Left: Darkness brings unsettling noises that consume the sounds of civilization the river flows toward. Photo © Bill Belleville. Center: The crane is one of many birds protected within the sanctuary of the Saint Johns River. Photo © George Wuerthner. Right: Exploring the water wilderness of the Saint Johns River, it’s easy to feel like you’re in the jungles of Latin America—not a short commute to the cities of northern Florida. Photo © Bill Belleville.

By Bill Belleville
Forest Magazine, November/December 2001

JUST MOMENTS AFTER FULL DARK, when the last shards of twilight slip away into the night, the junglelike woods outside my tent abruptly turn on, as if someone has thrown a switch. There are raspy screeches and deep, throaty grunts and the unsettling crack of branches being snapped in the underbrush. From the river nearby, something very large—a West Indian manatee?—splashes and then exhales loudly.

As I stretch out to rest, the hard-packed shell mound under me pushes through the thin tent fabric, outlining the knobby relief of thousands of freshwater snails gathered here by aboriginal campers centuries ago.

I am not in a tropical rain forest in Latin America, but on the banks of the Saint Johns, a river that parallels the eastern coast of Florida for 310 miles. Rising out of a vast saw grass prairie just northeast of Lake Okeechobee, the river meanders almost to Georgia before sluicing through Jacksonville and flowing into the Atlantic. As it goes, it refills the basin of an ancient estuarine lagoon, a sand-and-limestone valley defined not by the high relief of volcanic chasms but by scarps, long abandoned by the sea.

It is, in fact, a twenty-seven-foot escarpment trailing east to west just north of Lake Okeechobee that marks the genesis of this river. All the rain falling in the basin to the north of that bluff of ancient sand and shell and bone becomes part of the north-flowing Saint Johns; all falling to the south fills the Everglades.

Of the indigenous peoples who flourished here at the time the Spanish landed in La Florida, those known as the Timucua lived along the shores of the Saint Johns, worshipping the sun and the stars, imbuing the eagle and the rattlesnake with mystical powers and using wild herbs to fire the magic that intervened with the spirits of their ancestors. They left behind hundreds of shell middens, evidence of a subsistence lifestyle that dates to 9,000 years ago.

THAT I CAN STILL BE SURROUNDED by such wilderness in Florida at all is a tribute to an aggressive strategy of public land purchase and reclamation. In its saw grass marsh headwaters, some 245 miles have been restored in one of the largest—if unsung—wetland fixes in the country. Along the river corridor, the Saint Johns River Water Management District has purchased scores of water conservation areas to buffer, protect or restore river wetlands and woods.

But it is in the 625-square-mile Ocala National Forest along the middle river, that I have the chance to experience the largest chunk of natural land the Timucua once knew. This is the largest continuous sand pine scrub in the world—ancient sea bottom dunes now colonized by dry, stunted woods hosting wildlife such as scrub jays and gopher tortoises, rare elsewhere on the peninsula. Bordered by the Saint Johns and massive Lake George to the east and by the Ocklawaha River to the north, the Ocala National Forest is far enough from the urban sprawl of Orlando to escape the population impacts that have devastated natural lands there. At Lake George, Ocala hosts the largest population of breeding bald eagles in the country (outside of Alaska). In the thick forest, it nurtures the healthiest population of the subspecies known as the Florida black bear.

Historically, other chroniclers of Florida’s longest river have come here before me over the last 500 years—from the sixteenth-century French artist Jacques le Moyne de Morgues and pioneer American naturalist William Bartram to composer Frederick Delius, bird painter John James Audubon and novelist Marjory Kinnan Rawlings. Each of them found something that touched them deeply. In turn, they helped create a legacy of art and artistic science with images of the Saint Johns and the people it nourished.

Audubon visited the river in search of birds to shoot and sketch, traveling to the seventy-two-square-mile Lake George on a paddle-wheel steamboat. By the time he left, he had added several new plates to his portfolio, including a glossy ibis. Still, the Saint Johns unsettled him. “I felt unquiet,” he wrote, “as if I were almost on the verge of creation, where realities were tapering into nothing.”

No wonder: This river seems defined more by the minutiae of biology than by the drama of geology. It is this nuance that colors its slow-moving waters tannic from the detritus of its wetlands. Springs rise out of the landscape, bringing with them the rare chemistry of 5,000-year-old rainfalls. Bartram marveled at them, calling them “fountains of ether.” The Ocala protects them all inside recreation areas—Salt, Silver Glen, Alexander and Juniper springs, crystal clear waters that allow snorkeling visitors another dimension, transporting them not only across the landscape but also underneath it.

Unlike fast-moving continental rivers characterized by canyons and ravines, this peninsular waterway lopes along, falling barely an inch a mile over its entire run. It has time enough to pool up into a dozen shallow lakes, meander back into countless bayous and dead rivers. Finally, far beyond the reach of the Ocala, it reaches Jacksonville and settles into a deep and final estuarine dash to the sea.

Forest Magazine | FSEEE