Every spring for a week or more Becky and I travel to Florida’s Amelia Island, where, like song birds that return to the same nesting site each year, we rent the same condo over and over again. Amelia is the state’s topmost barrier island on the Atlantic, just across the St. Mary’s River from Georgia’s bottommost island, Cumberland. Our condo has palm trees beside the veranda waving their fronds in the sea breezes, and the blue sea itself waving beyond. The waves are so close I can carry my whitewater canoe down to ride them. Becky combs the beach for shark teeth, seaglass, and fragments of fossil turtle shells washed up by the waves. We sleep at night to the sound of the surf.
That is on the ocean side of the unit. On the mainland side lie inland waterways to canoe in our tandem and greenway trails to hike. Miles of bike paths lead us to state parks and through beautiful residential neighborhoods fragrant with flowers and shaded by old live oaks. For us it is Florida at its condo finest.
1. Condo Bound
Much as we like the condo, we never fly straight to Amelia but spend several days driving there on back roads, some just one step up from dirt.
One of the roads this year took us to Griffis Fish Camp and Landing, on the Suwannee River. It is just outside the boundary of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and we made a canoeing day trip there that I highly recommend.
Griffis Camp was started by fishing guide Lem (Elemuel) Griffis in the 1930s, and though you may not have heard of it or of Lem, Jimmy Carter has. Born and raised in the Okefenokee, Lem became known as Georgia’s best story teller, and people came from all over to hear his swampy tales and wit–including the Carter family from Plains when Jimmy was a boy. Carter recalls that one time Lem took him fishing in Billys Lake, which is a widening of the Middle Fork of the Suwannee in the Okeefenokee, and when they returned to camp Lem swore they had pulled so many fish out of the lake they had to haul water in to fill the hole.
I first learned about Griffis Camp in 1989, twenty-one years after Lem’s death. The camp was run by Lem’s son Arden then, and I used it as the base camp for canoe trips I led in the swamp. Arden was a tall, thin man—like his father, to just by photographs. Unlike his father, Arden was quiet, reserved, factual, private, though always polite and courteous. You would not have seen Arden in front of a mike. He lived in his father’s house at the camp, where he took care of his aging mother. Whenever I pulled in with a group, Arden came out in a buttoned-up shirt.
Though Arden attended to his appearance and to his mother, when it came to the camp itself, he ran it with benign neglect. When I stayed there with groups, it still had the look and feel of his father’s “old Georgia,” in a deteriorating state. In earlier years the sign out front had read “Griffis Fish Camp and Motel”—the motel being a strip of four rooms built by Lem near the road. But when the motel fell into disrepair under Arden, he closed it, and rather than making a new sign, he simply put duct tape across the word “Motel” on the aging old one. If you were driving down the road, you came to a sign that read “Griffis Fish Camp and . . .” As for the camp’s septic system, Arden kept razor-back hogs in a pen directly behind the small, white building that housed the showers and toilets. We joked that you could hear the hogs squeal with anticipation whenever we flushed.
When Arden died in 2007, his affable brother, Alphin, now 91, began to run the camp. Alphin was formerly a teacher and school principal, and then, once he retired, an avid world traveler with his wife. Now that the camp is under his charge, he has made “Old Georgia” new again. The motel has been taken down, a new sign put up, and the hogs are gone. He has also turned the camp office into a museum where he displays alligator skulls and turtle shells, Indian artifacts and mounted animal heads (he knows taxidermy), along with curios he’s brought back from his travels. On the morning Becky and I arrived, Alphin was kind enough to drop us off at the Stephen Foster State Park in the wildlife refuge. From there we canoed an eight-mile route through Billys Lake and the River Narrows, then down the main stem of the Suwannee back to the camp. It’s the day trip I recommend.
From the state park boat ramp, we turned west on Billys Lake, and right off began to see a lot of alligators. It was a sunny day and they were basking on the dense mats of lily pads and spatterdock that flank the open water. Most of them simply watched us go by, or they slowly slid in and submerged until only their eyes remained above the surface. But you never can be sure about gators, and several big ones—real drama queens—thrashed a lot harder and louder than necessary just to go under, throwing up showers of glittering spray.
Turning into the River Narrows, which flows out the western end of the lake, we found a forested, tightly winding stream that was a delight to navigate. We followed the channel as it gradually opened up to mixed “prairie” and bald cypress groves, before coming to an end at the Suwannee Sill.
The Suwanee Sill is the name for a five-mile-long dam across the Okefenokee’s oozy western outlet built by the federal government in 1960 for the good of the swamp. The idea was that the sill would protect the Okefenokee from frequent wildfires by backing up and keeping its water level unnaturally high. In the 1990s, however, a new generation of federal employees had a new idea: they decided the sill was abetting the swamp’s demise. In the Okefenokee, it turns out, fire and water do mix. The swamp–which is more accurately termed a peat bog–fills a large, shallow depression in the Coastal Plain, and if is not frequently cleaned out with frequent, fast-moving fires, its beautiful Billys Lakes and Grand Prairies and delightful waterways begin to fill up with accumulating peat. In preventing fires, the massive sill was helping the Swamp to bury itself. So, after the earlier expense for the public by the sill’s needless construction–and its offense to the swamp itself–the government opened the spillway gates permanently to approximate the swamp and river’s pre-sill natural flow.
The Okefenokee was brimful the day we were there, so rather than having to carry our canoe over the sill we simply ran it through one of the spillway gates, then ate lunch a short distance beyond on a small island of sand that rose not more than three inches above the water. While we were eating, a gator watched us from in front and another from behind. They did not seem attracted to crackers and pimento cheese.
The trees that line much of the Suwannee below the sill, growing right out of the inky water, are almost all Ogeechee tupelos, nyssa ogeechee. It’s a gum tree related to black gum that is found in the rivers of southern Georgia and northern Florida. They are also known as Ogeechee limes because the lemony fruits were used by settlers in pies. Most of the tupelos we saw were no bigger than dogwoods in size; but if you camp overnight at Griffis then paddle 15 miles farther down the Suwannee the next day to a take-out at the aptly named town of Fargo, you’ll see some very big female Ogeechee tupelos. To me they look like thick-waisted southern mommas standing in the river, their fleshy arms spread wide to embrace the oncoming flow of the snake-black current.
1. The Condo
The first thing we did on arriving at the condo was to go see Go, Pher, Tor, and Toise. Those are the names I’ve given the gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) that have their burrows in the dunes, two on either side of the boardwalk that goes from the condo to the beach. We like to watch the big turtles eat the scrubby vegetation, which they do with rapid bites, and tromp along in the sand to stare at each other. Occasionally they do more than stare.
Male gophers (“gophers” being what Floridians call the tortoises) grow battering-ram extensions called “gular projections” on the front of their plastrons or belly shells, and with them they butt each other over territory and females. One morning on our trip the year before, we were excited to see that the biggest of the gophers, Pher, had crossed under the boardwalk and taken a ramming stance on the apron of sand in front of the burrow of Go, a smaller male. And Go was there too. He was standing in his burrow’s entrance, with damp sand still clinging to his back. It looked like he had just emerged to find himself confronted by big Pher.
For several minutes the two turtles stood perfectly still, squared off about a foot apart. Then very slowly, as if he hoped to find a way out of gular jousting with big Pher, Go began to swing his head from side to side, as if saying “no.” To which Pher reacted immediately with fast, vigorous up-and-down shakes of his head, “Yes! Yes!” Go froze. The two stared at each other for several minutes. Then Go slowly swung his head sideways again,”no”—countered by Pher’s “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Go froze.
Up until then I did not know if tortoises could move backwards easily, or go backwards at all. Their scaly front feet are shaped like shovels for forward digging, their elephantine back ones are made to push forward with power. But when the smaller turtle waved his head “no” a third time and then Pher went “YES! YES! YES!” even more vigorously than before, Go was gone! That turtle shot backwards down his hole so fast the sand on his back was left hanging in the air. When we finally left, Pher was still standing there staring down into Go’s hole.
This year we did not see big Pher, or the female Toise, but Go was there, and Tor, along with a host of other creatures. Wildlife biologists say gopher burrows are so extensive that more than 300 different kinds of animals have been found living in them. The burrows are underground condominiums, making gophers a “keystone species” when it comes to healthy wildlife habitat. When a gopher goes down his hole, think of all the squeezing by, crawling over, and rubbing elbows that must go on there in the pitch black! The teeming life underground might be why we also saw three black racers in the dunes, two coachwhip snakes, an eastern milk snake, five rabbits, and dozens of Carolina anoles racing around. Though not a burrow dweller, we also saw a red-shouldered hawk perched daily on the railing, from where it looked down at all of the above. We spent so much time looking too that other condoers on the way to the beach carrying chairs and umbrellas would pause to ask what was going on.
The most memorial going-on happened when we had our binoculars trained on a cute sandpiper walking through the dune vegetation looking for tidbits to eat, all the while wagging its tail feathers. Suddenly, like a dark bolt the red-shouldered hawk fell straight down out of the Florida blue and crushed the little bird into the sand. We were just 20 feet off, and the hawk stared back at us as if to say “Mine.” Oddly, the finality of the strike brought to mind a short counter-culture video I’d seen in 1969 called “Bambi Meets Godzilla” where Bambi is the the flower child of purity and all you need is love, and Godzilla the soul-destroying Establishment of conformity, mammon, tradition, and Vietnam.
The raptor sprang back into the air, sandpiper clutched helplessly in its talons, and flew to the adjacent condo complex. We could not see what happened next, but we had a good idea of the little bird’s fate. At home we have watched a red-shouldered hawk pin down frogs and chipmunks beside the pond in our yard and with its cruel beak rip the creatures into pieces of flesh that are still quivering as they go down.
3. Condo Done
One morning I was surprised to meet another couple on the boardwalk who had been living in the complex when we were there the year before. At that time, a full year of condo living was not in the couple’s plan. Their plan had been to stay just long enough for their retirement house to be built on the island. But the plan had gone “agley,” in part because of Go, Pher, Tor, and Toise, or their gopher kin at any rate.
The couple explained they had already bought what they thought was the perfect lot for their dream house when they discovered it had an imperfection: three resident gopher tortoises. If the gophers had been mere drunks or squatters or homeless people, getting rid of them would not have been much of a problem. But gophers are not human beings; in Florida they are a Threatened Species. And since rampant home development is one of the chief reasons for their decline, the couple couldn’t simply hire someone to make soup out of their turtles or to trap and release them in someone else’s lot. Before a shovel could go into the ground wildlife regulations stipulate that permits have to be secured and the gophers have to be humanely relocated to a compatible and protected site. The regulations also require the removal to be conducted by a person with the necessary training, a PhG. The couple told me that on Amelia there is just one man with the credentials to do this. He’s known as the Gopher Whisperer.
Unfortunately for the couple, there are many other retirees on Amelia Island who want to build dream houses too. To judge by how many private jets passed low over our condo daily to land at Amelia’s airport, the species Homo Sapiens, sub-variant Wealthianus, is not threatened. And many of the house lots they buy also have gophers. We see the burrows on undeveloped land wherever we ride our bikes. This means the demand for tortoise relocation is high. Naturally, this being the situation, the Gopher Whisperer charges what the market will bear. Evidently it will bear a lot. In this couple’s case, they had to wait 2 and ½ months for the Whisperer to secure the permits and properly remove their gophers, and it cost them $22,00o. That comes to $7333.00 a turtle! They told me the removal had finally been completed, along with final inspections and certification. Only now was the first shovel about to go into the ground.
Naturally, the first thing Beck and I did after hearing this was to ride our bikes over to see the couple’s lot. It was our peddling destination for the day. To us the lot looked like a hot, overgrown, scruffy sand pile, a place much more suitable for gopher burrows than it did for a million-dollar house—especially considering that any house built there is slated for relocation in the future by a rampant Atlantic.
The people living next-door must have thought so too. On their mailbox post they’d nailed a yellow warning sign:
The following morning I happened to meet the couple again on the boardwalk and told them we had been to see their house site. Feeling a Lem Griffis sense of humor rise in me, I added that while we were, we’d watched a mama gopher walk past the tortoise sign into their lot, looking for a place to lay her eggs.
The husband scoffed and walked on towards the beach. The wife put her hand to her forehead and cried, “Don’t do that to us!”