twenty miles of Jacksonville, Florida, is yet a
wilderness, criss-crossed with roads and spattered here and there with
clearings, but yet a wilderness where deer and bear still linger. This
sounded like a very large bear; one with a toothache and a morose
disposition. I noticed for the first time a sort of path that crossed
mine, an enlarged rabbit-run under the palmettos. Perhaps he was coming
down that. I could hear the palmettos clatter in crescendo and the
morose voice come rapidly nearer, and still I sat motionless. It is hard
to believe in bears, until you have met a few. But I sat too long.
Suddenly out of the path burst a black bulk, and I sprang to my feet
with a shout of dismay. A big, black creature with a shambling gait, a
long snout and little fierce eyes, was right upon me.
But my shout of dismay was nothing to the “woof” of terror and
astonishment the jabberwock let out. He almost turned a somersault and,
ignoring his path, went straight through the palmettos which waved about
him, down the distance, with a noise like an anvil chorus played on many
xylophones. It was really the biggest and fiercest razorback I have yet
met. Razor-backs do not think it good to live alone. When they miss
their fellows they gallop, mumbling and
[Illustration: “Razor-backs do not think it good to live alone”]
grumbling till they find them. I do not blame myself for thinking this
the jabberwock, however. Seen from his own level, head on, the razorback
has a weird and ferocious aspect that can out-countenance most of the
wild animals I have met. Incidentally one can give a very good account
of himself in the prize ring with any opponent whatever, from a
rattlesnake up. What this one thought me I do not know. If he is
familiar with jabberwocks perhaps he, too, thought he suddenly saw one.