PALMETTOS OF THE ST. LUCIE
The cattle men, whose wealth is in range cattle, roaming at will, take
advantage of the dry weather of winter to set the world afire. Hence a
soft, blue haze all about that makes the wide spaces between trees misty
and uncertain and puts vague touches of romance on all distances. By day
a cloudy pillar shows where this fire has got into thick, young growths
of pines and is towering heavenward in pitchy smoke. By night the level
distance is weird with flickering light, and the wanderer is guided by a
moving column of flame as were the Israelites of old.
After these moving lines of fire have passed, the flame often lingers
for days in stumps of the pine, eating away at the fat wood which is
solid and green with resin. A chip off a dead stump of a Florida pine
will burn at the touch of a match. All over the flatwoods are these
stumps, often standing fifty feet high and a foot or two in diameter.
The bark has fallen, leaving them to personate thin ghosts in the vivid
light of moon-flooded nights. The sap wood of these trees softens with
decay after a while, but the heart stands firm for unlimited years. The
Florida farmers, who must fence their farms from the range cattle if
they wish to keep them, use this heartwood for fence posts and it is
fabled to last in the ground a century. When the fires of the cattle men
have burned over the ground, leaving nothing behind but ashes and the
blackened trunks of scrub palmettos which look like scaly dragons,
charred and writhing because of the fire, the sap wood of the standing
pine trunks holds the flame and it winds spirally about the hard center
night after night, till it flutters like a bird from the topmost
pinnacle and vanishes toward the stars. Of windy nights you may see
these crimson flocks fluttering and taking wing. By day the black heart
wood of the stub still stands, charred, but erect and firm as ever.
Very different is it with the sabal palmettos whose cabbage heads tower
often as high as the pines, but whose roots are in the moister soil. The
fire may run up these if they have not lost the “boots” as the clasping
petioles of their great leaves are called, but it does nothing more than
slightly blacken the real trunk. The palmetto decays differently from
the pine. When it lies rotting in the forest it is the outer husk which
is solid after years; the inner part decays and leaves a hollow which
is an easy refuge for wild things. In the palmetto trunk the coon finds
safety and the opossum curls up by day, waiting for his nightly raiding
time to come. The cotton-tailed rabbit, however, does not affect the
interior of the palmetto stub. For a siesta after foraging he tramps out
a little grassy apartment among the scrub palmettos. Usually this is
entered by the top, the rabbit hopping down into it when arriving and
hopping out with nervous haste and white tail high in air when I happen
upon him.
When he comes to hollow palmetto logs, I suspect br’er rabbit of passing
with a shudder, not because of opossums or raccoons, or foxes or
polecats, all of which might rush out on him from such places, and all
of which eat him. But the rabbit has little real fear of these. He can
escape from them too readily. There is another occasional occupant of
the hollow palmetto, however, for whom br’er rabbit has much horror, and
I confess to similar feelings when I chance upon him suddenly. That is
the gopher snake. Not that I have any real excuse for this feeling, for
the gopher snake is not only perfectly harmless to all creatures except
those that he swallows whole, but he is one of the handsomest snakes
known. His main color is an intense indigo blue, so deep that it is a
blue black, whence another common name, the indigo snake. His entire
scalation is as
[Illustration: “Sabal palmettos whose cabbage heads tower often as high
as the pines”]
polished as glass and his length reaches sometimes nine feet.
One that I know lives by the roadside down near the river and I can find
him there almost any sunny day that I go along. He cast his skin some
days ago and came out the most striking snake I have ever seen. His
blue-black back shone like glass, his under parts showed all the
prismatic colors on the plates of the abdomen, where he looked like
burnished metal, while his chin, throat and two streaks on each side of
the head were a rich red. The road near his favorite sunning spot has
been corduroyed with palmetto trunks, and when I approach too near, say
within two or three feet, he slips forward with an easy, gliding motion
and goes into a hollow trunk, usually turning round within and putting a
foot or two of his head and neck out again to see what is going on. He
is not at all afraid and shows neither nervousness nor anger as he
glides away. In fact, I am the one that is nervous. I am convinced that
Adam was my ancestor. It was Eve that hobnobbed with the serpent. I can
see Adam having cold chills and stepping lively for a big stick.
The gopher is really in a limited way a household pet of the region. He
is a mighty hunter of rats, and in consequence is welcomed about barns
and outbuildings and even sometimes invades the loosely built houses in
his vocation. He yields readily to friendly advances and in captivity
is a gentle pet.
To really see palmettos you will do well to explore the St. Lucie River.
Incidentally you will see a river whose tropical beauty exceeds that of
the famed Tomoka, and, I believe, any other river in Florida. I think
the St. Lucie originally intended to be straightforward, but it does it
by a most amazing series of windings and crooks. Within a half-mile you
will face all points of the compass on this bewildering, bewitching
river, nor may you be sure by the current which way you are going. So
slight is the fall between source and mouth that the salt sea which
floods in through the Indian River gets tangled in the crooks of the St.
Lucie and goes on and on to within a few miles of the source before its
force is entirely spent. Then only does it allow the water from the
savanna springs to go downward to the sea.
Twenty miles up come the mangroves, their seeds floating on the brimming
tides and germinating within the husk, to find root eventually along the
shores and grow new shrubs with ovate, shiny leaves. At high tide the
mangroves remind me of the alders which fringe the ponds and streams at
home. At low tide to see them from the river is to be astonished at
their forests of inch-thick waterpipe roots, dropping in parallel lines,
perpendicularly from their butts into the brackish water. Higher than
the mangroves grow the soft, swamp ash trees, holding the ground in the
river-carved swamps sometimes to the seclusion of other trees. The wood
of these trees is very soft, white and brittle and the trunks are never
large, six inches being a good diameter. Soon, too, they become hollow
and the crooked, leaning trees rot and fall to the ground bringing with
them great stores of air plants that grow, pineapple-like, along their
trunks from base to tip. With the tender green of the young ash leaves
come the blossoms of these air plants, giving the angular, awkward trees
the appearance of putting out tropic spikes of purple-stemmed,
blue-flowered beauty.
Here and there the live-oaks, never very numerous in this region, show
dark green on the higher banks. The live-oak is the symbol of stability
and even virility, if you please, but it is at the best somber and glum.
It drops its leaves grudgingly, one by one, putting out its new ones in
the same way, thus always retaining its cloth of dark green. In October
it was hard to distinguish the difference between the live-oaks and the
water-oaks. Both seemed somber and dour. Not long ago the water-oaks
went bare in evidence that winter was here. But now you should see them!
First they showed a misty, sage green with tender lights in it. The sun
of another day lighted this up with a nascent bronze that was full of
soft withdrawals and tender shynesses, and the wee leaves grew hourly
broader with a surgence of gentle green through the short petioles,
suffusing the whole tree with a tender, translucent beauty, as endearing
as that of a Massachusetts May. Here in southern Florida winter is but a
word that is not quite spoken, but spring comes very really, though not
as it does in the North. There it rises like an all-pervading tide. Here
it wells forth in spots as if the fountain Ponce de Leon sought bubbled
at intervals, here and there. Spring in the North is a symphony; here it
is a fugue.
Along the St. Lucie grow maples all richly salmon red with young leaves
and winged fruit. Willows are gray-green, too, and the sweet gum is a
milky way of green stars with the divergent points of its new leaves.
Here are creepers, lithe as snakes that climb from the muddy shores to
the tops of the highest trees and swing down again, trailing tips in the
water. In the dusk of the swamps the white blooms of the crinum glow
like stars that are reflected in the black water.
But with all this luxuriance of other growing things the tree that
dominates the St. Lucie is the palmetto. It grows from the black muck of
the swamp, where the slow tides swirl sedately around its roots, and it
towers from the highest bank where the live-oak roots grip the sand
with tenacity that holds it even against the undermining effect of the
spring floods. Where the floods have had their way it leans far out over
the water, or even drops into it, the long, straight trunk a famous
climbing place for foot-wide turtles that come out to sun themselves and
sit in solemn, silent rows with their heads tipped back so that the
warmth may strike their throats. These plunge beneath the surface with
much splashing as you pass, then secretly and silently paddle back and
crawl out after a while. If the current did not cut the banks and let
the palmettos fall the big turtles would have hard work to get their
share of the spring sunshine. Often a water-oak leans far out over the
water in this way, a favorite roosting place for the water turkeys.
The water turkey reminds me of a crow that has had his neck pulled. He
is rather rare, of a not very numerous family, the anhingidæ or darters,
there being only four species in the world. The bird is the funniest
thing on the river. Its glossy crow-black is touched with white, and in
some specimens this change begins at the shoulders and makes the whole
neck look as if plucked. The anhinga dives like a loon and lives on
fish, though how it gets them down that preposterously thin neck I
cannot explain. It is sometimes called snake-bird, and perhaps the neck
stretches for deglutition as does a snake’s. Often as I paddle up to
one, pointing his slim, serrate-toothed, sharp-pointed bill this way and
that, as if trying to poke holes in the atmosphere through which to
escape, then with a tremendous burst of nervous energy whirring on short
wings over my head, I note a big bunch at the base of this preposterous
neck, which I take to be his crop distended with nourishing fish. He is
a nervous bird, and he seems to fly with a lump in his throat. Once in
the air he soars prettily like a hawk, and often comes back into his
tree again, slamming with scrambling haste to a perch whence he cranes
his head this way and that. Sometimes the water turkey, surprised on a
low limb, will go into the river with a splash that reminds me of the
way a kingfisher takes a fish.
After that it is hard to see the bird again. He has a way of coming just
to the surface and poking up that slim head and neck to look around
while yet his body is submerged. If you do happen to see him you then
realize why the name “snake-bird” has been given to him. The natives who
refuse to eat the catfish from the river declare the water turkey most
toothsome. After all, there is a good deal in a name. No one eats cats,
but we all know turkey is delicious.
The pileated woodpeckers love the banks of the St. Lucie, their homes
in the holes that so often look toward the river from palmetto stubs on
the banks. Once seen, I do not find the bird difficult of approach. I
watched one at close range the other morning for a quarter of an hour
while he dug at an ash limb as if he intended to make a nest in it, but
after all his grubbing was merely for breakfast food, which he pulled
out and swallowed with gusto, his little slim neck and perky head
reminding me of those of a guinea-fowl. I do not think _Ceophlœus
pileatus_ a handsome bird, but he is fast becoming a rare one and just
to watch a pair is a privilege.
There is nothing rare about the little green heron. He is almost as
common to Massachusetts in summer as he is to Florida in winter, yet I
think I would pick him for the gentle genius of the stream. On bright
days this little fellow is not so easy to find. You will pass a dozen,
sitting motionless and dumpy, head on breast and neck telescoped down
between the shoulders, for one that you will see. He is a sweet little
cherub of a bird thus, and he will keep his pose till you approach very
near, knowing that immobility often means invisibility. I like to
steadily intrude on him and watch his change of demeanor when he feels
sure that he is watched. Gradually all dumpiness goes. His neck appears,
then stretches till he will almost rival the water turkey. Alertness
grows upon him. His head cocks with a perky air and a crest rises on it.
He walks, foot over foot, up his limb and finally poises there, as
assertive and vigilant as a red-headed street urchin standing tiptoe
behind the bat when the bases are full and the honor of the ward hangs
on the next play. He reminds me of just that. But the resemblance ceases
when he flies, for he just gives a flop or two, over perhaps to the next
bush, then sinks into immobility again, seemingly confident that he has
found safety by his flop.
But over all rare or common birds, graceful or awkward shrubs or trees,
waves everywhere the benedictory grace of the palmettos. Ferns love them
and climb by the brackets of their young trunks to the tops where they
still grow when the trees are old and the boles are smooth to the crown
of living petioles. Often the weather or some strange trick of growth
has carved the upper portions of these aged trunks till the feathery
fronds seem set in vases mounted in pedestals, and the ferns and air
plants seem as if tucked into these by the slim fingers of some tall
goddess of the woods. So across them falls the topaz splendor of the
tropic sunset and as quick night glooms the river the passing sun
caresses the palmettos last and leaves them, rustling gentle wildwood
talk among themselves, waiting his return.
[Illustration: “As quick night glooms the river the passing sun caresses
the palmettos last”]