How happily situated is this retired spot of earth! What an
Elysium it is! Where the wandering Siminole, the naked red warrior,
roams at large, and after the vigorous chase retires from the
scorching heat of the meridian sun. Here he reclines, and reposes
under the odoriferous shades Zanthoxylon, her verdant couch
guarded by the Deity; Liberty, and the Muses, inspiring him with
wisdom and valour, whilst the balmy zephyrs fan him to sleep.
—William Bartram on the St. Johns,
This wild, beautiful country, tucked off the tourists’ highways...
is in itself a challenge to the imagination. I had met only two or
three of the neighboring crackers when I realized that isolation had
done something to these people. Rather, perhaps, civilization had
remained too remote, physically and spiritually, to take something
from them, something vital. They have a primal quality against
their background of jungle hammock....Theonly ingredients of
their lives are the elemental things.
—Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings at Cross Creek, Florida,
‘‘Ole starvation, he’s...meaner than ole Slewfoot!’’
—Ezra Baxter to his son, Jodie, in the film version ofThe Yearling,
.
In March northern Florida is blessed with azure skies, shirt-
sleeve-warm days, and best of all, the transporting perfume
of orange blossoms wafted upon gentle breezes. Natives
greet their early spring happy in a seasonal rhythm denied
Floridians in the tropical South. Visitors from still-frigid
northern places are simply overwhelmed with enchant-
ment. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a thirty-one-year-old jour-
nalist traveling from Rochester, New York, arrived in the
lakeside citrus groves twenty-odd miles below Gainesville
in March , and her enchantment became permanent.
She and her husband had come for a late-winter vacation,
to visit her brothers-in-law, Yankee settlers who had estab-
