Saying goodbye

Sadly, my time here is up, so thanks for reading. A few last observations:

1. I've said it before and I'm saying it again: I don't know about the rest of Florida, but this part has an abundance of state parks, preserves, forests, and other natural areas. I think there are a dozen within an hour of my condo. Gotta love that!

2. There are a lot of people in Florida (it's the third largest state). I hit a traffic jam when I was taking the kids to the airport in Orlando. It took us a full hour to go maybe ten miles.

3. Everyone who's visited has noticed it: there's a lot of sky here. (The last photo is Steve's.)

4. The Old City is completely charming. Where else in the US can you walk down a narrow, pedestrian-only street dating to the 1700s, eating an orange-basil ice cream bar, with a fort, marina, and quaint bridge a block over, a cathedral behind you, and a 1905 Spanish-Cuban restaurant in front of you?

Bye, St. Augustine. I loved your beaches, your Old City, and your surroundings. Save me some sunsets for the next time!

The Gilded Age

One thing about those robber barons: they knew how to entertain. And build. And luxuriate. Henry Flagler, seemingly founder of just about everything in St. Augustine, made his money in Standard Oil (as Rockefeller's partner), and he spent a whole lot of it here.

Never one to do things by halves, he built a grand hotel you could only stay at if you stayed the whole winter and paid cash up front (something shy of a half mil in today's money). He wrote a blank check to a pair of 20-something architects and told them to go crazy. They did.

He had Edison put in the electricity. Tiffany did the dining room windows.

Flagler didn't like the taste of the local water, so he piped it in from seven miles away and stored it in fake bell towers.

St. Augustine wasn't a tourist town then, and his guests got bored. So his architects designed another hotel across the street that was basically a rec center: a massive swimming pool in a 3-story central atrium, steam baths, gym, ballroom, beauty parlor, etc.

But wait, there's more! Later on, older and sadder after losing a couple of wives and a daughter, he built a memorial church. 

You can see the tops of these buildings from way out in the harbor; with one other building, they are pretty much the whole of St. Augustine's skyline. For better or worse, this tycoon was probably the founder of St. A's tourist industry.

SICWTH

My friend Janet Speranza-Moran inadvertently provided me with a motto for life. Last year she said her New Year's resolution was to say more often, "Sure I can. What the hell?!" I'm no risk-taker; I need reminders to grab opportunities.

So when the kids discovered that you could Segway on the beach, I thought: Not me. Bad knee. Bad balance. I'll fall and wreck myself. Then: SICWTH to the rescue!

I had a couple of nervous moments. My legs got tired. But it's not exactly climbing Mt. Everest, or even zip lining over alligators (another possibility). It was an amazing hour of fun on a gorgeous, summery day.

The Alligator Farm sounded like the biggest tourist trap of all time. But we gave it a try (what the hell?!), and it turned out to be a good little zoo. In addition to the alligators and other fun critters, there's a native birds area. The great egrets were in breeding mode, fluffing their feathers, posturing, and building nests.

Speaking of which, spring was in the air at the truly touristy Fountain of Youth, too:

I got a second chance at a wood stork portrait:

And SICWTH served me well when it was time to drop the kids at Orlando airport and drive two hours home alone through a strange city at night. Thanks, Janet! And thanks to my kids, who are terrific supports and great fun to be with.

Suddenly summer

It was like magic: my three kids arrived from Connecticut, Michigan, and Texas, and suddenly the windy days pretty much vanished and we were slathering on sunscreen. Never ones to sit around, they've been lugging cameras to tourist spots.

Much time has been spent on beaches and eating good food. The night photo is of a very fun restaurant in an old fishing camp. As a Calvin and Hobbes book once had it, "the days are just packed," just the way we like it.

Plantation life

Kingsley Plantation is a poignant site on a small river, surrounded by a vast salt marsh. Nearly empty of visitors on a gorgeous day, it was serenely beautiful. (Click to enlarge the photos, if you like.)

Two hundred years ago, it was a thriving sea island cotton plantation. The National Park Service provides an audio guide that is detailed and includes lots of first-person narratives (and it couldn't be stopped once it started, so you had to either abandon it or listen to every word). By the time it was over, I was knocked flat.

I learned that slavery isn't as all-of-a-piece as I tend to think. This Kingsley had a freed-slave wife who ran the plantation in his absence. And he believed in treating slaves reasonably well, keeping out of their private lives, and allowing some to earn their freedom. 

Sounds like a flaming liberal, yes? Not really. He firmly believed that paternalistic slavery was good. His motives were largely pragmatic: relatively content slaves produced more and caused fewer problems. Regardless of the treatment, slave life was, of course, grim. The cotton harvest began in July, when it's 100 degrees here, and lasted six months. Sea island cotton can't be ginned, so they had to pick the seeds out by hand. Slaves also had to do the planting of the cotton, the harvesting and processing of sugar cane, and all the gardening for the owner's large family, as well as specialty jobs like blacksmithing, carpentry, and whatever else it took to make a plantation work. When their work for the day was done, they could work on feeding their own families.Oh, and they built their own houses, as well as all the other building on the plantation.

It was the slaves' houses that did me in; today their skeletons stand like gravestones in a semi-circle, with an overseer's house in the middle so he could keep an eye on things. 

Today they're surrounded by trees and grass in a park-like setting, but at the time, there would have been no shade and only open, dusty ground. The houses are so tiny – two rooms and a sleeping loft, but the rooms weren't much bigger than a walk-in closet.

The audio stressed that, despite all this, the slaves made their families their chief priority and the thing that kept them going, and they never abandoned the dream of freedom. They built a society and culture that sustained them and eventually added richness to our national life.

It's easy to think of the U.S., the world's first democracy, as the good guys compared to those greedy Spanish conquistadors and other colonial powers. But when Kingsley Plantation flourished in the early 1800s, Florida was still a Spanish territory, and Spanish law allowed a level of citizenship for free blacks like Mrs. Kingsley. When the U.S. took over in 1821, with passionate white-only politics coming to the fore, that possibility vanished. Kingsley sent his family to Haiti, along with any of the freed slaves who wished to go. There, the dream of freedom and a good life still flourished for a while.

The Castillo

When I saw photos of the Castillo de San Marcos, like the one above, I assumed that this fort was out of town somewhere. But no. It's the first thing you see when you come into downtown, across the street from the Pirate and Treasure Museum, between Ripley's Believe It Or Not and the horse carriage rides, and just before the bridge to the beaches. Traffic is interesting here.

But as much as I might have scoffed at the touristing-up of so many things here, the fort was a lot of fun. It was surprisingly beautiful.

Lots of explanatory signage helped convey the sense of what it was like to try to hold onto this piece of the world in an era when the English, French, and Spanish were all hell-bent on establishing New World empires. (Florida actually changed hands three times, from Spain to England, back to Spain, and finally to the U.S., and wasn't a state until 1845. That doesn't count some Huguenots who tried to establish a colony early on and got wiped out for their trouble. Or, of course, the Seminoles and other local people. Therein lies yet another tale for another day.)

Uniformed "Spanish" soldiers were hanging around a campfire on the parade grounds, or helping kids work on their Junior Ranger badges.

At the appointed hour, everyone gathered on the gun deck to see how this bit of coastline was defended.

They fired off the cannon just as they did in the early 1700s, the whys and wherefores of which were very interesting.

We left with images of sun, sea, and color in our heads, along with some serious thoughts about the impulse to conquer new worlds and the ordinary people who, willy-nilly, became part of that enterprise.