William complained little that the floating islands sometimes confounded
navigation, especially in the lakes, where channels were mazes of choice.
This was not the case with later river travelers, who discovered islands not
yet imagined when William paddled and sailed.
In March , Marjorie Rawlings undertook with a young woman friend
what Rawlings told Maxwell Perkins was ‘‘a very foolish trip’’ on the St.
Johns. Local men warned her against the dangers of the wild, yet con-
cluded (to her delight), ‘‘No fool, no fun.’’ So the women would navigate
most of the St. Johns, beginning not on the easy, broad northern or (rela-
tively) straight middle sections of the river but at its presumed source, just
west of Melbourne, in a lake named Hell ’n’ Blazes. (Marjorie rendered it
‘‘Hellenblazes.’’) This upper region of the river was notorious for its nar-
row, mazelike channels—if channels could be found at all—and lakes so
covered with drifting vegetation that they were avoided by all but a few local
fishing people. The worst of the lakes was properly named Puzzle. Marjorie
and her friend, Dessie Vinson, would take an eighteen-foot rowboat with a
small outboard motor (plus another motor for safety), gasoline, a tent, food,
and Marjorie’s dutch oven. Dessie brought a rod and reel and packed a pis-
tol. If they made it to Sanford, beginning of the ‘‘middle’’ part of the river,
where banks and channels were obvious, they would proceed northward
through Lake George and then, at Welaka, steer westward into Marjorie’s
‘‘home river,’’ the Ocklawaha, a tributary of the St. Johns originating far in-
land toward the south.^14
Even as late as , women generally did not attempt such adventures.
Marjorie, however, was deeply depressed. Her long-faltering marriage had
just ended, and now she identified herself to Max Perkins as ‘‘an old woman
of .’’ Dessie, twenty-six and athletic, was the adventurer who insisted on
the trip to distract the troubled Marjorie, and simply because she relished
the notion. Married to a Tampa physician, Dessie ‘‘lives a sophisticate’s
life among worldly people,’’ Marjorie wrote, but ‘‘at the slightest excuse she
steps out of civilization, naked and relieved, as I should step out of a soiled
chemise....Gunsandcampfires and fishing-rods and creeks are corpus-
cular in her blood.’’ So off they drove in Marjorie’s Oldsmobile, trailing her
rowboat piled with gear. Lake Hellenblazes turned out to be a dry, yellow-
ing marsh. A drought that had begun in forced the adventurers north-
ward, where they finally discovered the navigable head of the St. Johns at
Fort Christmas. They pushed off (a boy drove the car back) and started the
motor in the narrowest of streams, surrounded by endless marsh.