ONE ROAD TO PALM BEACH
One of the Alice-in-Wonderland fruits of the pineapple ridge which lies
to the westward of the Indian River is the papaw. I never see it but I
expect to find the walrus and the carpenter sitting under it engaged in
animated argument. Especially is this the case with one variety,
imported, they tell me, from the West Indies. Here is a stalk that comes
up out of the ground as a milkweed might, green and succulent till it
overtops a man’s head, spreading from this single stem somewhat
milkweed-like leaves from four to eight inches long. Nodding from the
axils of these leaves come the flowers, followed by the fruit which is
the grotesque climax of the whole, for here, stuck close on this
succulent, head-high stem, is a muskmelon, or something just as good, so
far as appearance goes.
The thick, green rind becomes yellow on ripening and even when you twist
the fruit off and hold it in your hand the muskmelon thought remains
uppermost. You may taste this goblinland muskmelon if you will and
still not entirely lose the idea, though it is to me something like
eating a muskmelon in a bad dream. There are people who say they like
papaws, and that if you take them at just the right period of their
ripeness and eat them muskmelon-wise with sugar and a spoon you will
hardly know the difference. Such people may have all the papaws that
have thus far been reserved for me.
Well out in the pine barrens, I find another shrub which is a close
relative of the papaw, the custard apple. This is a wild fruit which I
am quite prepared to believe is delicious, perhaps because I have never
eaten it. The opossums, coons and foxes, all very fond of it, have
gotten ahead of me, long ago, and since their harvesting the low-growing
shrub has been but a leafless thing, not to be noticed in a world of
tropic vegetation. Now creamy white blossoms have burst from the bare
twigs and are sending a new fragrance all along the level barrens on the
soft, summer breeze. This fragrance has in it something of orange
blossoms, something of the fruity odor of the guava which is to some
people unpleasant but which I declare delicious, and a wild delight of
its own. It suggests things good to eat. Some perfumes give you dreams
of disembodiment in heavenly spaces of pure delight. Of such are
carnations and English violets, the clethra of our Northern swamps and
the wild cherokee roses of the Southern hedgerows. The odor of the
custard apple blooms makes you think of banquets of delicious fruits
served by pink-fleshed, round-bodied wood nymphs while amorous breezes
blow soft from Southern seas.
The newborn scent of the custard apple blooms has added a zest to the
joy of the morning breezes. These were sufficiently intoxicating before.
Always there are odorous flowers in bloom here, and always there is the
spicy fragrance of the long-leaved pines to form a basis for any delight
which they may bring. The soft winds which are their messengers call you
out mornings early and I do not wonder that this is never a land of the
closet or the counting house. No one whose senses are set a-tremble by
them can stay indoors, and once he is afoot they lead him on and on, nor
does nightfall make him willing to return. Then the great white moon
simply lends further enchantment to the road.
To-day this lure led me far out on the old Government trail which is
now, strange to relate, one road to Palm Beach. This is one rarely
traversed by the butterflies of fashion. You may see these gliding by on
the Pullman limited, looking with road-weary, unseeing eyes through the
thick glass of the windows. The yachts of others take them down the
sparkling waters of the Indian River, but now and then an automobile
enthusiast, lured south by the good trails through Ormond and Daytona
and Rockledge, then bewildered by the vast sand depths of the roads
below and finally learning with sinking heart at Fort Pierce that there
is no bridge across the St. Lucie nearer its mouth, swings westward into
the limitless prairie and follows this old Government trail which swings
out from the noise of breakers somewhere above the head waters of the
St. Lucie, keeps for a dozen to a score of miles to the westward of the
seacoast, and marches steadily southward to Miami. I doubt if the
country along its two shallow ruts is any less wild to-day than it was
in the days of Osceola. Except for those narrow ruts which you may not
see two rods away man has left the region unmarked. You see there what
Ponce de Leon may have seen.
A mile west of the St. Lucie you still carry the settlements with you.
Here are ditches, that first requisite of Florida farming, and wire
fences, which come next. Here are comfortable houses, set high on
heartwood posts, and here too are groves of grapefruit trees, the great
golden globes weighing the tough branches with their glossy, dark-green
foliage to the ground. Here are dogs that bark and cocks that crow and
all the simple, genial activities of farm life. You
[Illustration: A Seminole village deep in the flat woods of Southern
Florida]
go your mile and with the houses at your back you stand within the
untamed wilderness. A mile farther and you may look which way you will
and you are lost from all touch with man. But before you make the mile
you will pause and turn, for there, upside down upon a tree, but with an
arrow pointing due south, is a sign which says, “To Miami”. The last
warning, guiding word of civilization is humorous and you plod southward
into the primeval with a laugh.
After a little the spaces take you in and make you one with their
fraternity. The sun and the wind spy upon you. The broad blue eye of the
heavens looks you through and finds you fit. Thereafter you begin to see
this barren, lonely world as it is, and find it neither barren nor
lonely. The absolute level begins to show undulations, and after you
have walked it a half-score of miles you may tell the hills from the
valleys though the variation be but that of a half-foot in a quarter
section. Here is the top of a ridge which you might need a theodolite to
find if it were not that it has its own peculiar vegetation. Along this
the taller pines have crept and found permanent foothold. With them have
come the saw palmetto, accentuating the rise of inches by the dense
green vegetation of a foot or two in height. No summer floods have long
topped this ridge, else the palmettos had failed to find permanent
rooting here. Down its long slope they fall away, and though the pines
have ventured farther than they, the water has dwarfed them at first and
later left them but dead stubs a few inches in diameter and standing but
a score or so of feet high.
A study of them will show you not only the swing of the land from high
to low, but the swing of the seasons through wet to dry and back again.
During long successions of droughty years the pines have seeded down the
slope and made a small growth in the rich bottoms. Then the pendulum of
annual rainfall has swung back again and a series of wet decades have
followed. Through these the trees have failed in growth and died, with
their roots under water. Now their bareback, white stubs stand as
markers on the borders where prairie land runs into muck.
On the intervals of prairie grow the grasses, soft, brown and ripe with
last year’s growth, showing as yet but little of the green of this.
These paint all the background of the scene with their olives and tans,
as if the painter of it first made his background with grass, then set
his figures and lights and shades upon this, the gray stubs, the deep
brown trunks of living trees, the vivid green of the palmetto leaves and
gold of sunlight and purple of shadows chasing one another over all. The
high lights in all this scene are the pools. Where the long dip of the
land culminates the grasses give way to sedge and bulrush, and these to
sparkling water which catches the shine of the wide sky and throws it
back to the eye in silvery lights.
Such, in broad splashes of color, is the prairie through which this old
Government trail winds, from the St. Lucie to Palm Beach, and on down to
Miami. Always the pines are present, though seemingly always just
beyond. They stand so far apart that all about you is invariably the
open space, while beyond, dwindling into the distance of receding miles,
the trees draw together and group in a forest that you are never to
find. As you proceed it recedes, slipping away in front and closing in
behind as if the trees, shy but curious, fled, then followed.
By the time you see all this the wide spaces are no longer lonely, and
the individuals that inhabit them begin to step forward out of the mass
and salute you. I always notice first the prairie flowers. Like the
trees these are scattered here and there, the conspicuous ones in no
wise as plentiful as the daisies and buttercups of Northern meadows.
Scattered like big stars at twilight the heliopsis blooms show golden
disks of composite flowers, veritable tiny suns in the prairie
firmament, while about them revolve constellations of yellow stars of
coreopsis. The ground in moist spots is often salmon red with the
plants of the sundew and starred yellow with the blooms of the tiny,
land-born utricularia, while in the pools their larger, many-flowered
brethren float free, touching heads almost and studding the pool as
stars stud the sky on a moonless, winter night.
Only in the pools is this profusion to be found. In some of these the
blue blooms of the pickerel weed crowd shoulder to shoulder, almost as
close as in some Northern bogs I know. But the flowers of the drier,
grassy plains are far more scattered. Indeed, one may walk a half mile
sometimes and hardly see one. Again they are more numerous but never
what might be called grouped.
And yet, I must needs revise that again. There are places where the
moist ground is white with _Houstonia rotundifolia_, which is not so
very different from _Houstonia cærulea_, the common bluet of our
Northern May fields. In other spots the purple-flowered variety,
_Houstonia purpurea_, is very plentiful; yet neither have I found making
such solid masses of bloom as the Northern variety. Of all the varied
flowers of these sky-bounded levels, however, the one that pleases me
most is the Calopogon. It makes the beautiful, level wilderness more
beautiful with the quaint racemes of bright purple, curiously
constructed flowers.
I think the most conspicuous bird along this lone, level trail is the
black vulture, which in this region seems to be more common than the
turkey buzzard. It is not always easy to distinguish the two at a
distance, but the vulture has shorter wings, is a heavier bird, flaps
oftener in flight and the under sides of his wings are silvery.
In places where the young grass is springing beneath still growing pines
I find the Florida grackle, which is hardly to be told from our Northern
species, in numbers, feeding on the ground and singing and fluttering
iridescent black wings in the trees. With the blackbird groups fly up
flocks of a swifter, cleaner built bird, colored in the main a slaty
gray. These birds have the unmistakable head of the dove, and my first
thought on seeing a flock of them was that I had stumbled upon a remnant
of that vanishing bird, the passenger pigeon. This was a smaller bird,
however, and, nowadays, a far more common one, the mourning dove. The
whistling of their wings on first starting into flight should have told
me better, for the flight of the passenger pigeon is said to be
noiseless.
The mourning dove is a beautiful bird, with those gentle outlines which
make all birds of this species lovable, but for quaint, gentle beauty it
has a rival in the ground dove which is quite as common here. These I
find in the open prairie or among the pines, but far more often in the
scrub of the palmetto hammocks, where they run along the ground almost
at my feet, gentle, lovable and unafraid. The bird seems to be as much
like a quail as a dove as its feet twinkle over the grass. In flight it
is like a picture on a Japanese screen.
But, after all is said and done, the loveliest bird I have seen in all
the South, pine barrens or savannas, palmetto hammocks or village
gardens, is the bluebird. Here and there these may be found all along
the Palm Beach road, sitting perhaps on top of the gray bones of a dead
prairie pine with the rich cinnamon red of the breast and throat turned
to the sun, or dropping thence like a bit of the blue sky itself,
fluttering down into the olive brown wire grass, seeming to add a more
beautiful bloom to the prairie than I have yet found there. The faint
carol of the bird is so slight a sound that it might well be lost in all
this limitless space, but somehow it seems to carry far and is sweeter
than any song of Southern bird that I have yet heard. When the bluebird
goes North the savannas will have lost their finest touch of beauty and
of charm.
To those who would see the real Florida I recommend this lone Palm Beach
trail, not taken in the whirl of an automobile rush to safety under the
wing of one of the big hotels, but slowly and with open eyes and ears
that the beauty and significance of the place may enter in. Chief of
these, I fancy, and longest to be remembered will be the wide sweep of
sky which there seems to bend nearer and be bigger, bluer and friendlier
than in most other places. The southeast trade winds sweep across this
sky all day long, and bring with a temperature of June great store of
white clouds that now roll in cumulus heads and again are torn to white
streamers of carded fleece. Sometimes these gather and darken and spill
April-like showers for a moment, then blow over and leave the vivid sun
to pour the round, inverted bowl of the sky full of the sunshine’s gold.
Through it all you walk as if on the pinnacle of the world with the sky
very big and very near and all things friendly.