Wakulla Springs Page 11

  “I hear you.” Levi laughed. “I was raised in Florida, and let me tell you, I’ve spent so much time on the river, in the woods, in the swamps—hell, I believe in everything.”

  4.

  Waters of Mystery

  Paddling slowly down the Wakulla River felt like coming home for Dr. Anna Williams. Although she had grown up in Southern California, her family had alternated holidays—spending Christmas one year with Abuela Cecelia in Michigan, the next with Granny Mayola in Florida. And although she adored both her grandmothers, she always felt like she belonged here. Saginaw just couldn’t hold a candle to the natural wonders of the springs.

  On a hot, humid August afternoon she sat motionless in the bow of her fifteen-foot jon boat, a catch-pole at the ready in her double-gloved right hand, a hook in her left. Her paddle lay athwart the second bench, dripping into the flat bottom, unneeded. The lazy current drew the boat forward as easily and quietly as that azalea blossom spiraling past, toward the island.

  She scanned the vegetation, and caught her breath. Trouble. Possible trouble, she reminded herself. The snake coiled amid the palmetto thicket might be a native. She couldn’t discern the patterning from this distance; only a forearm’s length of brown-and-tan scales was visible through the sawblade leaves. So instead of steering around the island as she had umpteen times before, Anna eased bow-first into the surrounding hydrilla fronds, which hissed along the aluminum hull as the boat’s snub nose thumped ashore.

  The snake didn’t budge until Anna prodded it with the hook. Then it flexed like a strongman’s arm and threw itself to the left, but Anna’s reflexes were just as quick. She tightened the noose of the catchpole around its head, planted her feet squarely in the bilge of the forgiving flat-hulled boat, and lifted the writhing creature free of the vegetation.

  Almost four feet, she estimated, and unusually thick. Possibly a pregnant female. She eased it up a few more inches and saw that the scale pattern was clearly a checkerboard. Just a brown water snake. Her students would laugh if they’d seen her. Professor Williams mistaking a common water snake for a Burmese python?

  She released the annoyed reptile and sighed with relief. Although it would have been exciting to be the wildlife biologist who bagged the Panhandle’s first confirmed python—more than four hundred miles north of the Everglades, their documented adopted habitat—it would have been very bad news for this environment.

  Anna swished the pole through the water to remove any scales, and looked around at a landscape that had not changed much in thousands of years. It was a state park now, protected from development, and past the hotel and the springs, there was almost no sign of human habitation. But she knew that civilization was closing in. It was why she was here, spending her sabbatical documenting the changes, hoping she could find a way to turn back time.

  Divers had explored the limestone caves beneath the springs, discovering more than fifteen miles of branching channels that ran unseen beneath pavement and pastures, all the way to the Apalachicola National Forest. The aquifer was being tainted by wastewater from Tallahassee and nitrate fertilizers from farmlands, turning stretches of the formerly crystal-clear waters as dark as iced tea. It was on its way to becoming a real black lagoon.

  She was just as worried about the creatures that had invaded her childhood playground. Florida was home to more non-native species than anywhere else, the promised land for escapees: the hydrilla weed that choked off the surface, introduced as an aquarium decoration; pythons, boas, and anacondas brought up from South America and set free from amusement parks and tiny zoos; armadillos released from monkey jungles; and countless more former pets left behind by tourists since the 1920s.

  It was still the most amazing place Anna had ever seen.

  She plucked a fistful of beautyberries—a natural mosquito repellent—crushed them and rubbed the lavender juice into her forearms and neck and face. She pushed away from the island, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a bandana. She’d survey for another hour, then head back to the springs for a swim, work off a day of sitting and paddling. She was an excellent swimmer with her share of collegiate trophies, but she couldn’t hold a candle to her dad. Levi Williams must have been born in the water; even at seventy he could hold his breath a full minute longer than she could.

  She picked up the paddle and steered the boat past the gentle curve where Dad used to point out Old Joe basking in the sun—before a poacher downgraded the huge gator from a riverbank guardian to a relic in a glass display case in the lobby of the Lodge—and nosed into a trio of mangrove knees. She slipped her sweaty hands out of the gloves, waving them in the air to dry before she took her tablet out of the waterproof rucksack, opened the database app and added the water snake to the afternoon’s tally of gators, tortoises, pelicans, anhingas, herons, and ibis. She was glad that the Wildlife Commission had given her an intern to count fish.

  Anna had been happy when the Commission invited her to join the Wakulla research project. It gave her an excuse to spend one more summer at her grandmother’s little house in Shadeville. At 86, Granny was a tough old bird who sat on her porch from sun-up to sundown drinking lemonade and waiting for the bookmobile. She said she didn’t need any looking after, but Anna knew she was glad to have the company.

  And the project also gave her the possibility for furthering an ambition of her own. Officially, she was making a count of the wildlife whose habitat was the two-and-a-half miles of the Wakulla River between its origin at the springs and the chain-link fence that marked the boundary of the state park. Unofficially, she was hoping to sight some creatures that didn’t exist, at least not any more—a black panther, a Carolina parakeet, or an ivory-billed woodpecker. Maybe even a Skunk Ape.

  Common sense and professional dignity dictated that she keep her cryptozoological tendencies to herself. But Anna had been raised on the combination of tall tales and midnight monster movies that so delighted her father. He took her and her brothers on field trips to the La Brea Tar Pits, bought them Ben Cooper creature masks for Halloween, and lulled them to an uneasy sleep with stories about the swamp creatures of his own childhood. Every time she’d visited Granny, Anna had laid awake listening to every cypress branch scraping the tin roof at night, sure it was a Skunk Ape trying to peel the house open like a can. Part of her was terrified, but another part had always been thrilled by the idea that some of the tales could be true. She cherished discoveries like the coelacanth and the Javan elephant, and hoped one day to add to that list. Not myth. Not extinct. Here’s proof.

  She swatted at a swarm of no-see-ums, bringing her attention back to the task she was being paid for. She counted five more tortoises, eight gulls, a really big water strider—that made her paddle faster because she did have a few issues with Florida’s insects—a nice ten-foot alligator, and—

  Bloomp!

  Something splashed to her right. She looked up into a cloudless sky. Nothing could have dropped from an overhead branch; she was in the middle of the river.

  Ker-chunk!

  That was much closer, soaking her right arm. Any human being who met Anna’s gaze from within those interlaced fingers of foliage would have caught a momentary glimpse of a scared child looking out from her adult face. But the thing watching her from the bushes wasn’t human, though it had alert and intelligent eyes, a long pink face, and a grayish-brown beard. It smiled with a toothy grimace.

  Anna’s pulse slowed when she recognized a rhesus monkey, which cocked a skinny arm, and let fly another rock. That one plunked into the river well short of the boat. Anna laughed as the monkey screeched, inspiring a derisive chorus. There were others back there—many others—but all less brave, merely egging on their leader.

  The monkeys were invaders, too, but Anna found them harder to dislike than pythons. Cuter, more anthropomorphic. And they didn’t eat all the other animals. Urban legend claimed they were descended from Hollywood monkeys, released into the wild when a Tarzan movie wrapped. Anna was skeptical; she h
ad watched all those jungle flicks—her parents owned both the Weissmuller DVD sets—and had noticed capuchins and spider monkeys, but no rhesus macaques. That didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Maybe their ancestors had just ended up on the cutting room floor. All Anna knew was that monkeys were not native to Florida, so someone must have let them loose, back in the day.

  The lead monkey screeched again. Anna smiled and took out her phone, snapping a picture with the zoom function to get a nice close-up of the face. No cell reception out here, but when she got back to the Lodge, she’d email it to her mom with a note: “Any interview questions for this one?”—a reference to her parents’ oft-told, so-cute, how-we-met story. Then she switched from smartass daughter to dutiful biologist and added three monkeys to the database, using an asterisk, because she’d heard at least a dozen more, even if she hadn’t actually seen them.

  She was almost to the moss-draped chain-link fence that was the downstream border of Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park. Beyond lay the Shadetown Road bridge, and the intrusion of the twenty-first century: a series of subdivisions with street names like Limpkin Court and Turkey Trail and Razorback Road, all named for whatever had been killed or displaced to build them.

  The fence marked the end of paradise. It was time to turn back, call it a day.

  But seeing the monkeys, thinking about where they’d come from—and where she’d come from—had put a bee in her bonnet, as Granny would say, to do something she hadn’t done since she was a kid.

  Would a noise qualify as invasive? There was decibel-based pollution, sure. But what about a sound that was artificially introduced into the landscape, only to propagate unexpectedly, crowding out the natives? Because, surely, before the 1930s, Florida children like her dad must have created their own yells of look-at-me exhilaration when they swung out on a vine and dropped into the middle of a swimming hole, right?

  Anna laid down her paddle. She took a deep breath. She balled her hands into fists, raised them and beat on her chest like a drum. She opened her mouth wide and began to yell—to yodel, really, a yell more Austrian than African, more Hollywood than Florida, a fake that over time had become real.

  “Aaahhh-eeeeeeee-aaahhhh-eeeee-aaaahhhh-eeeeee-aaaahhhhh!”

  Her long, ululating cry pierced the quiet of the jungle.

  It carried across the surface of the water, and the animals responded.

  Two anhingas broke their cover, flapped into the cypress tops.

  A family of rhesus macaques chortled and hooted and beat their own chests.

  A limpkin emitted a rattling scream.

  A twelve-foot gator slid into the river and lazily stroked upstream away from the din, its prehistoric brain ticking coolly away.

  Anna gave the call again, queen of this jungle, primal and fearless.

  Back in the trees something that smelled of sour cabbage dragged its knuckles and roared: woomp, woomp.

  An armadillo fully as big as a VW bug shook its scaly head, snorted, and lumbered through the brush.

  And beneath the river’s surface, a creature reached for Anna’s boat with a webbed hand, its talons approaching the metal hull. Then it changed its mind and kicked away, back down into the depths where it dwelled, away from the light.

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by Gary Kelley