IN A FLORIDA FREEZE
In St. Augustine there is a very genial, old colored man who, in spite
of his weatherworn tatters, is a philanthropist and has an eye for good
dressers. His favorite stampede is the sea wall and the open region
about old fort Marion where he watches with wary eye for the tourist.
“Heah you are, suh,” he says to such, “heah’s yo’ lucky beans. Take a
han’ful suh an’ be lucky all de res’ ob your bawn days. I gives dem to
yuh. I ain’t charge nuffin for dese I ain’t, kase you is de born image
ob my ol’ massah. Yaas you is, suh. Mons’ous fine lookin’ man he, yass
suh. Dem ladies dey jes’ nachully follow my ol’ massa roun’ kase he such
fine man. Hey? Yaas, tank you kindly suh. You sure is like ol’ massah.”
It is astonishing how many visions of his old master rise in this gray
old man’s sight as tourists pass. Long or short, fat or lean, it makes
no difference to him, so be they are well dressed and have an air of
prosperity. If it is a group of ladies it is the same. They simply, one
and all, are images of his ol’ missus who was the smartest dressed and
handsomest woman in the State. It may be that the people who have small
stores on St. George street and sell far less valuable things than lucky
beans to good-looking tourists make more money, though I doubt it. Dimes
come rapidly to the old chap, and though with many rents he has none to
pay.
To-day is January of a new year, and all Florida is once more steeped in
golden sunshine. Soft airs out of Eden, or some place just as good,
breathe over the landscape, and the genial warmth is that of a fine,
June day at home. But so far I have failed to hear the familiar
salutation of the old bean man. I fancy he is not yet thawed out. I hope
no harm has come to him, for I have bought my beans and I like to stand
smiling by and see the other fellows get theirs. Perhaps he is still a
little distrustful, for this is the first comfortable day since
Christmas, and that was something of an oasis in a raw desert of chill.
There had been several frosty mornings before that, somewhat to the
disturbance of the purveyors to tourists, though they had said,
grudgingly, “Oh, well, we do have a light frost some winters.”
The morning after Christmas saw the thermometer at twenty-six, and the
purveyors of summer, unlimited, in time of winter, were properly
horrified. “Oh, but we assure you that this is quite extraordinary,”
they vociferated. “The weather is always warm in Florida.”
The morning after that the wind came roaring down from the northwest,
full of needles. The temperature was below freezing and it kept steadily
going lower. The water front, steeped in the midday sun and sheltered
from the keen wind, was the warmest place in town, and there my old
colored man lingered, shivering beneath an old overcoat that, I trow,
belonged to that grand, old master whom we all resemble. Beneath it he
still clung to his lucky beans, but he found small comfort in the dimes
that he took in from overcoated and shivering tourists.
“Uncle,” I asked, “what makes it so cold?”
“Huh,” he replied, and his usually beaming, shiny black face was ashy
gray and twisted into a tragic discontent with the chill, “Hit’s dese
Nordern people. We ain’t had nothin’ like dis ontwel dey began to come
down here, so much. Pears like dey brought it in dere cloes.”
I fancy that is as good an explanation of the freeze as any, though if
the Northern people brought it thus they did it against their will. Out
on the water front the first severe morning I found an old man from
Missouri. When they had told him about the perpetual summer that reigns
in Florida during the winter time he had said, “show me,” and started
for the peninsular State with his big overcoat under his arm. Wrapped to
the eyes in his big coat he sat, this morning that the thermometer
registered at only seventeen above in St. Augustine, on a bench that
faced the morning sun. I thought he must be warm, for his face was
flushed, but it was only the warmth of his indignation.
“They told me to leave my overcoat at home,” he said, “but I wouldn’t do
that. But I did leave my sweater, and now look at me! Had to go out this
morning and buy a new one. There’s no heat in the house I’m living in
and I had to come out here and sit in the sun like a sage hen, and durn
me if I’m warm now. Next time I take an excursion in winter, young man,
I’ll go North. I know a stove up in Chicago that I’ll bet you is red-hot
this minute, and I wish I was sitting side of it, durned if I don’t.”
The plaint of this man from Missouri is a song of different words,
perhaps, but it is the same tune which all Northern people sing who
happen to hit a Southern winter during one of the freezing spells which
are so likely to reach the northern third of Florida. The most severe of
these kill the orange trees and are felt to the very southern limits of
the peninsula. Fortunately, there are periods of several years’ duration
in which these do not touch the State. This one is exceptional enough
both in severity and duration, to make the Northern visitor, who comes
to escape that sort of thing, unhappy, severe enough in some cases to
make him unpleasantly ill from colds contracted in draughty houses,
often unheated. At home we install elaborate apparatus for taking care
of a temperature that gets below fifty degrees. Down here they scorn
such a thing. Yet sections far enough advanced in civilization to have
water pipes and plumbing arrangements awoke to find them frozen all over
northern Florida the other morning.
Now that my own memory, somewhat iced up by these alleged unprecedented
conditions, is thawed out, the week seems quite grotesquely impossible.
It is like asking me to tell how, during a week in midsummer, we had icy
weather and mornings on which the temperature was only seventeen above,
Fahrenheit. But that is just what happened, and the only thing to prove
it as you walk about town now is the black wreckage of all tender
herbage that a little over a week ago flourished so greenly and put
forth sweet-scented flowers. There is visible from my window the roof of
one of the old-time houses on quaint old St. George street. On this
grew, before the freeze, tiny, beautiful clumps of the Southern polypody
fern. These are represented now by crumpled remnants of gray leaves
from which the life has been frozen--and it takes a good deal to kill a
polypody. The gardens in the town were full of vivid-colored foliage
plants, coleus and the like, handsome poinsettias graced many places and
climbing vines scattered white and scarlet bloom. All these are dead,
killed to the ground, and with them went the taller and more picturesque
shrubs. The palmettos stood it, though their leaves have since curled a
bit, showing that the cold penetrated their tough fiber.
The first frosts turned the upper leaves of the banana trees a light
brown like that of elm leaves after they fall in the autumn. The two
nights at seventeen killed the plants to the ground, and not even the
thick coats that I saw hung over green bunches of bananas here and there
sufficed to keep the fruit from freezing, any more than similar
protection helped the flower beds any; the cold was too severe to be
staved off in that way. I think the most striking sight was a big field
of sugar cane out at Hastings. This had been green and luxuriant, though
ripe for the knife, the grinding having begun in many sections. After
the second morning of severe cold this field was all of a lovely soft,
tan brown, the exact color of the shooks in a Northern cornfield where
they are allowed to stand out in the field until this time of year. The
Southern cornstalks still standing in the field do not take that color,
nor are they so massed. The whole looked as striking and out of place as
the weather in which I saw it. In this same town of Hastings is a big
orange grove from which the fruit had been but half picked, the rest
hanging, waiting for the holiday rush to be over, the market cleaned up,
and the prices better. There the orange leaves were curled and crisp
with the frost and a thousand boxes or more of splendid, golden fruit
was still hanging, yellow, beautiful in the chill sun--and solid blocks
of ice, from kumquats which are as big as one’s thumb to grapefruit
almost as big as one’s head.
There is an alligator friend of mine out by the city gates for whose
safety on that first cold morning I was much concerned. For free
alligators one need have but little worry. Safe under water in the warm
corners of the swamps they were sleepy and happy and would not come out
till the sun called them with sufficient vigor to assure them a warm
day. Nor need I worry much for the city alligator who is put into the
little pond beneath a fountain in the plaza on the first of January, to
be removed no doubt when the tourists go. The steady outflow of warm
artesian water would make him comfortable. The East Coast railroad
people have two that they put into similar tanks in their station
grounds. These, too, seem to be a part of the decoration in honor
[Illustration: “The first frosts turned the upper leaves of the banana
trees a light brown”]
of the tourists. So, not to be outdone in friendly welcome, a
photographer friend of mine has been keeping “George” in a pen in a
shallow, cement tank on his grounds down by the city gate.
This photographer is an enterprising chap; indeed, the photographers of
the city gates neighborhood are all enterprising. If you get by them
without having your picture taken in many poses it is not their fault.
They know the weakness of vain, human nature almost as well as does the
ancient bean man. One has a jungle, a wild and most realistic wilderness
in which you may be pictured in the very den of alligators, sitting on
pa, fondling ma, and holding the babies on your knee. Who would not send
one of these home to the shivering sufferers in the frozen North?
Another will take your likeness sitting at a tiny table with a most
gorgeously-gowned young lady, sipping bubbles from a tall glass. Few gay
sports can resist sending that up to jealous admirers who have doubted
that they would be received in Southern society. To be sure, the young
lady is of pasteboard, but how are the neighbors to know that? You can
have your picture taken in the ox cart, just coming in through the
ancient city gates, and a real live ox is kept for the purpose--that is,
he was alive until he got pneumonia standing out there, waiting for
customers in the freeze.
Of all these I think the owner of “George” does it best. He takes your
picture in a real orange grove, picking oranges. He is the fortunate
possessor of five trees, and some of the five have real oranges growing
on them--a few. But who wants to be picking oranges in a skimpy grove?
The owner of “George” fixed that. He wired golden fruit and leafy twigs
on his trees by the bushel and then, because nature has made it
difficult to photograph oranges in their native color, he whitewashed
the fruit. As a result you may send home from the ancient Spanish city a
picture of yourself, supremely happy, standing beneath trees loaded with
real fruit, picking them as nonchalantly as if it was your constant
occupation. No wonder people come to St. Augustine by thousands each
winter and go away charmed with the place.
But about “George.” The first morning that the thermometer stood at
seventeen I went out early, wearing a sweater and a big overcoat,
besides one’s usual garments, and still shivering, so penetrating is
this Southern cold. At the gates I found the owner of “George” inside
the pen, chopping vigorously. He was removing an ice blanket from the
top of the shallow tank in which the alligator was securely frozen. This
ice blanket had kept the ’gator secure in a temperature above
thirty-two, whereas he would have been frozen stiff if he had not had
the wit to get under water. “George” was lethargic. Even when prodded
severely to see if he was really alive, he moved but slowly and
positively refused to blow off steam with that high-pressure hiss which
is the alligator’s chief warning note. But he came through it unharmed.
Still, he was fortunate in his tank. There were many Northern people in
quaint old St. Augustine that night who had no such reliable heater.
For all the blackened gardens, the icicled oranges and the banana trees
cut down in their prime, the whitened sugar cane and the ice-blanketed
alligators, I think the really extraordinary sight of that first morning
of severe cold was a fountain in the plaza. This shoots a few tiny
streams into the air and they fall upon greensward beneath it. The
brisk, northwest wind that blew all that cold night blew the thin stream
askew, and the morning sun showed a circle of ice hummocks beneath this
fountain, such hummocks as suggested the bad roads which Arctic
explorers negotiate, and a pyramid of icicles that was built up from the
ground into the urn of the fountain and above that into a sort of
statuette of ice on which the artesian stream sprinkled still. The sun
of Florida, even in the dead of winter, is a hot one, but the pyramid of
icicles stood unmoved during the greater part of that forenoon, indeed
they would have been there all day and the temperature of the night
which followed would have augmented them, only that people began to take
them away for souvenirs.
Now the point of this story is not that the climate of Florida is not
beautiful during the winter. I know that it is, most of the time. But to
say that Florida is a land of perpetual warmth is not to tell the truth.
In northern Florida the winters often show days when the morning
temperature is below freezing. A temperature which freezes the oranges
is likely to come any winter, and though such cold lasts but a few days
at the most, it is very trying to people dressed for July. Florida women
buy furs for the winter, and wear them, too. Remember that if you are
coming down for even a short stay. This freezing weather comes oftenest
in late December or early January, but it may come as late as early
March. Remember that and wear the overcoat down, also put the sweater in
the trunk, else you may be like my friend from Missouri and vow to take
your next winter vacation beside a Chicago red-hot stove. Florida is
indeed a land of perpetual summer, with certain exceptions that prove
the rule. One of these certainly came, this year, between Christmas and
New Year’s.
[Illustration: The banana tree in bloom]