It’s a gorgeous December afternoon along the shores of Boca Ciega Bay. I’m standing at the southern edge of Eckerd College campus, where Frenchman’s Creek drains into the bay, watching sunshine glitter off the wake of passing boats and sift through the dense clump of mangroves at Maximo Point, just across the channel. I’m waiting for my friend Tyler, who directs Eckerd’s coastal management program and has promised to show me around the College’s new living shoreline installation, a grouping of plants and riprap meant to protect this erosion-prone section of its coastline. Snatches of students’ conversations in the nearby dog park drift by: a killer chemistry exam, roommate drama, plans for the upcoming break. The sun beats down and I peel off my jean jacket; by the time Tyler arrives, I’ve started to sweat. Even after 11 years, I’m still not quite used to Christmastime in Florida. 

The night before, we’d put up our tree: the six-and-a-half feet, prelit, made-in-China ersatz evergreen we’ve affectionately dubbed “Wesley Spruce” after the name printed on the box. (It’s worth noting that there is no such species as a Wesley Spruce. This is apparently a marketing name created by Christmas tree manufacturers to designate a particularly lush and lifelike type of artificial tree). I’ll admit, I have mixed feelings about using an artificial tree; growing up, I relished the yearly trip to the tree lot, the delightful man-versus-tree wrestling match between my dad and our chosen conifer that inevitably followed, and the sweet green smell of fir that would fill the living room all season. I also know that, by the time you balance the plastics, the carbon footprint of shipping millions of artificial trees around the world, and the carbon mitigation provided by all those Christmas tree farms, you really should just buy a live tree. It’s what real treehuggers do. And yet, our family has been ringing in the holidays with our scraggly, smells-like-attic Wesley Spruce since 2014.

But, of course, there’s more to the story. Christmas 2014 was the first one we’d spent in the house my husband and I had bought together. I had just left a good job that had gone sour, and was moping anchorless and miserable through bright December days that felt like an affront to my sad state of mind. Wesley caught our eye on a routine trip to Home Depot; we needed a tree, and I think my husband knew it might cheer me up a bit. So we brought Wesley home, patiently unpacking and stacking his octopus-like tiers, tenderly untangling and fluffing his feathery-plastic boughs, and covering him with two boxes worth of gold balls—all the ornaments we had at the time. Since then, Wesley’s finery has grown: my tarnished silver First Christmas ‘82 bell (still plays “Joy to the World” if you wind it up enough), my husband’s collection of owl ornaments, and all manner of painted and googly-eyed creations produced by our son over the years. We deck Wesley out, plug him in, and, every time, there it is—that sentimental catch in my throat that means the Christmas season has officially begun. An awkward beginning turned strangely lovely. 

Looking around me, I could say the same about the living shoreline. As we wade into waist-high spartina grass, I’m amazed by what I see. Just 16 months before, one broiling August afternoon, I had stood in this very spot, helping a throng of Eckerd students and staff plant grasses and shrubs in a patch of raw, sandy soil. Dodging shovel-swings and flying sand, I’d eased spartina and muhly grass plants from their pots, chatting with my planting partner about her first semester in college. We’d made a little game of wishing each plant luck as we patted it into the ground. When we finished and stepped back for a drink of water, it didn’t look like anything so grand as a living shoreline; it looked like a phalanx of ragged recruits, transfer-shocked plants stationed across 400 feet of bare soil. If I had understood the drubbing those little plants were to face in the next two months with the arrivals of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, I might have wished them more than luck. Parts of the installation had to be completely replanted.

But now, the picture is altogether different. Up and down stream, marsh grasses grow in wild profusion, slender stalks swept this way and that like tousled hair. They slope gently down to the water, sheltering gray-green tufts of salt bush, fiery splotches of blanketflower, and, right along the edge, scrappy stalks of red mangrove. Along the shaved-down remnant of the seawall—all that remains of a structure that had armored Eckerd’s shoreline for decades—Tyler finds new patches of oysters growing. And these aren’t the only signs of life: we find narrow wildlife trails winding through the grass and the delicate footprints of raccoon and possum along the low tide line. We also find slightly broader paths cut by students—known in the restoration business as “social trails”—down to the riprap, a prime fishing spot. And, wedged in the watery hole between the boulders and the old wall, one punchy little crab. 

Our campus, like so many other waterfront properties on Tampa Bay, is reckoning with the long term impacts of the dredge and fill craze that swept this part of Florida in the 1940s-1960s—the construction boom that brought ecological disaster to Boca Ciega Bay and became, as former State Representative Roger Wilson told Tampa Bay Newspapers in 2019, “a national representation of how not to dredge and fill.”  By some estimates, as much as a quarter of the bay bottom of Boca Ciega was scraped up and piled into finger islands, destroying seagrass meadows and mangrove banks that had once nourished one of the most productive estuaries in Florida. Add to this the runoff and sewage that followed from all that development, it’s no surprise that  environmentalists declared Tampa Bay “dead” by the 1970s.

Looking at old aerial photographs in the College archives, you can’t help but notice the startling fact that the western third of our campus did not exist—at least not as land—before the late 1960s. (Fun fact: the Ratner Fill project, which completed our campus and also laid the groundwork for neighboring Isla del Sol, helped spark the controversy which led to Zabel v. Tabb, a court ruling that called for the Army Corps of Engineers to take the cumulative effects of any dredging project into consideration when granting permits. It helped spell the end of the dredge and fill era.) The miles of sea wall that hold all that dredged land in place are now fighting a losing battle with time, tide, and sea level rise, all of which gradually erode and undermine them. It’s a common sight in the Tampa Bay area: places where land behind a seawall has subsided into ankle-twisting gaps and holes, where the concrete has begun to buckle and crack.

Living shorelines are promoted as a “green infrastructure” alternative to this overabundance of concrete that works on multiple levels: they absorb the wave energy that causes erosion, while creating habitat for wildlife—or in many cases, restoring lost habitat. They also scrub runoff headed into the bay, removing pollutants and improving the water quality that is so important for seagrass meadows and all the species they support. Where dredge and fill degraded the estuary, living shorelines repair, bit by bit.

We’ve wandered now to the end of the installation, where the cordgrass peters out into the shade of trees and the sidewalk curves away to the west. I start to thank Tyler for his time, but then he points out something interesting: the seawall keeps going, curving along the imposing wall of mangroves that shield the southernmost tip of the campus. As many times as I’ve walked (or even paddled) this quarter mile stretch of the shore, I never once noticed the old sea wall. And it’s easy to see why: red, black, and white mangroves all grow here, sheltering in their deep green shadows beach shrubs, vines, and fiddler crabs. In some places, sand has accumulated so deep that palm trees grow, and every once in a while, the vast mangrove hedge breaks to form a tiny secret beach. The seawall runs just landward of this hidden world, in some places a sizable hop above it, in others just barely visible above the soil. 

I’m momentarily bewildered. This isn’t what seawalls are supposed to do. Seawalls cut a clear, immaculate line between land and water; they let us roll our carpets of sand or sod right up to the edge of the bay and dangle our toes over; they slice through the map to turn nature’s messy edges into precise geometric shapes. But this seawall is…not doing that. 

Tyler sees the question on my face. It’s all about wave energy, he explains. Back at the living shoreline, boats coming into the creek cut their engines at the “No Wake” channel marker, ironically sending a surge of wake toward the encroaching banks of the creek. I’d seen that clearly enough when we were there; every time a boat passed, wavelets churned up, crashing into the old sea wall and bouncing back. Over time, this rough movement gouges out the sediment in front of the seawall, making it difficult for anything to grow. But at this point on the wall, the shifting sands slowed down, accumulated, transformed into the floor of a mangrove forest. Why? Tyler points out into the bay, where the emerald hump of Indian Key, an undeveloped mangrove island, rises out of the water just a third of a mile away. It’s possible, he says, that the key sheltered this part of the wall from the wind and waves, letting the sand settle and mangroves take root—an accidental forest. 

My mind jumps back to our Christmas tree in all its synthetic glory. What makes it lovely, I decide, is not its perfect imitation of nature (no matter how “Wesley Spruce” it may be). Instead, it’s the way it catches and holds our memories—the bells, owls, and other flotsam borne in on the tide of our life together—like a tidal flat transformed into a hidden beach. To fully appreciate it requires a firsthand understanding of our family’s history, the auld lang syne we’re always singing about this time of year.

In the same way, living shorelines complicate a simple understanding of “nature” versus “manmade.” They aren’t just about replacing the unnatural hardscaping laid down by generations past with something greener, something prettier—after all, living shorelines are also engineered by human hands (as the blisters on my thumbs that not-to-long-ago August day will attest). And, as much good as they can do for slowing erosion, enhancing habitat, and improving water quality, they’re not just about bringing those benefits to any one site. At heart, living shorelines require an understanding of the complex, unique-to-every-installation agencies of water, wind, sediment, plants, and animals; they require us to see how one location is connected to the others around it, to think—with apologies to Aldo Leopold—not like a mountain, but like an estuary.

I’ve zoned out. Tyler’s probably wondering what’s wrong with me, but it’s just sweet visions of oyster reefs dancing in my head. You can keep your Frosty snowmen and winter wonderlands, I’ve found my Florida Christmas groove. It’s Oyster the World, Away in a Mangrove, The Nutcracker Marshgrass: the pretty darn miraculous way the bay can heal itself, if we help it. 

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The post Away in a mangrove, there are reminders that if we help it, Boca Ciega Bay can heal itself appeared first on Creative Loafing Tampa.

As we do, we’re trudging and squelching through hallowed ground. Pausing to catch my breath, I glance across the parkway that runs along the lake’s edge and spot the pebbly gray facade of the Tomlinson building, dedicated in 1924 as St. Petersburg Junior High School (funded by Edwin High Tomlinson, the same city booster that developed St. Pete’s bygone Fountain of Youth attraction). After years of serving as a vocational training center, the old landmark is now being redeveloped as affordable housing for Pinellas County’s educators. Along the same winding road lies a cavalcade of St. Pete’s centenarian structures: a 1915 Carnegie Library, the 1920 founding site of St. Petersburg High School (now also converted to apartments), St. Pete’s iconic 1924 Shuffleboard Club, and even its 1937 City Hall. It’s no wonder—especially with new developments like the 18-story Reflection condo tower shouldering in nearby—that the city chose to declare Mirror Lake its newest historic district last December.

But notably absent from the line-up of Mirror Lakes’ historic structures is the city’s first waterworks. A water tower and pumphose were constructed on the lake’s southeastern shore in 1899, the same year the city passed an ordinance forbidding cows to graze freely along its newly paved Central Avenue. While the site has given way to many other worthy edifices—including the Bernie McCabe Second District Court of Appeal Courthouse currently under construction—the absence of the waterworks makes it easy to forget a very salient fact: Mirror Lake was the city’s first municipal water supply.

A shriek snaps me out of my reverie. A runaway beach wagon filled with pulled weeds and gardening equipment barrels down the sloping grass, heading for a gaggle of screaming teens at the waterline. A gallant young man swoops in to intercept, his long dreads swinging behind him. “Just doing my part,” he says, flashing a winning smile as he pulls the offending cart up the hill.

Teen hijinks are nothing new here. Early photographs of Mirror Lake (then called Weir Lake) date from the 1870s, when H. A. Weir acquired 40 acres along its shore. They show a broad, shallow waterway bordered by tall pines and a troop of teens and tweens in long flannel swimsuits lined up on a rustic dock, ready to take a plunge (alligators be damned!). The lake appears again on the 1888 plat of the City, but this time with a new name: Reservoir Lake. At this point, St. Petersburgers were still gathering their water from wells and cisterns, but it was clear that the city’s developers had an important supporting role in mind for the erstwhile swimming hole.

New park board takes action on several matters/ St. Petersburg, Florida · Sunday, July 25, 1915 25 Jul 1915, Sun St. Petersburg Daily Times (St. Petersburg, Florida) Newspapers.com

Reservoir Lake then began its shift away from its role as water resource and entered a more genteel phase of its existence: a central city park. The marshes along its edge were dredged to give the lake a more uniform shape; the roadway around it paved and trimmed with elegant gas street lights; the ubiquitous St. Augustine grass planted in a green swathe around its shore. By 1915, the St. Petersburg Daily Times felt compelled to explain to the growing number of tourists in St. Pete that “there is no longer any connection” between Reservoir lake at the city’s water supply. This transformation was soon made official by the city park board’s decision—spurred on by pioneer conservationist and St. Pete Audubon founder Katherine Bell Tippets—to change the waterway’s name again, this time to something a little more (if you’ll pardon the pun) polished: Mirror Lake.

Today, nobody would dream of drinking Mirror Lake’s waters.

Like most urban lakes, its serene beauty masks a less visible function as a sink for all kinds of pollutants, byproducts of the city’s development. Decades of trash washed into the lake have sunk to the bottom. At the same time, fertilizers, animal wastes, petrochemicals, and even human waste—the area is home to a significant population of unhoused folks who lack good bathroom options a lot of the time—have drained into the lake as runoff. 

Reports of the lake’s demise were somewhat exaggerated. It survived well into the 1990s, when the city began to treat it with an alum injection system, which adds aluminum sulfate salt to incoming stormwater. The alum combines with heavy metals and phosphates in the water to form heavy “floc” molecules which sink to the bottom, keeping the water above relatively clean. Bays notes that, despite the litter, Mirror Lake is, water quality-wise, one of the cleanest urban lakes in St. Petersburg.

Still, I’m not exactly reaching for my eco-friendly metal straw.

But I am thirsty. So I perch on a low wall above the embankment to take a water break. Before long, an older man in a broad straw hat approaches, takes a seat nearby. I’d noticed him circling the lake earlier, chatting with some of the other volunteers. From the confident way he’d smiled and gestured out over the lake, I’d assumed he was one of the team leaders. Up close, that same grin reveals damaged teeth, some missing altogether; his eyes have a friendly sparkle, but one is clouded over, like a cataract. His broad hat and clothes are threadbare and pungent. We chat a little about the weather, about the new plantings that will come in around the lake, before the conversation drifts to his church, which he kindly and repeatedly invites me to join. I thank him, explaining that I’m already spiritually affiliated. As I return to my shoveling and raking, I wonder if, perhaps, he lives out here by the lake.

By 1930, St. Pete’s thirst had outstripped local waterways’ ability to supply it. So the city, together with the newly formed Pinellas Water Company, invested in a new supply system that could pump up to 14 million gallons of ground water per day from the Cosme well field (located northwest Hillsborough County). The new system required 26 miles of 36-inch pipe, a portion of it sunk into the bottom of Old Tampa Bay, to deliver water to a newly constructed pumping station in the north St. Pete neighborhood of Washington Terrace. This massive undertaking—heralded by the St. Petersburg Times as “the very latest development in hydraulic engineering”—was celebrated with an elaborate Soft Water Carnival attended by 10,000 thirsty citizens, featuring a barbecue in Williams Park, a formal ball at the Coliseum, an old-timey nail-driving contest, and a “water carnival” of 100 gushing sprinklers for the city’s children.

It’s hard to imagine anyone getting that excited about drinking water now.

And ironically, this colossal infrastructural achievement, which brought high quality water to taps, tubs, and toilets throughout the city at the turn of a handle (almost as easily as simply wishing for it!) may be part of the reason why. After 95 years of conjuring plentiful potable water from wellfields most of us have never seen and couldn’t locate without Google Maps, it might be fair to say we’ve lost our appreciation for the everyday miracle of having enough—really, more than enough—water.

St. Petersburg’s own water history bears out this idea. By the mid-1990s, the Sunshine City’s water needs, coupled with those of surrounding cities and counties, had grown to an insupportable demand on the region’s groundwater. Decades of population growth, drought, and over-permitting pulled water out of the aquifer faster than seasonal rains could recharge it, and lakes and wetlands were beginning to dry up. Tampa Bay municipalities and counties traded lawsuits in what would become known as the region’s “water wars,” leading to the foundation of Tampa Bay Water. This utility currently supplies Hillsborough, Pasco, and Pinellas counties along with St. Petersburg, New Port Richey, and Tampa with a mixture of groundwater, river water, and desalinated seawater. Our “big straw” is really more of a carefully operated skill crane, balancing the pressures of demand against drought, water quality, and the energy cost of preparing and moving water. It’s a calculation very few of us are privy to, and yet one on which everyday life depends.

Standing knee-deep in St. Pete’s first official reservoir, watching my fellow volunteers swig ice-cold water from Nalgenes, Hydro Flasks, and other highly specialized and expensive water drinking equipment, I’m struck by the irony of cleaning up a polluted lake in a city where good drinking water is so cheap it’s practically free. In a neighborhood where luxury high rises overshadow homeless shelters, a historic district where unsheltered residents seek shade and cooling by the edge of a once celebrated lake. In a state, no less, where it is not really legal to live outside if you have no other options. But it is definitely legal for Nestle to siphon off millions of gallons of water from our aquifer to sell for $2 a bottle.

There’s something in all of this that doesn’t quite add up, something important that’s been forgotten. Here in Florida, we may build our lifestyle and our identity around the water, but we’ve long since ceased to recognize that water is life.

Maybe that’s what brought me out here today, pushed me to wiggle into these sweaty frog pants to pull weeds for two hours. Maybe that’s what drives some of us to harvest rain in barrels, or shelve our fertilizers for the rainy summer months—or even rip out our lawns entirely to replace with native plants or xeriscape. Maybe that’s what motivates folks to actually read those periodic water quality reports that come to our mailboxes, or to spend hours studying the former courses of urban waterways on old maps. It’s a longing to recognize, to respect the water that flows through our city and gives life to our bay. To somehow just do our part.

Maybe. As I pile up my tools and peel the sodden work gloves from my hands, I take in the glassy sweep of the lake, the green shade of trees along the shoreline, the glittering skyline beyond. I wonder what picture these waters will reflect in the next 50 years.

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A palm tree inclines its spiky crown, as if to pray
In an old postcard, among jungled timbers:
Beautiful Maximo, defined by the currents
Of Frenchman’s Creek converging with the blind-mouthed bay.
The happy snowbirds’ lens inscribes this horizon:
A paradise of sunset, shell, and shoreline.

I walked beside my mother. She scanned the shoreline
And leaned upon her cane, gazed down as if to pray.
A distant storm front piled clouds on the horizon.
Her eyes lit on a lightning whelk trapped in timber
At the base of a palm tree, exposed by the bay.
We traced its graceful curvature, felt time’s current

Electric through its whorls. I expounded current
Archaeological theories, noted the shoreline:
Thousand year old middens eroded by the bay,
Oyster domes assembled like penitents who pray
Deliverance from the flood. Another timber
Memo read: HONOR THE OCEAN. The horizon

Is dimmer these days; no more the bright horizon
That drew folks toward their golden years, like a current.
But something more fragile, wanting care. In timber’s
Or water’s recordings, that’s clear. We sat, shoreline
Before us, and maybe, not exactly, we prayed,
Raised thanks for our Pub subs, for this beautiful bay,

For the privilege of feasting where remnants of bay
Scallop and oyster stretched thick to the horizon.
Like the faithful frolfers, so we, ploddingly, prayed
For this muddy sponge of time, soaked by currents,
And the rapt beachcombers of a future time’s shoreline.
Proclaiming the wisdom in the tower’s timbers:

THIS SPOT RULES! we did pray. Let’s abide by this bay
Seek truths in its timber; dream beneath its horizon:
Ripples in time’s current, footprints on the shoreline.

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“There’s a bluff?” I’m often asked by visitors to the Gulfport History Museum, where I volunteer. The look on their faces suggests that the only bluff they can detect is the craggy crock I appear to be handing them, something akin to the “proof” in Frostproof or the “city” in Everglades City. Florida place names can be deceptive.

“It’s subtle,” I politely concede. “But yes, we have a bluff.”

It’s so much easier to show them the bluff. And we do, once a month, on our walking tours. We take them to the foot of 52nd Street, passing over quaint brick roads where you can see, if you look carefully, the faint impression a brickmakers’ fingers pressed into the blocks as they handled them. Here the road narrows down to driveway width and cozies right up to the 148-year-old Torres House—a quirky Victorian manse, all lavender clapboard and frilly trim. It’s Gulfport’s oldest remaining residence. We snake through a tunnel of trees onto a public right of way, a berm stretching between the Torres House and the adjacent property down to the shore of Boca Ciega. Here the view opens up to an immense swath of sky, framed by graceful lawns on either side and a dark fringe of mangroves in front, boats drifting in the shallow water just beyond. It’s a beautiful place—one where the past feels very present.

This is where, in 1868, the town’s first white settlers, John and Rebecca Barnett, spotted that subtle bluff, which you can still detect if you look northwest. It was high ground with a freshwater spring (one that still burbles up into one of the backyards visible from the berm) that was perfect for a sensible pioneer homesite. The so-called “Gulfport ridge” that runs northward toward town from this point still hosts some of our most significant civic structures. City Hall, two schools, two churches, and some of Gulfport’s oldest homes can be found on this modest rise (topping out at around 40 feet).

A “ridge” and a “bluff”? Well you might scoff. It’s much easier to see the more recent impressions builders have left on the land, like the seawall stretching across most of our downtown waterfront, a mark of our town’s extensive dredge and fill in the mid-20th century. Like a Magic Eye image, these early earthen shapes require some practice—and a certain amount of wishful thinking—to really see.

But still, there were signs. Since that first summer, I’d noticed the broad puddles that formed on the next street over, turning the intersection of 26th Avenue and 56th Street into a small pond—much to the delight of our son, who came along about 18 months later—for a day or two after any good rain. I had a vague sense, confirmed by years of strolling around the neighborhood, that if Boca Ciega’s waters ever swamped us, they would come from this direction, creeping up from the southwest, where, just three blocks away, stands an 18-building condominium complex built in the 1970s on what was once called Fiddlers Flats. As in fiddler crabs. As in tidal flats. If a big enough storm came, the water would first reclaim this old lowland and then surge up the gradual incline toward our house—the kind of invisible hill you can only detect when pushing a stroller or pedaling a bike.

This topography is a little easier to see when you look at a FEMA flood map. In the most recent edition, our house is perched just a few feet outside the orange overlay that indicates “moderate risk”—an awful swathe that licks alarmingly at the southwest corner of our property and engulfs the side street where I normally park my car. The next block over is a solid “high risk” blue, clear down to the bay. My partner and I had taken to joking about our smart investment: the beach front property of tomorrow, folks! No flood insurance required.

But the water came home in a different way this past September, when a sudden downpour transformed our neighborhood into a shallow sea. Crawling home from work in my Prius, I cozied up to the curb and reached for the door handle, my impatience prompting me to race up the sidewalk despite the driving rain. Then a tremendous bolt of lightning slashed through the sky, followed almost instantly by a deafening crack of thunder. My Girl Scout training kicked in: better stay put until I can count at least 10 seconds between flash and report. So I waited, peering out my car windows like the portholes of a submarine into the sheets of water tumbling around me.

That’s when I noticed that 56th Street had turned into a river.

Not a regular street with some heavy rivulets crisscrossing its width. Not a constellation of puddles swelling with rain. But a bonafide knee-deep river, bursting up over the old limestone curbs, with—I swear to God!—rapids in its midst. A swirling, raging creek I’d neither cross on foot nor brave in a boat. As the storm began to clear, I ventured out to the flood’s edge, joining a few other neighbors who had come to gawk. “Has it ever done this before?” I asked the man who lives in the house on the corner, up to his ankles at the edge of his lawn.
He shrugged his shoulders, at a loss for words. “This is a first.”

We turned our gaze northward up the street. It seemed all the stormwater in Pinellas County was funneling down the old brick road—seeking, as always, its own level. Some foreshadowing, perhaps, of what the next two months would bring: in just a few weeks, a quarter of the city would be under water.

Not everything was awful. When my son’s waterside school flooded and the district determined it could not reopen until the following year, the school was reassigned to an old middle school campus, just a few minutes from our house. In the space of a week, his teachers managed to transform that strange new space into something welcoming and exciting—Like an AIRPORT!” our third grade buddies said, in awe. And just across our street from our house, neighbors and city staff turned our senior center into a busy respite station, where hot, belabored storm survivors could cool down, use the Internet, and get a good, free meal from the World Central Kitchen / Shawarma King truck in the parking lot.

More than anything, what I remember from that time was the waiting: waiting for the power to come on, the water to be safe. Waiting for schools to reopen, for parks and roads to be cleared. Waiting for the doors of our favorite businesses to open and the familiar comfort of neighbors’ homes to be restored. Waiting for things to go back to normal—and knowing that maybe they never quite would.

Before the storms, we’d fretted that we were perched on the rim of a disaster, our toes dangling into a confluence where water—after many decades of being hardscaped, channelized, and paved over—was beginning to reassert its ancient patterns. But after the storms we could see, in bold lines, how that transformation was unfolding. This time around, our family and our home was spared, more or less. We came home to an inch of water in our converted garage apartment, a couple of dents in the roof, and the two trees that shaded the southeast corner of our house torn in half. So much less than what so many Gulfportians have endured. But still, we couldn’t help but imagine how Milton’s mind-boggling 18 inches of rain must have pooled in our backyard’s low spots, pushed under the door, steadily-warping the cheap particleboard legs of our Ikea cabinets.

That same rain seeped under the bricks of 56th Street, chewing voids into their sand foundation and leaving two cavernous, brick-edged sinks in the middle of the street. The holes are still there, slowly spreading behind their barricades. A third is growing nearby. The repair will take time; in a city where we are still waiting for our iconic Casino and our less-iconic but equally vital Rec Center to come back online, these potholes are many lines down on a very long list. They are one of the hundreds of places, large and small, where we will have to reconsider the power and direction of water in future years if we want to keep on living here. And most of us do.

Two of our friends have already left; they loved this tight-knit community as well as anyone else, but after all the trauma they have experienced, their houses could never quite feel like home again. Another friend, who is waiting on a job opportunity out of state, has moved six times since the storm; at least the moves are easier, she jokes, since most of their things were already destroyed.

And our family? In our 10 years here, we’ve weathered six major hurricanes—three in our home, three from evacuation. We’re observing these changes from the 16-foot finished floor elevation of our 86-year-old timber-framed house, for which we owe the bank—as of earlier this month—exactly $0.

The future is difficult to discern. It’s easy to see placing solar panels on the south side of our roof, now much sunnier (thanks, Milton!). But it’s much harder to imagine growing old together here peacefully. Whatever comes, at least, we will own our home, and our decisions about it, outright.

Every step of this journey felt like another stitch binding me to this place—my own fingerprints on the bricks. Every memory inspired, every pedantic history factoid evoked, was a yearning to be part of this place. Part of a story that, I hope, will keep unfolding across many more years. But to do that we’ll have to learn to live with this land (and this water)—not just on it.

I crossed through the archway of the oaks, out into the sun and breeze and mangroves, paying my respects to the Barnetts, the Torreses, and the countless generations that inhabited this spot before them. I know I must have looked ridiculous to the current residents, who probably wondered why a random pedestrian had wandered out to perch among their shrubberies.

But neighbors, that should really be obvious to you: I’m just loving on Gulfport. So hard.

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It’s a simmering August morning in St. Petersburg. The sun’s still-slanted light plays through the jigsaw branches of the ancient banyan onto the grassy bank leading down to Round Lake. This tiny oasis, a hidden gem just west of the busy Fourth Street North corridor, shines like a polished tiger eye under the brilliant summer sky. The steady splash of the aeration fountain cools my soul exactly two degrees as perspiration pools along my hairline and creeps down my back. Watching a tricolored heron thread its way through the spikeweed and pickerel along the water’s edge, I feel I’m about ready to give up on my mission—learning more about a decade-long effort to restore the lake’s habitat—and just dive in. Those refreshing depths are calling my name.

But how deep is Round Lake, really? As it turns out, it depends on the year.

Days earlier, in the mercifully cool rooms of the St. Petersburg Museum of History’s archives, I’d seen an 1888 plat of the neighborhood that identified the pool as Deep Water Lake. Just how deep remained unclear. But the presence of two other bodies nearby—“Long Pond” and “Grass Pond”—seemed to suggest it was a deep spot in a chain of marshy lakes that once stretched just north of town. Possibly a sinkhole fed by groundwater. And while this watery triad stuck around for at least another 18 years, appearing again on city plats in 1902 and 1906, by the time St. Pete celebrated its sweet 16 in 1908, there was just one lake with a whole new name: Park Lake.

At the edge of my vision, the heron spears a fish with its black-tipped bill.

In the archives, you can watch how this vision of City Beautiful unfolded. In 1914, muck cleared from the park was spread along the St. Pete waterfront to cover the bare sand and provide a foundation for landscaping. In 1916, St. Pete Postmaster and chair of the park board Roy S. Hanna championed the idea of transforming Round Lake into an alligator farm, noting that alligators were rapidly disappearing from their natural habitats in Florida and that Northern tourists expected to see them while visiting. (While this exciting idea never came to pass, one such northerly visitor would open a privately-owned alligator farm to the south of the city just two years later.)

Perhaps the park’s crowning moment came in 1938, when the city marked the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the Orange Belt Railroad at the Festival of States—the yearly celebration in which clubs formed of snowbirds from various parts of the country staged a magnificent parade, with floats showing off their home states. That March, Round Lake hosted a fantastical evening Golden Jubilee Pageant on a towering three-story stage over the lake. Spectators seated on the city’s signature green benches, specially brought in for the occasion, watched as hundreds of performers danced tributes to the sunshine, the railroad, Florida citrus, and Florida flowers, among many other topics. Reporters gushed about the “glory of the scene” as lights reflected off the lake’s placid waters.

Today, it’s the bright green stalks of fireflag and the white speckles of ibis that shine along the lake as I meet Adrian Arabitg, a neighbor who helped form a conservation group known as the Friends of Round Lake. When Arabitg moved to the neighborhood in 2014, he explains, the lake looked very different: there were few if any birds to be found and the surface was clogged with invasive plants, which were regularly treated with pesticides. Since its glory days of Golden Jubilee Pageants and the St. Pete Fishathon (a city-wide kids’ fishing contest begun at Round Lake in 1948), the lake had borne the brunt of the development around it, and had fallen into neglect.

But there was one challenge nobody was expecting. In late 2021, Round Lake began to dry up. After a particularly dry winter, water started receding from the lake’s shoreline, leaving exposed lakebed to bake in the sun. By March 2022, the lake had shrunk to about half its original size. “It was basically a mud pit,” Arabitg laments.

Everyone knew that Round Lake depended on rainfall to survive. But a complicating factor was soon discovered by the City: a pump which had been installed in the 1970s to keep the lake full had broken. Simply fixing it wasn’t an option, as pumping groundwater to fill a lake—especially a “manmade” lake without significant connections to the larger ecosystem—had since become illegal. And years of laying down impermeable streets and parking lots in the surrounding neighborhood had limited the lake’s natural groundwater recharge. A temporary fix of repairing the pump and rerouting the water to irrigate the surrounding park (which eventually drains into the lake) is still in place as the City searches for a long term solution.

I scan the lake’s edge, noting an old concrete retaining wall and a small culvert—all part of the complex plumbing that supplies the lake with surface water. I recall another article, dated 1925, which described the installation of a pipe to drain Round Lake into nearby Mirror Lake. Like an overflow hole in a gigantic sink, the pipe was meant to keep the lake’s level manageable, and suppress flooding in the neighborhood, in times of too much rain.

Too much rain, or not enough. My mind returns to the question of depth: in the journey from Deep Water Lake to Round Lake, from messy marsh to perfect park, it seems, the city had taken on the challenge of managing an ecosystem it had just barely begun to understand. And with the hotter temperatures, drier droughts, and fiercer rainfall of climate change now bearing down on us, the flaws in our logic are beginning to show.

But we are learning. Arabitg points out, with pride, that the new plantings not only survived the low water levels but have spread, by themselves, along the lake’s edge. He describes the Friends’ next big project of dredging the southern end of the lake to retain more water, for longer, in dry times. He, along with his colleagues, it strikes me, also demonstrate the difference we can make when we start to really pay attention to how water moves.

In the end, I learn from Jim Bays, President of SoUL, that Round Lake is, on average, only about five feet deep (though, he allows, there’s a significant layer of sediment built up at the bottom, so it’s pretty hard to know for certain). Hardly the underwater wonderland I’d fantasized about, and probably not so great for a swim.

But, as I gulp down the solace of my well-iced water bottle, I have to admit that Round Lake has more than enough depth to set me dreaming. About beauty, resilience, and the changing ways we account for the world’s most precious resource. And maybe, just a little, about alligator farms.

17 Aug 1913, Sun Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, Florida) Newspapers.com

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I find my friend Tom waiting under a palm tree, wearing a big straw hat that I immediately envy. We’ve decided to explore the creek before us—Frenchman’s Creek—for the column we share on Tampa Bay’s forgotten waterways (#Creekshed). Though paddling urban streams in search of their stories is something we’ve come to enjoy, I’m especially excited to explore Frenchman’s, which I consider a neighbor. For eight years, I’ve worked alongside the creek at Eckerd College. At least twice, I’ve kayaked with the doughty students from Eckerd’s Waterfront out past the mouth of the creek and into the nearby Pinellas National Wildlife Refuge. And, more times than I can count, I’ve sped over the bridge that vaults across the creek just to the east of campus on my way toward the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. But today, we’re going to try and find its source.

This could be harder than it sounds: on the map, Frenchman’s looks less like a creek than a narrow hook of water that snakes between the western edge of campus and the eastern point of Maximo Park, intersected by the I-275 as it plunges south towards the big bridge’s causeway. On the far side of the Interstate, it transforms into a maze of blue-brown ponds and marinas, woven into the gray-green patchwork of residential blocks around it. A creek in camouflage.

As we unload my old canoe, and prepare to launch, Tom takes in the scene with a sweep of his well-shaded head: downstream, the creek curves through walls of mangrove, then opens out to Boca Ciega Bay. Upstream, in the direction we’ll be heading, it narrows into the I-275 underpass. Over the concrete barrier, we can see the tops of cars and trucks—an estimated 50,000 of them every day—that fly right over the creek. Blink and you’d miss it. “This place is so marginal!” Tom exclaims.

I think I know what he means. For decades, Frenchman’s Creek has been more of a corridor than a creek. It’s a convenient passage to link boaters to the open water of Boca Ciega Bay (as witnessed by the steady stream of party boats and fishing launches we notice around us). Until the 1970s it served as a discharge point for the nearby water treatment plant, and it is still prone to outbreaks of fecal coliform during the rainy summer months (Eckerd students call this a “poonami”). Even the “Frenchman” for whom it is named—a Quebecois named Alfred Lechevalier—used the stream as an access point for stalking its rich rookeries to supply the plume trade in the 1880s, leaving behind a decimated wading bird population.

So that’s what we’re paddling toward: an 11-acre impoundment at the end of this half-mile of marginal urban waterway. But even if we make it, I’m not sure we’ll find the source.

Months ago, I had stood (perhaps not perfectly legally) on the far shore of that same pond, trying not to look too suspicious as I took a pair of binoculars out of my pocket. An August downpour fell in gleaming curtains all around me, whipping the water’s brown surface into silver. Muscovy ducks were reveling in the new geography of rivers and swales that had formed on the parking lot and lawns of the apartment complex. Shoes soaked and rain jacket clammy against my skin, I focused the glasses on the distant fringe of cattails where the pond, I thought, must connect to the Frenchman’s creek. But I couldn’t spot the outlet. How did the water get from here to there?

And where, I wondered, looking at the submerged lawns around me, will all of this water go?

This place could look very different now. In the 1940s, the city of St. Petersburg began imagining how it might use this ragged end of the Pinellas peninsula, known mostly as a “best bet” for local anglers, as a bridge into its future. Real estate developers were rapidly dredging new “finger islands”—those long, backbone-shaped neighborhoods that allow every home to have a waterfront view—out of the bay, hardening up the shoreline with seawalls. Roads needed to catch up, and the city considered multiple proposals for a new Bayway project that would have to pass through Frenchman’s creek. One would have launched from the mouth of Frenchman’s Creek across the shallow bay water to Indian Key and south toward the Don CeSar, creating a chain of spoil islands and residential neighborhoods where there are now mostly mangroves, wading birds, and fiddler crabs.

But plans for the Bayway turned westward, and Frenchman’s creek remained, for a time, in the care of Anna and Captain Leo Davis, who settled along the creek in 1938. Together, the Davises dredged and widened the creek to establish the Izaak Walton Fishing Camp, which would become a legendary spot among local anglers, in 1947. Described as “a familiar and energetic figure in dungarees,” Anna ran the place on her own after Leo died in 1951, right up until the city began construction on the Eckerd College campus in 1959.

The place is still quiet, if not so rustic anymore. Emerging from the underpass, we find ourselves paddling along a bright avenue of boats with names like “Fueling Around” and “Liquid Asset.” A massive boathouse looms up, right next to a glass-fronted sales office. On the south side, blocks of expensive condos, each with its own boat slip, dominate the horizon.

Based on the map, the outlet we’re seeking should be near the southern end of this basin, so we hang right, plunging into a steep-sided canyon of condos and docks. We pass a few friendly dog walkers strolling along the sidewalk above, folks sunning on small but well-appointed porches. No outlet, though; the closest we seem to get are a few narrow, water-stained culverts that peek up over the waterline along the wall that separates us from the lake.

Tom spots a ladder leading up the seawall to the neighborhood above and suggests we give it a try. We tie off the boat, assisted by a friendly mangrove crab who pops out of a nearby culvert, and clamber up, still wearing our bulky life preservers. We follow the sidewalk to the top of the berm that seems to separate the lake from the marina, inspect the shoreline. A thick fringe of head-high cattails lines the near edge of the pond—often a sign of a disturbed waterscape. A little further on, cormorants dive and surface in the lake, or rest on the branches of a spreading oak near the shore.

“Do you think that could be it?” I ask, looking at a spot maybe 60 feet from where we stand, where the water seems to have some extra movement, maybe a pulse, though maybe it’s just the wind pushing the water along. It’s hard not to think of the spectacular turquoise springs up north, the ones that boil where they surge out of a limestone basin, and push you backward with the strength of their current. But I’m not sure if what I’m seeing now is actually a spring; the flows and forces here are a lot less obvious.

What we do find are a couple of storm drains along the berm, dark water glimmering below like stars in a distant universe several feet under the street. Maybe this is the closest we’ll get to an answer: a hidden network of pipes that regulates the flow of the freshwater creek to the salty bay. A miracle of modern plumbing that separated water from muck, made dry land out of a marsh. At least for now.

But something doesn’t sit right. As we settle back into the boat—after a somewhat tricky jump off the end of the ladder—I find myself dwelling on the other kind of connectivity, the one that ecologists used to describe the movement of species and the flow of natural processes across a landscape. For all that we’ve gained in ways to live by the water—seawalls that perch us right on the edge, finger islands that maximize the view, and astounding bridges that help us leap across the bay—we’ve sold the generational wealth of seagrass and mangrove habitats, choked the delicate exchange of currents, sediment, and nutrients that keeps the bay healthy.

It’s so easy to appreciate the beauty of a waterscape without also understanding or honoring water’s complex, life-giving desire to flow. And even as we’re learning new ways to heal the damage we’ve done—living shorelines, artificial oyster reefs, fertilizer bans—we seem to be facing bigger consequences than ever.

That’s when I notice the ripples. First far ahead, then off to our left, the waters bubble and roll as if beginning to boil. A dark hump breaks the surface about 50 feet ahead of us. “Marine life!” I yell, half thrilled and half terrified. A gray snout with two wide nostrils huffs out of the water on our right.

“Manatees!” cries Tom. Lots of manatees! They swim and surface and sigh in a wide kettle all around, their massive bodies dimly drifting beneath the boat. We watch, amazed. Their backs, when they appear, are green with algae, their tail flippers waving like gentle fans. We wonder what their skin might feel like—a mossy old catcher’s mitt?

We also wonder what brings them here, where the sea grass is scant and the hard sides of the marina are lined with keels and propellers. Is it the taste of fresh water, the last detectable pull of the old springs? I want to believe it is. Later on, when I ask a biologist friend, he has a different explanation: “My first thought is a breeding group, one female in estrus and a bunch of males. Only two things would make a male manatee subject itself to any sort of effort: food or girls.”

We know the headlines: manatees are declining fast, victims of habitat loss and harmful algal blooms. Calving just once every two to five years, it’s hard for their population to keep up with the pressures our own population growth places upon them. In such times, what right do we have to the unadulterated joy we’re feeling as we watch them swim around us?

And yet, as we paddle back to Maximo, we can’t stop talking about the extraordinary thing we’ve seen. “An embarrassment,” says Tom, “of riches.” A miracle in a marginal place.

We didn’t find the spring, I think, as we load up the canoe, but we did find a connection: astonishing evidence of life’s desire to endure (ahem, manatee sex party). Even in places where we’ve choked it back.

I wonder what other amazing things we’ll see as we learn to restore the flow.

The post We didn’t find the springs at St. Pete’s Frenchman’s Creek, but we did see a miracle in a marginal place appeared first on Creative Loafing Tampa.

I’m feeling this breakdown down to my overheated core one sweltering Labor Day afternoon, cruising westward along Bird Street past River Tower Park. The park’s sun-bleached fields stretch out on the left, while acres of strip malls and parking lots bake away on the right. Behind me, my five-year-old son is draped across his car seat like a steamed noodle. I’ve dragged the poor kiddo along on this adventure with promises that we’ll “hunt for a hidden spring”—pretty enticing for a young explorer—but I estimate we’re now four minutes short of a meltdown.

“We’re super close,” I tell him, not 100% sure about that, through the thrumming exhaust of a red light. “The river’s right there by the tower, so the spring’s got to be close.”

We dart left and then right onto North River Shore Drive, grateful as the Hillsborough snakes into view and the trees throw cool shadows over the road. A moment later we’re pulling off onto a graveled shoulder, unloading our picnic, and plunging into a small jungle of overgrown elephant ear and papyrus. We hug the edge of a dark pond shaded by the languid limbs of oaks. The curving path leads us back through the woods until suddenly a grassy slope falls away into a small, startlingly blue pool. It glows from within, like a jewel. It opens upward to the sky, like a wide-awake eye. My heart catches in my throat; the boy cheers. We finally found Purity Springs.

We aren’t the only ones seeking this little blue wonder these days. Whit Remer, Sustainability and Resilience Officer for the City of Tampa, is leading an effort to restore Purity Springs, now backed by $217,000 from Tampa Bay Environmental Restoration Fund and the City of Tampa as well as a $1 million in American Rescue Plan money earmarked in the state budget. Remer himself discovered this little-known site as part of a “springs tour” led by University of South Florida School of Architecture and Community Design’s Brian Cook, a landscape architect who researches the historic patterns of the Hillsborough River.

“When you see this little, blue, majestic spring nestled in the middle of an urban community,” Remer reflects, “how do you not fall in love with it?”

“Hey!” I say, pointing to a nearby sign. “It says no swimming!”

“Can I just wade?” he pleads, his face a pink, sweaty question mark.

I eye the sandy stream run. Purity’s fresh water attracts its fair share of transient campers, and I’m concerned about what surprises the muck might conceal. “You can get your feet wet,” I relent. “But watch where you step. And stay out of the pool.”

I watch as he splashes his way through a forgotten chapter of Tampa history. As early as 1912, this place was home to the Purity Springs Water Company, which supplied drinking water to a crescent of neighborhoods stretching along the Hillsborough, including Seminole Heights and Sulphur Springs. A pumphouse once stood on this very site, tapping the flow to fill bottles and water mains for as many as 5,200 subscribers, and sending barges loaded with spring water downriver for seagoing ships at Seddon Island (now Harbor Island).

“Purity Springs Water” was once a bragging point for hotels and rentals throughout the city who took that supply. The water was neither filtered nor treated with anything but a bit of chlorine, the company claimed, giving it a kind of legendary quality—especially when, in the 1950s, pressure came from the city for Purity Springs to sell its holdings.

And while it’s an undeniably good thing to have the water we need at our fingertips—not to say a convenient way to put out fires and flush our, um, effluents—somewhere along the way, an important connection was lost.

“People just turn on the tap and don’t even think about where the water is coming from,” Hillsborough County Commissioner Mariella Smith tells Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. She would know: as Vice Chair of Tampa Bay Water, she helps oversee the distribution of regional water resources to 2.5 million people in Hillsborough, Pasco, and Pinellas County. “People don’t generally think about water as a shared resource, one that we have to preserve and protect.”

This may, in part, explain what happened here.

As the city became more reliant on the Hillsborough River Reservoir, its water treatment facility, and the complex but largely invisible infrastructure it uses to deliver water to customers, small, storied sources like Purity faded into the background and off the map. The water we drink became abstracted, dislocated, a commodity—which, Smith tells me, can be had at the mind-bogglingly low price of $1 or $2 per 1000 gallons, depending on whether it’s ground or surface water. Purity itself, finally purchased by the city in 1961, gradually transformed into an obscure city park, just another impaired tributary seeping away into the river.

What a miraculous effect, I think, if such healing and restoration could be provided for the many dozens of “lost” springs along the estuary…

My thoughts are interrupted by a cloud of mumbled curse words emanating from the brush on the far side of the pool. I spot a young man, his thin frame folded into a seated position atop a foam sleeping pad, a small knapsack tucked beside him. He stares down toward the spring, and grumbles loudly and continuously—not, as I first suspected, into a cell phone, but to someone or something I can’t discern.

Startled, and resisting some pretty serious “stranger-danger” indoctrination I received in the third grade, I manage to say, “Hello there. Are we disturbing you?”

“No,” he says, looking up, voice softening. “You are not.”

But I sense that we are. His attention seems to hover around the peaceful pool almost like a guardian spirit … and here we are, noisily splashing in the stream and gobbling picnic snacks. I recall Remer telling me that the spring had a reputation among some city workers as “that place where homeless people go to bathe”—to the point that many felt just fencing it off would be the best solution.

Feeling the need to explain, I say, “This is a beautiful place. I wanted to show it to my son.”

“It is the most beautiful place,” he agrees. Slowly, he rises to his feet and walks with measured, heron-like steps down the path that leads to the pool. He dips an empty Dasani bottle into the water, slowly fills it, and brings it to his lips.

Now it’s my stomach, not my heart, that is in my throat. Everything I’ve ever been taught about germs, contamination, and outdoor survival turns backflips inside me. “WOAH. Is it OK to drink this water?!” I blurt out.

He fixes me with a stare. My question hangs in my ears.

Now I remember something else Commissioner Smith said. “If you travel to other countries where you can’t drink the water, it really comes home to you, how extraordinary it is to have access to water that you can trust is safe and clean.” She paused. “For all of us to be running that water through our sprinklers…it’s a mark of the height of privilege.”

I’ve almost never had to wonder if it was OK to drink the water in front of me. But many people do—including, evidently, the man across the pool. As well as an estimated 63 million Americans, particularly in small, poor, and minority communities, who are facing the prospect of imperiled drinking water due to industrial dumping, agricultural pollution, or deteriorating water infrastructure.

“Of course it’s OK,” says the young man after a beat. “This water comes straight from the Earth.”

Restoration can be, as Remer says, a surprisingly thorny problem. It’s not just about restoring ecological connections, as critical as they are, but also about managing human connections—the widely varying and sometimes conflicting points of desire and need that anchor and attract different populations to a landscape. I want my son to grow up loving and defending the best gift God ever gave Florida—its water. But I also need to recognize that my way is not the only-and-best way of receiving that precious gift. This, I believe, is the challenging process at the heart of what Remer calls “diversifying access” to public greenspaces.

After a few more minutes of playing in the stream and the requisite documentary picture-taking, I suggest to the kiddo that we go find some ice cream. I wave goodbye to the man, still perched above the edge of the spring. I want to return some of the quiet we stole from this place. I follow the trail back to the car, hoping we’ll all be able to find what we’re looking for.

As we pull back out onto busy Florida Avenue, I glance up at the review. My son is watching the landscape, deep in thought. “What did you think of Purity Springs?” I ask him.

“Mom, it was the most beautiful place.”

The post Tampa’s Purity Springs is up for a $1.2 million revival appeared first on Creative Loafing Tampa.

I’m searching for the Fountain of Youth.

This is, of course, a quest as old as La Florida itself. Except maybe not. For more than a century, the legend of Florida’s magical youth-giving spring has woven its way through the state’s aquatic attractions, tourist literature, and a whole suitcase full of Florida place names—including the odd little corner of St. Petersburg I’m seeking. The story reputedly begins with conquistador Juan Ponce de León, who gave Florida its name (from the Spanish “Pascua Florida” Easter celebration) after sighting its Atlantic coast in April of 1513. His expedition went on to survey the “island,” which they quickly discovered was not an island, coasting from the vicinity of present-day St. Augustine to somewhere near Charlotte Harbor.

My journey is much shorter. After two or three drizzly blocks, I find myself in a brick-paved octagon surrounded by a low wall of beige cement, with a white, water-stained pedestal rising out of the center. The space is guarded by two growling lion masks that once splashed water into basins below. The “fountain” itself is a water-stained spigot, turned slightly askew, not unlike the one I remember from the water fountain outside my high school gym. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have known this place for The Fountain of Youth if it weren’t for the old-timey script scrawled across the marker facing the street—which I only noticed as I was leaving.

St. Pete’s own “discovery” occurred in 1901, when local philanthropist Edwin H. Tomlinson tapped a well of sulfurous groundwater at the base of a fishing pier he had built off 4th Avenue S. Visitors soon began flocking to this “fountain of youth” to taste the waters, reasoning, I suppose, that anything that smelled so medicinal must in fact be good for you. A few years later, one of these visitors (Dr. Jesse Conrad) returned to buy the pier and expand the site with facilities for bathing and drinking and an eye-catching sign. About the same time, another get-young-quick attraction had opened across the state in St. Augustine. Indeed, that Fountain of Youth, built on the grounds of an old Spanish mission, is still booming today, with tourists coming from far and wide to drink water from its spring out of little plastic cups—or, if they’re feeling classy, out of a blue wine bottle complete with cork.

Later writers who claimed he was seeking the Fountain were more likely throwing shade, suggesting that Ponce was either foolhardy (looking for something that obviously didn’t exist) or impotent (one of the things the Fountain was said to restore was your…um, personal vitality).

In the end, the water that Ponce de León—along with his navigator Antón de Alaminos—should probably be known for is not the Fountain, but the Gulf Stream, the powerful current that hugs Florida’s coast and pushes northward along the Atlantic seaboard. This flow would prove instrumental in the process of European colonization, powering, among other things, the infamous Triangle Trade in sugar, rum, and enslaved people.

But the myth of the Fountain of Youth stuck, and perhaps it’s no surprise. As Rick Kilby points out in his richly illustrated tour of Florida’s Fountain-related sites (“Finding the Fountain of Youth,” 2013), this story has taken on iconic power in promoting Florida to would-be visitors, even as Ponce de León—and celebrating colonial invasion in general—has fallen out of favor.

“For five centuries, the idea of Florida has been linked to the life-giving properties of its water, both real and mythic,” Kilby writes. This is perhaps especially true in St. Pete, where early boosters like Dr. W. C. Van Bibber were already promoting the city’s warm climate, salt breezes, and abundant sunshine as creating a “Health City” perfect for ailing snowbirds.

I wish I could say the same for myself. Standing in this tiny, forgotten spot, squeezed on both sides by the vast, currently empty parking lots of Al Lang Field and the Mahaffey Theater, it’s hard not to feel disappointed. Why? Because I failed to find a magical elixir to turn back the ravages of my nearly 40 years (or even just the last two)? Or maybe it was discovering a place that once bubbled with life now so deserted? Or maybe it’s a more profound concern, one that goes as deep as the aquifer itself.

Because, as the Fountain of Youth’s popularity illustrates, the story of water in Florida has, for so long, been a legend of ever-renewing abundance.

Our springs, our seas, and even the vast Floridan aquifer that waters so many of our cities and farms—all have been imagined as an endless wellspring that allows us to defy the ironclad rules of depletion and exhaustion. We are beginning to see the consequences of living in this fairytale: the Florida Springs Institute determined in 2018 that there has been a 32% reduction in average spring flows between 1950 and 2010, even as withdrawals for residential and agricultural use continue to climb. As National Geographic’s Jon Heggie puts it: “In Florida, the health of the aquifer is visible in its springs. With insufficient water to create high pressure, the flows stop, algae forms, and the springs’ clear waters become stagnant and brackish, and may even ultimately run dry.”

I’ve seen this anti-miracle for myself: after a formative Florida experience at the extraordinary first-magnitude Wakulla Springs in the late 1990s, I returned to share this special place with my partner in 2015. Nostalgic for the magical glass-bottomed boat tour I had taken as a kid, I was disappointed to learn the boats weren’t running. Thanks to run-off and reduced flow, the water just isn’t clear enough most of the time. I climbed the old dive tower to peer into the 200-foot wide entrance to the massive cave at the bottom of the basin, a ghostly place that still burned bright in my memory, littered with mammoth bones and peopled by hundreds of schooling fish. What I saw instead: a lone snorkeler trying to spot a manatee who was less than 15 feet away. His family was shouting instructions down into the pool: “On your left! Ten’o’clock!” they cried. No good; the water was too dim.

And while Tampa Bay’s urban springs are smaller than their giant cousins, their struggles are, in a way, even more spectacular. Paved over, piped away, polluted, or fouled by rising salt water, they are often the first casualties of development, indicators of our vexed relationship with the water we depend upon. Many of them could be restored, their flows regaining some of their lost power to feed the bay, provide habitat, and wow us with their extraordinary beauty. But this—along with saving the big springs up north—would require us to move beyond desiring eternal youth and expecting eternal plenty. As I stand alone, shivering in the cold drizzle, a vision comes to me: maybe we should transform this lonely place into a Fountain of Elders, a vantage point where we could keep a vigil over our life-giving bay. A shrine whose waters would magically inspire outpourings of thanks to the land that has provided us so much, and floods of respect for this beautiful, fragile, utterly unique place we now call Florida. the story of water in Florida has, for so long, been a legend of ever-renewing abundance.

Yeah, that’s it: Fountain of Elders! I think, pulling up my hood for the return pilgrimage to my car. That will look great on a postcard.

The post St. Pete’s ‘Fountain of Youth’ is a familiar lesson about the challenges for Florida’s urban springs appeared first on Creative Loafing Tampa.

Flying up I-275, heading north out of Tampa, it’s impossible to miss: the 200-foot Gothic Revival tower, pale as a ghost, glowering down from the west at the interstate below. It’s the iconic symbol of a leisure empire that had its heyday nearly a century ago: Sulphur Springs.

In the annals of Florida springs attractions, Sulphur Springs occupies a puzzling place. On one hand, it represents the epitome of our state’s celebrated tradition of springs tourism, a genuine Florida tourist trap from the boom years of the 1920s and a local hotspot well into the 1960s. But that history, so easy to see in the countless colorful postcards and photographs that remain, is almost entirely missing from the site itself (giant tower notwithstanding). Once heralded for the curative properties of its waters, the spring is now deemed unsafe for swimming (though still, during dry spells, tapped for the city’s water supply—after being treated, of course). And despite the fact that a tight knit community of neighbors has rallied around the springs for decades to advocate for its cultural and ecological value, the neighborhood is more often associated with poverty and crime than with its extraordinary contribution to Tampa history. 

As I pull into the parking lot of the Sulphur Springs Pool off Nebraska Avenue one warm morning in early fall, lured by the lore of this legendary spring, these opposing images swap back and forth in my mind. What happened to Sulphur Springs? And what does it reflect about our ongoing reckoning with Florida’s water resources?

I head through the entrance gate to the sprawling pool, a chlorinated facility supplied by city water, which replaced its spring-fed counterpart after high bacteria counts shuttered it in 1986. When I tell the attendant that I’d like to bypass the pool and get a look at the spring, her eyebrows raise. “You know you can’t swim in it, right?”  

She’s right to be suspicious; it’s hard to keep me out of the water. But the fact is, I couldn’t swim there even if I tried. The boil lies behind a tall chain-link fence, overshadowed by John Gurbacs’s mural depicting various species that can be found along the Hillsborough River. Outsized manatees and limpkins mingle with zoomed-in microscope views of the algae now so familiar in Florida springs. The water below pulses into a circular pool choked with what exploratory divers once described as “fluffy brown detritus” and “free-floating, jelly-like organisms”—which turned out to be pulverized plant matter and mats of hydrogen sulfide-eating bacteria. An old headline flashes through my mind: “Tampa’s Sulphur Springs too far gone, experts say.” 

Multiple studies of the spring in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated that the spring’s decline was linked to the degradation of about one dozen seeps and sinkholes in the neighborhood, some as far as two miles from the site, all hydrologically connected to the spring. With very little regulation around storm water management for most of the 20th century, these sites were subjected to decades of ecological abuses, including storm water retention, filling, and dumping. One dive into a sinkhole on Alaska Avenue in 1987 retrieved shopping carts, washing machine parts, furniture, and full bags of garbage—even the proverbial kitchen sink. 

You could say that Sulphur Springs was, in this sense, the victim of progress and its legendary failure to foresee its own consequences: to recognize the reality that nothing we do in this wet sponge of a state stays out of the water table for long. With the spring’s pathways for recharge increasingly choked, paved over, or contaminated, and with less fresh water to push back saltwater flows edging in from below, Sulphur Springs has now changed in ways that would make it extraordinarily complicated and expensive to restore.

But the spring is not the only feature that has fallen off the map here: as I walk upstream along the river, I wind past an old gazebo where white tourists from all over the country—white tourists, because Sulphur Springs, like so many of our famous attractions, was segregated—once sampled the spring’s waters. I pass the bridge where they watched bathers sloshing down an enormous toboggan slide into the luminous blue spring run. Both are now fenced off. And so much more lies flattened under the massive parking lot around me: a host of delights—including a dance hall, an alligator farm, and a sandy bathing beach (sand trucked in, of course), and even Sulphur Springs’s legendary Arcade, still touted as “America’s first mini-mall.”  All traces of these marvels disappeared when the land was sold to the dog track a few blocks north and converted to overflow parking in 1976. 

Further on, where I-275 now cuts through the landscape, more stories lie buried. This area was once known as the Bottom, and it was one of the few places along the river where, during the era of Jim Crow, Black residents could enjoy access to the water. While the spring and its amenities were closed to them, says Dr. Antoinette T. Jackson, Director of USF’s Heritage Research Lab, Black residents turned to the river. “For Black people,” she reflects, “the river was their key place. It was an equalizer.  Everyone could swim, fish, boat, and baptize in spite of segregation.”

Now this history, along with the 2-3 block wide strip of homes that the interstate claimed when it was built in the early 1970s, is concealed under a noisy, noxious, endless stream of motorized flow.  

Now, at last, standing in the shadow of the River Tower, I can’t help but think that the familiar “march of progress” story does not explain what happened here.

With its major commercial center (the Arcade) demolished, a large section of its neighborhood uprooted by the interstate, and white flight taking many of its more prosperous families to other neighborhoods, the closure of the spring in 1986 struck Sulphur Springs at an already difficult time. In February of 1987, a group of neighborhood leaders known as the Sulphur Springs Action League applied to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to obtain an Outstanding Florida Water designation for the spring, hoping its historical and ecological value might ensure future protection for this community asset. The request was stalled on the grounds that Sulphur Springs was not a pristine natural site and already had substantial pollution problems–not “outstanding” enough in the ways that counted. 

After years of organizing and multiple environmental studies, residents were able to secure the new, city-run pool, which fulfilled a major community need, especially in the summer months. Recent scholarship from USF’s Mathews Jackson Wakhungu has shown, however, that some basic needs such as updated sewer lines and effective drainage are still not being met in Sulphur Springs, and many residents drink bottled water out of mistrust for what comes out of the tap. When it comes to the community’s relationship to this most vital of resources, you might say the waters are still troubled. 

When it emerged in the early 1980s, the environmental justice movement drew attention to the fact that marginalized communities often pay the highest price for industrial and urban development, while enjoying few of its benefits. Looked at through this lens, we could understand the loss of the springs as part and parcel of the neglect of an entire community—one whose voice was less often heard in the halls of power and whose unique history was, for too long, considered expendable. As Hillsborough County’s longtime official historian Theodore Lesley put it in 1976, when assessing whether or not to halt demolition of the Arcade: “From the boom time on, Sulphur Springs was nothing but a dive.” 

But this is beginning to change. Tucked away on E River Cove Street, in a riverside park just a few blocks from the pool, is the Sulphur Springs Museum and Heritage Center. First conceived in 2006, the museum opened its doors in 2017, after a decade of collaboration between Sulphur Springs Neighborhood Association and USF’s Department of Anthropology. The museum tells the many-voiced story of Sulphur Springs and aims to provide empowerment for the community—especially for its younger residents. “We want them to be proud of the community in which they live, and also to help take care of the heritage, and to help it grow,” explained co-founder Norma Robinson in a 2017 interview. In addition to its own permanent exhibit on Sulphur Springs, the museum has featured traveling exhibits on the human ecology of water, civil rights in Florida, and, coming soon, the life and times of Frederick Douglass. A recent exhibit which showed the work of USF’s forensic anthropologists feels right in tune with this purpose: telling a fuller story of those people (and places) who have been lost helps us down the long path toward justice. 

Behind the Museum is a small park with a lovely view of the Hillsborough. Perched in a small picnic area overlooking the river, it is easy to see how it might be, as Jackson says, a healing force. There’s peace in the steady drift of its tea-colored, tannin-dark waters, abundant life in its waters and in the green tangle of oaks, palmettos, and houseplants-run-wild that spills down its banks. Even the kayaks and canoes resting on the docks of riverside homes seem to lean out over the water, as if ready to drop in and go with the flow.  Everything here tends toward the river. 

And maybe that’s another answer to the question of what Sulphur Springs can teach us: the spring is only part of the story. More important is its connection to the river, the river’s connection to the bay, and our human connection to the entire life-sustaining system. Choosing to see those connections, rather than ignoring or denying them, is as fundamental to the work of justice as it is to the work of sustainability, which are, in the end, deeply entwined. And to do the work of sustainability and justice, we need to hear the whole story.

Send anonymous news tips to cltampabay_tips@protonmail.com. Support local journalism in these crazy days. Our small but mighty team works tirelessly to bring you news on how coronavirus is affecting Tampa and surrounding areas. Please consider making a one time or monthly donation to help support our staff. Every little bit helps.

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Summer in Florida makes me nervous, and not just for the normal reasons.

Sure, there are hurricanes pinballing across the Gulf, algal blooms choking our shoreline with dead fish, and a heat-humidity combo that makes you feel, as a friend says, “like walking through somebody else’s mouth.” In a way, these are things I have come to expect from Florida, a state where nature has a flair for dramatically reasserting itself despite our best attempts to terraform it into oblivion. These are things that—taken separately, and until they start happening to you—can be weathered OK with open-toed shoes and comfortable clothing, rum drinks, and a reasonable tolerance for the Cone of Uncertainty (which pretty well describes my normal existential state anyway).

The problem, of course, is that they aren’t happening separately. And they happening to us. 

Climate change, with its welter of disastrous effects, is unfolding faster and with greater intensity than we ever really believed it would. Rising sea levels are impacting coastal communities from Fort Lauderdale, which has installed an elaborate system of tidal valves to combat flooding, to Yankeetown, where saltwater intrusion has begun to create a rim of dead and dying trees where coastal forests used to be. Record-setting temperatures are driving more Floridians, particularly in our cities, to the doctor’s office with heat stress and respiratory illnesses worsened by climate change. Warmer waters are bleaching and killing the coral reefs that support our fisheries, and even the seashells littering all of our yards and bookshelves bear the marks of climate-driven ocean acidification. And with changing storms and seas directly undermining the tourism, agriculture, real estate construction, and ports that uphold our economy, it’s no wonder that Susan Glickman, Florida Director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, says “Floridians are feeling the heat and paying the price for climate change.” 

Now, into this noxious mix comes the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), predicting that the earth will cross a dangerous threshold of a 1.5 degrees celsius rise in annual global temperature—a tipping point around which the Paris climate agreement is organized—in the 2030s (while noting that average temperatures and carbon emissions have increased, not decreased, since the 2015 agreement went into effect). The U.N. has called the situation a “code red for humanity,” an emergency which is going to affect where we can live and what we can eat, and test our ability to protect basic human rights (which we aren’t exactly great at, even now).

So yes, Florida summers make me nervous. For all the global significance of these transformations, there is something acutely local in the way I worry. I can’t stop imagining what my neighborhood, perched on the edge of Boca Ciega, will look like in 50 years: how favorite haunts like Clam Bayou, one of the largest remnants of tidal estuary in Pinellas County, will be swamped and fall off the map. How my 1930s beach bungalow will plunge, perhaps around its 100th birthday, from highly desirable real estate to abandoned property (probably after I have lost a great deal of money on it). How my son’s generation will struggle to find drinking water as saltwater pushes into our wells, and will face the constant threat of superstorms that can punch out a community in a single stroke. How he maybe won’t be able to live out his whole life in the state where he was born. 

How do I describe a feeling at once so broad and yet so personal? “It’s like that crushing and squeezing feeling you get when you think about dying,” says my colleague Joanna Huxster, who teaches environmental communication classes at Eckerd College, reflecting on what it means to contemplate a future shaped by climate change. Or, as one of her students recently put it: “You know that feeling where your stomach drops out of your butt?” That kind of fear. It’s also wrestling with the fact that, as Florida writer Lauren Groff puts it, “We are failing the people we love the most if we allow climate change to go on.” That depth of terror, that weight of guilt, that flood of sorrow. 

But what if you really leaned into that feeling? What if you went ahead and imagined the whole  state of Florida was flooded, and only a few scattered communities survived in the high-rises and hangars that remained above the surface? That is precisely what Miami-born writer Karen Russell does in her 2019 story “The Gondoliers.” The story imagines a perhaps not-too-unlikely scenario in which a gigantic seawall built around South Florida catastrophically fails, drowning much of Miami and prompting the United State to officially abandon the city and the rest of its soggy home state. Among the holdouts who remain is Blister, a teenage girl who, along with her older sisters, makes a living by ferrying people safely across town, using a mysterious power of echolocation they have developed (this is a little less realistic, I suppose) to navigate their boats over the city’s many submerged hazards and toxic swamps. Blister’s story reaches a turning point when she takes on an older passenger who, bizarrely, asks to be taken to the flooded ruins of the seawall in the middle of an oncoming storm. As they travel, she learns that he is one of its architects, now on a suicidal grief quest to die at the scene of his greatest failure—taking her along for the ride. 

As the two struggle for control of the boat, a fascinating question emerges: do we, as readers, identify with the heartbroken architect, who sees the eerie post-apocalyptic waterscape around him through the lens of fear and loss, a clear testament to his hubris and the massive tragedy it caused? Or are we more like Blister, who finds it “hilariously inaccurate” that older folks think of her floating city—a niche she has literally evolved to survive in—as a “wasteland”? 

Of course, we are neither the gondolier nor the architect; as always, we readers are always stuck in the middle, triangulating our own position from the trajectories of conflicting characters. But it’s hard to resist the story’s premise that confidence and despair about the fate of the world contend in the same boat, whether that boat represents our collective journey into the future or the thin shell that keeps each one of us afloat in turbulent times. In a 2019 interview with Esquire, Russell speculated: “I hope it doesn’t come to this, but even if Florida went totally underwater, I think that life would continue to find new ways. People would find a new way to live with water. And maybe to sit lightly on the water as these sisters do; they just couldn’t be bogged down by grief.” 

Perhaps this sounds a little optimistic, given the scale of destruction climate change promises us, but I think Russell is right about the magnetic pull of the world we know. Whether we grieve the loss of a familiar world transforming, or elevate the struggle to survive in a difficult place to the level of an art, we fiercely cling to the idea of home. “I think it’s hard to imagine these newborn generations not mourning the world that we’re living in,” Russel concluded, “but why should they? That wouldn’t even be on their map of reality.” If we could reframe future-Florida as a place as rich with the possibility of life as our own paradise, rather than a hopelessly diminished version of the place we know, maybe we could find the will and the way to act on its behalf.

Reading fiction is not going to save our state from climate change, especially if we’re all doing it inside with the AC cranked up to sub-Arctic. But it may be one way to help us practice what Bina Benkataraman, author of “The Optimist’s Telescope,” calls “imaginative empathy” with people who are experiencing and will experience the impacts of our actions (and our inaction). “Most of us,” she writes, “won’t act on the forecasts we receive without fully inhabiting the experience in our minds.” Stories like Russell’s can help us imagine and accept the full humanity of future people, who in too many conversations about climate change receive only empty rhetorical gestures. (How many times have you been urged to do something “for the children”? How many times did you actually do it?) Envisioning climate change through stories can also help us to shift our personal relationship to the future in significant ways. Huxster, a prodigious reader of climate fiction, agrees: “First of all, climate fiction affirms that there is a future,” she says with a wry smile. “And it can give you ideas about the kinds of adaptations we could be capable of doing to deal with destruction.”

Let me be clear: I am not letting myself (or you) off the hook. I am not saying that we can stop sweating our carbon emissions (we can’t), that the future might not be all that bad (it very well could be), or that it is not a moral failing if we don’t do something to improve this situation (it definitely is). But I am saying that it’s important, as Huxster advises, to “hold space” for the feelings of fear, doubt, guilt, and rage that may arise when we look into a future inflected by climate change, “to understand where they come from and why.” This is a first and critical step to engaging our hearts and spirits, as well as our brains, in a struggle that will require all of these things. 

So if you, like me, feel a special kind of Florida-feverish as late summer comes around, remember that anxiety is a reasonable response to an existential threat. It’s part of the work that feelings do to help us survive. And if you follow it to its sources, you can often find the wisdom and grounding you need to respond.

Send anonymous news tips to cltampabay_tips@protonmail.com. Support local journalism in these crazy days. Our small but mighty team works tirelessly to bring you news on how coronavirus is affecting Tampa and surrounding areas. Please consider making a one time or monthly donation to help support our staff. Every little bit helps.

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