DOWN THE INDIAN RIVER
The bobolinks, bound for South America and perpetual summer, go by a
route which most birds, strange to say, shun. They pass down through
Florida and over the Caribbean Sea, touching at Cuba, Jamaica and
Yucatan. Why this is not the popular route with all birds it is
difficult to say. It offers the most land surface for food and the
shortest sea flights on the way, being in its comfort and elegance a
sort of Pullman train route which the Florida East Coast pleasure
seekers imitate. Yet there seem to be only about ten of the migrating
birds which follow it. The yellow-billed cuckoo is one of these, and
last night I heard him spring his musical rain-call in the guava bushes
while the wind in the palm trees overhead beat a zylophonic
accompaniment. It is now mid-January, and I am a little in doubt whether
this cuckoo has paused on his southward way and winter is yet to come,
or whether he is one of the first of the spring migrants to turn his
flight northward, so gently does one summer fade into the next as one
gets well down the Florida peninsula on “the bobolink route.” The bank
swallows are of the ten that take up this route, and the air is often
full of their whirling flocks.
Here at White City we are about two-thirds the way down the Florida
peninsula, about east of the northern end of Lake Okeechobee, which sits
at the northern end of the Everglades. The southeast trade winds,
blowing across the Gulf Stream and over the Bahamas, bringing fresh sea
odors to Florida, here pass a long line of the islands which bar off the
Indian River from the ocean. Then they cross the river, and top another
wave of the sea of billowy sand. The Indian River is the first hollow
between these long north and south extending billows. Over the ridge to
westward you come to a shallow lagoon in which all kinds of marsh life
flourish, from alligators to the lovely yellow blooms of _Utricularia
inflata_ and the heart-shaped leaves of _Limnanthemum lacunosum_, both
these last Northern friends whom it is cheery to find so far south.
Here, rather more than two hundred miles south of St. Augustine, north
and south meet and merge most curiously and at this time of year one has
reminders of winter or of summer according to the direction of the wind.
Ten days ago this came out of the north and froze oranges
[Illustration: “The southeast trade-winds here pass a long line of the
islands which bar off the Indian River from the ocean”]
on the trees well down into the middle of the State. Here the cold was
not severe enough to do that, but the cocoanut palms over on the Indian
River bore frosted cocoanuts one morning and all tender vegetables such
as beans, eggplants and tomatoes were killed outright. The result gives
the eye some key to those trees and shrubs which are truly tropical and
have wandered north over their really proper boundary line, and those
which hold northern pith and do not mind some cold weather. The oranges
have not minded the temperature of twenty-six degrees which came to
them. The yellow fruit hangs like golden blobs of sunshine all about.
The green leaves are untouched, even those of the little thumbling
kumquats which are the least of oranges.
Lemons as well, though they are far tenderer than the oranges, hold up
their pointed ovals in the midst of green leaves. But the guavas were
badly nipped and their foliage everywhere is brown, a color something
like the soft tans in their sycamore-like trunks. Though the guava leaf
is like that of a chestnut, its trunk makes one think it a young
sycamore. By rights its fruit should be a button or a bur, according to
Northern landmarks. As a matter of fact it begins an orange blossom,
most spicily sweet scented, grows a green apple to a lemon-looking
maturity, and its seeded pulp is peach-like, and spiced with a faint
off-color flavor which seems but to add to its delectability. In
Northern minds there is well rooted a belief that the orange tree holds
ripe fruit, green fruit and new blooms at the same time. This is hardly
borne out by the facts. The orange is a cropper, just as the apple is,
and just now the trees hold no color save that of the ripe fruit, no
odor but that of its spicy, oily rind. The guavas, however, have
everything in motion from bloom to ripe fruit.
Cocoanut palms and royal palms are both to be found in south Florida,
though neither is indigenous, both having been planted by accident or
design. The palmetto is on the other hand native to the State. In the
northern third of the State, however, it never seems to me to feel at
home. Palmettos there are set out along fine walks and in yards and
formal gardens where for the most part they stand primly and seem a bit
self-conscious. Rarely there in my woodland walks, either in swamp or
upland, did I find the cabbage palmetto, which is the only tall growing
kind, wild. As you come south you begin to find along in the Palatka
neighborhood sudden accesses of tropical picturesqueness in the swampy
lands. The jungle grows stateliness and becomes peopled with
possibilities of all romance, a condition less common to the lonely,
flat woods and the impenetrable tangle of jasmine and greenbrier and
gray moss of the swamps in the northern counties of the State.
All this I think due to the presence all about you of the tall
palmettos. There is an interminable regularity about the pines. From
Palatka south, the palmettos stray in groups all about the landscape,
never standing prim and solemn as they do about Jacksonville and St.
Augustine. Here they seem to prance in toward town like plumed Seminole
chieftains of the early days. They lean together in groups and make the
landscape cozy and beautiful, while yet it loses nothing of dignity.
There is something of the feather duster model about the palmetto, but
it suggests only dignity and beauty for all that. Along the banks of
streams they lean plumed heads far over the water and make the muddiest
“branch” a place of enchantment thereby. There is a graciousness about
the simple act that makes you take off your hat and say “thank you” in
all reverence. Of all the trees of the South the palmetto has most
personality and you learn to love it far beyond the others.
I think it is the presence all about of the picturesque and sociable
palmettos that softens the aspect of the flat lands as you go back from
the Indian River in this latitude, and makes the barrens lovable and
kindly. Yet other things I am sure contribute. The cold snap, which may
have been the end of the tiny winter that comes even to this far
Southern clime seems to have sent many Northern birds awing once more.
All about flock the robins in countless numbers, their winter plumage
seeming just a little duller than it will be when they hasten North in
April. I have not heard one of them sing, but the air is full of
unmistakable robin cries and they run over grassy spots with the same
self-confident grace. A favorite food with them seems to be the
gallberries which exactly resemble low-bush black huckleberries and grow
in vast profusion all over the ground through the flat woods. These are
most bitter and nauseous to my taste, in fact I know of only one thing
worse and that is the buckthorn berry which is plentiful all the early
winter at home and of which also the wintering robins seem very fond.
Blue birds are plentiful.
The crow blackbirds that are wintering here seem to be, if anything,
just a little more familiar and fearless than those which nest yearly in
the Boston Public Gardens. They may very well be the same birds, though.
At Fort Pierce I saw them walking gravely about the yards and in the
public streets, picking up food with the pigeons and hardly getting out
of the way of the slow-moving wagons. At White City they fly up from
the road at my feet and barely wait for me to go by before they are back
again. With them I find redwing blackbirds, the males in full epaulette,
almost as fearless as their larger brethren. There is another flock of
black birds, whose presence I hailed with delight, making the woods
vocal over on the shores of the St. Lucie River. That is a dozen or so
of unmistakable black crows, _Corvus americana_; not the big-billed,
big-footed Florida representative of the race whom I have seen
occasionally sneaking silently off among the pine tops; not the
cracked-voiced fish crows with their childish hilarity; but good old
Northern crows, making the woods ring with their full-throated haw, haw,
haws. These sounded good to me. I think the cold snap must have sent
them down a little below their usual parallel, for they are the first I
have seen in over two months spent in the Florida woodlands.
The garden in which the house is embowered is full of myrtle warblers in
full winter plumage. These flit from one rose bush full of bloom to
another, then in among oleander and hibiscus blossoms and the scarlet
clusters of the begonia. Here again is a touch of Northern winter that
has come to the land of flowers. Often of a winter’s day in
Massachusetts have I seen myrtle warblers lingering among the bayberry
bushes, feeding on the waxy berries.
There is far more brown in the landscape than is wont to meet the eye
and this tells the tale, not only of a temperature that has been below
freezing, but just what plants are on the northern edge of their limit,
just as the yellow-rump warblers are on the southern edge of theirs. The
brown guava leaves whisper the story; the banana plants, killed to the
stalk, shout it aloud. So do the fields of pineapples. This is a country
of pineapple plantations. They cover that ridge next the Indian River,
clothing it in prickly green lances from the river banks to the savanna
behind it, for miles on miles, running north and south. In places these
are under sheds, acres in extent. In others the wide lagoon of water on
the west protected them and they are but little harmed. In others the
full blight of the cold has worked in them and their green lances have
turned a sickly, straw yellow. On such fields the crop for this year is
ruined, and many acres of newly set young plants are killed to the root.
Thus does winter set his mark occasionally even on this semi-tropic
land.
But if it has been winter, I am quite convinced that it is now spring. I
have surprised a suspicious tone of young green along the river edge,
such a color as in Massachusetts I would know meant mid-April. It is the
tender green of young willow leaves just opening out of gray
[Illustration: “This is a country of pineapple plantations”]
buds, all yellowed with the pollen from drooping catkins. The swamp
willows that had lost their leaves are beginning to put them out again.
So on oak trees I find the straggly catkins hanging in tassels where the
limbs are gray with new leaf buds that are pushing off last year’s
leaves. And still the blue jays are searching among these catkins for
acorns of last year, not altogether unsuccessfully, so close does spring
tread on the heels of the old year and its fruits. All about in the
fields I hear a springlike twittering among the myriad birds, a
preliminary tuning of instruments. I hear the friendly “cochituate” of a
goldfinch as he scallops his way along the sky. The Florida blue jays,
even noisier than our Northern ones and vastly more familiar, clang and
scream all about and red birds whistle musically. Through all this I
hear another note, or rather a succession of notes, that make me smile.
I have been stalking this puzzling, strange song, if one can call it
that, for a day or two, as opportunity offered, and only this morning
made sure. After all, it was only the crow blackbird trying to sing a
spring song. As a song it is hardly a success. It begins with a shrill,
hardly musical, call note, long repeated. Then the bird essays something
like the trill of a canary, though not very much like it in result. Then
he gives a little deprecatory chirp as if he were as much surprised as
I am at the result of all this, almost tumbles off his perch, recovers,
and flies over to another tree to begin the performance all over again.
The whole is as grotesquely awkward and humorously meeching as the
motions of the crow blackbird usually are.
Not only in bird voices, in willow and oak catkins, are these signs of
spring. The ground underfoot is beginning to teem with them. Under pines
it is starred with tiny, white blossoms while the ditch bottoms and the
moister places everywhere are purple and white. Most springlike of all
is the violet among the wild grasses in the flat woods. From its tiny,
white flowers with their purplish veining I took it at first glance to
be _Viola blanda_, our sweet, white violet of early May in all meadowy
places. A closer examination, however, showed it to have beardless
petals and instead of the round, heart-shaped leaves of our Northern
variety lanceolate ones, tapering into long petioles. Therefore it is
_Viola lanceolata_. But except for these minor differences it is the
same flower, as delicately beautiful and enticing as when it grows
fifteen hundred miles nearer the pole. Yet if one thinks a New England
spring is at hand he has but to look up. On bare limbs in all swampy
places, hang the solemn beards of Tillandsia, the Spanish moss, while on
others grow grotesque pineapple-like plants that are indeed of the
pineapple family though they bear no pineapples. Instead they shoot
upward a scarlet, gladiolus-like spike from which appear long tubes of
blue petals, holding out yellow anthers. The whole looks as if some
vivid, tropic bird had lighted on this pineapple-top and was poising
there a moment before farther flight. Underneath springs the rank growth
of Florida’s largest fern, the _Achrosticum aureum_. Its fronds rise as
high as my head and spread like a trunkless palm in a circle sometimes
ten feet in diameter.
Out of all this confusion of Northern and Southern spring signs, rises
always one clear note, that of the southeast trade wind in the palm
trees. Rarely is it absent from the ear. It brings fresh, sea-born
smells of perpetual spring to the nostrils, sometimes weary of the too
rich perfume of spicy pines and odorous gardens, and its rustle sings
you to sleep all night long with the song of the Southern sea. So as the
palmetto grows dearest to the eye of all these Southern trees, it
becomes also dearest to the ear. It is the harp on which this loneliest,
yet most alluring of all Southern tunes is soothingly played.