July 22, 2006: Brooksville & Homosassa Springs

Since we saw a lot of Asian and African animals at Disneyworld yesterday, it seemed only right that we take in some of Florida’s creatures today. Cousin Christine, her daughter Taylor, and Taylor’s friend Toby went with us to Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park, one of a cluster of nature preserves on the northwestern coast of the Florida panhandle. Homosassa features a short river cruise and a small zoo of animals native to the state.

At the visitor’s center, we examined a two-headed turtle that has been living there for years. Two heads, no joke!

We had lunch and then took the cruise, which winds through the preserve and ends up at the zoo.

The park is famous for its manatees,

which visitors can watch from an underwater observatory,

but it also features alligators,

as well as otters, bears, bobcats, deer, eagles, and flocks of flamingos, egrets, and other birds. There’s even a 46-year-old hippo that was born at the San Diego Zoo, a former animal actor named Lucifer. Hippos are African, of course, but after the state took over the park and started transferring its exotic species to new homes, a public outcry convinced the state to grant an exception for “Lu.”

Rangers gave talks on the manatees as well as other animals such as the opossum, which really does play possum when threatened. It can rapidly lower its body temperature, emit a foul odor, and lie stock still for up to four hours.

We could hardly tear Tommy away from the reptile house. He stared for the longest time at a clutch of baby alligators, and at a skink, a type of lizard, wondering why a pair of toads of more-or-less the same size shared its enclosure.

Debbie thought the baby alligators were adorable, but Christine did not share her enthusiasm, since she has been trying unsuccessfully for several months to get an increasingly-bold, 12-foot gator removed from her back yard in Aripeka, a nearby town on the Gulf Coast.

We had dinner at a steak-and-seafood place in Hernando Beach with Aunt Claudia, Uncle Jim, Christine, her fiancé Don, Taylor, Toby,

and Cousin Scott and his wife Cindy, who is a social worker soon to receive her bachelor’s degree.





Among our appetizers was fried gator tail, which I tried for the first time. Yes, it did taste somewhat like chicken – with the light texture of fish – though there was too much breading for me to describe the flavor accurately. But I liked it.

Our conversational topics during dinner ranged from food and digital cameras to dogs and stormy weather. (We passed through a doozy of a storm on the way to the restaurant. Granted, we weren’t rained on at Disneyworld, but in general the Sunshine State has not lived up to its name this week.)

During their meal, the boys continued to pester the girls with questions about their religious faith, the existence of God, and other questions both theological and ontological, a conversation they started at lunch when they noticed Toby wearing a t-shirt from her Baptist church. The discussion-cum-debate only succeeded in puzzling the girls a great deal.

Things lightened up considerably when a rock band in the adjoining bar started playing and ten-year-old Toby decided to teach the younger children to dance. This charmed the adults no end.

After dinner, we invited everyone to visit us in Seattle, then stopped off for a short visit with Claudia and Jim at their new house. They always make us feel at home, and we really can’t thank them enough.

We finished Huckleberry Finn today, which was only appropriate, for tomorrow we start moving north. Huck suffers his crisis of conscience and decides he’ll go to hell rather than betray Jim, one of the most sublime moments in all of literature. The novel unfortunately loses steam at its conclusion with the contrived reintroduction of Tom Sawyer and his protracted preparations for freeing Jim. Why should Tom, so charming in his own story, be so tedious in this one? His fantasies are anticlimactic; they pale in comparison to Huck’s real adventures.

The novel’s coda is nonetheless wonderful, and I’ll probably feel the same way when I finish this blog: “…there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.”

I’m a little sorry to leave Florida yet again without indulging in the 1950s kitchiness of the famous mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs, but the mermaid shows are part of an unexceptional water park that we had no interest in patronizing. And I suppose we should also regret not devoting time to lazing on a Florida or a California beach. But we vacationed for nearly a month in Hawaii last year and spent many days swimming and snorkeling and lying on the sand. This trip has a different sort of focus.