grad school to begin teaching at Rollins College and the better part of me realized I might need a canoe to help me adjust to the place. There’s something liberating about having your own fins and rudder. The first thing I wanted to do was sleep out on the river. I never thought of doing that with a rental. The most comfortable inn on the upper Wekiva is surely Shell Island, a half mile downstream from the marina and the run coming out of Miami Springs. Just before you get to the shell mound, the river opens to a shiny flats, begetting an island that became the central dwelling place of the largest community of natives to inhabit the upper river. I remember the view from the head of the island, standing on the elevated bank, the feeling of worship, really. A profound understanding wells up from the music of the place and the long upstream vista. It pays to stand relatively alone in the wild, exempt momentarily from an overpopulated state of mind, and imagine you are at the beginning of that splendid development of our species in the western hemisphere. Listening all night to the strangest of sounds, you wake with a new, but antique and familiar consciousness: the hunter-gatherer prevails. In the ‘70’s more fishing and hunting took place in Wekiva because the river here and there was a shanty town of locals and squatters. Most of the shacks were below Shell Island, but the traffic of motorboats and canoes was fairly regular along the north-side channel. We used to stop off to investigate these crude abodes, but I never tried sleeping in one of them for fear the “owner” would arrive at midnight with a shotgun. I have tried to pillow on some of the smaller islands further on down: not a great prospect, where there’s no shell midden, to lie down between all the maple roots or cypress knees and fall asleep with the water slurping up, practically into your ears. At home I listen to barred owls all the time in my Maitland neighborhood, sometimes right in the back yard, but out on the river, at night, their calls always seem amplified, flaring out in some kind of Dolby triple stereo. In the gothic night on Shell Island, aside from any equipment you can buy, Wekiva has woofers and tweeters of its own that keep up their conversations with the buzzers and zeekers. The otherworldly beauty of this night has another dimension. For some reason everything that must answer to gravity finds the night the most opportune time for dropping. So the river has a gig going that’s like some experimental music, tricking your every expectation of interval: plop------pip-----glugg--pip-------------wooop-------kadonnngg. Why doesn’t this music seem to be playing in the daytime? It must have something to do with being on the edge--of consciousness, of civilization, of this river, and of night, all at once. Someone should do a sleep study of campers on Shell Island to see how much more Rapid-Eye-Movement is going on out there. Better than any water bed, it seems, river enhances reverie. So then, just about when the barred owls agree to retire, the Blue Sausage can rise up as a phantom and make you want a mammoth breakfast.

II.

The Shell Island Campus

10/2/03

Rollins College has owned Shell Island for 65 years and made an extended campus of it for almost most of its history since 1885. In the late 1920’s and ‘30’s, it was a regular practice for a group of eight Rollins students and their chaperones to spend a weekend on the river, men one week and women the next, sleeping in a large log-cabin with a dirt floor. During this decade, by an agreement with the owners of the island, the Wilson Cypress Company, as many as thirteen hundred students got a sense of the river community as a part of their own Florida education. Because the college was having trouble keeping the cabin and island clean between weekend visits, in 1938 they arranged to buy the island for $10 and other considerations through Wilson’s President, Russ McPherson, who had two daughters pursuing degrees at the college.

Courtesy of Rollins College Archives

At present the island is an inholding of the Wekiwa Springs State Park and still belongs to Rollins. The Trustees of the College do not wish to give up the property because the island is connected to its historical character as a frontier and pragmatic liberal arts college. Officials of the college, however, have entered into an informal agreement whereby the park governs and polices the island while providing access to Rollins upon notification. The reason for such an agreement is quite practical: the island has a long history of attracting squatters who usually leave more than footprints. The question of how best to preserve the site is left unresolved, but as the following story reveals, the place has considerable educational value.

***

After lunch we go over to her lab and sort through cabinets with carefully stored samples of Florida archaeological evidence. Each tray is arranged for teaching all the principles of the dig that embrace a goodly portion of the arts and sciences. Besides cultural anthropology, the student of Shell Island needs an integrated liberal arts array of geology, chemistry, animal physiology, field botany, Florida history, and stream ecology. Examining the plastic bags with labels, my colleague starts to pull out the artifacts from Shell Island, where she and her predecessors were digging and poking around in the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. She is Dr. Marilyn Stewart, Professor of Anthropology and an archaeologist who began her career up north by studying the remains of the Iroquois. Shell Island sits in the middle of the upper Wekiva, about three miles from the namesake springs. It has the oblong shape of a cypress dugout, sharper and higher at the front end where the mound rises to four meters, then lower all the way back to where one might stand and steer, tilted toward crayfish and bream. It has a buildable half acre at the top, some 74,440 cubic meters of shell mound, sixty times larger in volume than the next highest native habitat on record for Wekiva. Of course, a few mounds in the basin have been eradicated, probably turned into roadbed, especially at Wekiwa and Rock Springs. In 1982 when the state was interested in purchasing the 8,000 acres between Rock Springs Run and the upper Wekiva--all that swamp on the other side of the Bridge to Nowhere--Marilyn did the necessary survey of archaeological sites. It was her report that indicated the incredible value of preserving so many relatively undisturbed sites. Hence, in the state’s current file of thirty middens along the Wekiva River, fourteen are listed as established by her surveys. We comb through trays of check-stamped, fiber-tempered, and plain St. Johns pottery fragments; I finger the teeth from sharks, bears, gators, and deer; then she produces tools made out of chert, shell, deer-bone, and limestone. Finally, in a cabinet of another lab belonging to a specialist in human evolution, we lay out on the table a human skull encased entirely in a concrete made naturally by the compression of shell and earth. Out of this irregular shape, extending at a strange angle, emerges a broken upper set of yellow teeth and below that a relatively straight lower jaw with several molars cleanly exposed. Marilyn explains that this skull was not part of a burial, in her view, because the rest of the body was not there and no signs of ceremony were evident. The skull, therefore, likely belongs to an outcast of the band of Timucuans living in the basin. From other records she shows me, it appears that the burial mounds of this culture were located at the two major spring sites, now largely destroyed. As I flip through a stash of folders and binders containing the records of the Rollins digs, I feel like something of an archaeologist myself, digging in a mound of papers about a mound of

shells. Here’s a final examination booklet (why are they blue?) from a student who has been asked to place the course’s findings in the context of American native anthropology. My goodness, the paper has an A+. However haphazard the work of the class might have been, this student has been able to comprehend and store it carefully in a larger, more stable understanding. Photos of the digs show students sifting the ground, creating alternate mounds of shells and dirt out of neatly squared holes about a meter wide. Here’s a grimy coed of the ‘70’s, just her head showing out of the earth, the rest of her invisible. She seems herself to be buried in the past. Her thin smile belies the fact that only the tiniest fraction of the work produces any spectacular specimen, that a real or accurate understanding of the dig--as of the whole river itself--comes from the aggregate of data carefully documented and interpreted by many like herself over the years.

Courtesy of Rollins College Archives One student paper shows that the viviparous snail dominates the Timucuan diet; that’s 70-80% of the food stuff found, in all the layers of all the pits. As it turns out, her amateur’s conclusions correspond fully with those published much later by Dr. Brent Weisman of the University of South Florida in his 1992 study of the relatively undisturbed Twin Mounds, three miles downstream. The major find from Shell Island, Marilyn reports, is the large reconstructed bowl which is on display in the museum downtown. According to one student, it shows evidence of charcoal and indicates that the viviparous snail might have been boiled or made into a chowder in such a large bowl. Well, imagination too is a gift.

It is difficult not to view archaeology as a kind of autopsy where the goal is to reconstruct the living process of the human ecological past, and yet the element of destruction inherent in the dig seems irreverent in its objectivity and something that goes against conservation in a wild and scenic river. I too show this irreverence by taking a picture of the jawed stone for my web site. Marilyn suggests I might want to reconsider publishing the picture since natives these days get quite angry and sometimes sue those who display remains of their ancestors. “Ouch!” my conscience screams out. I know better, but forgot for the moment because the scientist and the journalist in me knows that readers will want to see this human connection to

the island. When I am on the river and especially any of its mounds, I feel the spirit of the Timucuan dwellers, but I don’t think of that spirit as traveling in pieces to the Rollins campus. By virtue of its diverse levels of inquiry, the university gets into every river and the river thereby is camping out at many a college.

Shell Island Bowl(14.5” diameter x 6.5” high)

Courtesy of Dr. Marilyn Stewart

...Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless       successions of diseas'd corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptu-      ous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings       from them at last.

Whitman: the closing lines of “This Compost”

III.

The Great Golden Digger

9/20/03

At the marina I plop down my $20 deposit and rent a kayak to go solo down the river. I want to refresh my memories before finishing my essay on the island’s history as a piece of property. Short, flat, and yellow, the kayak sits thirty inches below the concrete platform as I try to figure out how to settle into it. No way for me to cross-check the torque of it with my paddle, so I sit on the deck, put one foot on a rock ledge under the wall, crouch and step in, while holding the outside of the unstable, elongated kernel of corn. To balance on the water is so much more precarious than on land. For the first few minutes I focus all my attention on the alignment of my body weight to keep from rolling over into the cool depths. Hurricane Isabel has just turned up the coast and provided us with a perfectly sunny day and cool winds from Canada. I return to the island for the sake of “ground-truthing” the map and a few other ideas I have about the island. All ideas have to be checked against the real world or else they will roll you out. I have a picture I got out of Archives, from seventy years ago, which shows a cabin in a large flat clearing and thirteen Rollins students spread out over the open area, much flatter than my recollection of the knobby mound. I want to survey the island and like

TOPO! © 2011 National Geographic (www.topo.com)

Thoreau put my stride to its length and width, pacing it all off and taking the measure of the cabin’s impact. As noon approaches, I am the only human on this part of the river and float almost all the way down. It is five or six feet deep here and fairly clear so that you can watch the fish and water plants through a lightly brown filter. The river averages about fifty feet wide in this stretch, but the sun is contained in a much narrower corridor. At first there is not much aquatic plantlife on the edges. I watch it carefully for signs of otters that are usually in the area. Turtles I see plenty, but no gators on logs. Almost no birdlife can be seen along the way either, possibly because they have had their fill or have taken to flocking into the wetlands beyond these banks. The farther down stream you go from the marina, the farther away you get from the large upscale development of Sweetwater Oaks that Everette Huskey produced in the 70’s and 80’s. The river angles northeast toward the St. Johns now and begins to feel more and more like a remote part of the Amazon. I am counting the islands off my bow and on the map—the river has more than the USGS shows—and they are all decidedly edgier and more serrated. I find this constant mismatch between abstract thought and the real Wekiva especially difficult to balance. It seems as though we should abandon all mapping and just live like Heraclitus, between the spatterdock and the pennyroyal, watching for snags, great and small, in the riverbed. I carry in my head the major theoretical map-work of the disciplines of the western university system, but in real life, as they say, you can’t see the same river twice. My topo map has a black intermittent line that rolls on one side or the other of these islands and at first I thought it was a designation of the channel, but now can see (what a good reader of the ledgers and fine print should know) that it tells me the islands all belong to Orange County on the west and north side—well, all the bigger ones that get on a map in the first place. A kayak is just about the best thing you can use to tell whether you have an island, today, or not. The Timucuan natives here did not have maps on paper with measured scales, longitude, and latitude. Showing these islands to one of them on the topo and calling them such and such a name would seem insane to them. The Spaniards understood maps, but when we look at the horrible appendages they call La Florida, we laugh the wicked laugh of self-deception. We “know” the true shape of Florida in a way no Spanish sailor’s brain could ever produce, even though we would rather have our vessels guided by the native’s who knew by experience where all the reefs and snags might be. Now the Wekiva widens cordially, perhaps doubles, and the extra surface of water is full of vegetation, little green boathouses with solar panels crunching out a huge amount of fuel and food for a great community of aquatic critters, the fliers and the swimmers and the crawlers and the stalkers, the sloshers and the stingers and the creepers and the squawkers, and not a one of these singers carries anything but a chemical map. Lots of proteins are strung everywhere across the vegetation. Each sentence I write is a leap across an infinitely irregular boundary and jumps

from one abstraction to another, using the function words as web-nodes or stepping stones. The trick is not to tilt the boat and dunk your readers.

I pass now the skeleton of a huge tree that sits above the water, sawed off at several heights to clear the channel for boaters. Two major islands touch together here on the right. They look like two sperm on my map, head to head, the first facing downstream is fatter and the second nosing upstream is thinner and has the shape of one of those vegetarian dinosaurs that lifts up to reach the tallest vegetables. At the bottom of the second island then, you can look downstream a great distance—a rare vista in the basin of 500 yards or more—to an island with a single palm at its front and a tree behind that which seems extraordinarily high. I feel a little like Ulysses returning to Penelope—it seems a long time because we’ve both changed--, but I think I recognize you, Shell Island. It takes quite a while to float down through the wide flats and pull up to the head of the island. You can see the remarkable five to six foot elevation of it and a path up through the shell-earth. Everything seems familiar upon landing except for the large limestone rock to the left of the 25 ft. palm. It must have always been here, but I never “took it in” before, never coupled it to my abstractions of geology before today. The exposed rock is in several layers, hanging over the water’s edge and probably presenting a 4x3 foot surface. Now I ask, how in the world did it get here, at least four feet above the water level? Boulders of granite sit like this in all my favorite mountain creek-beds, but Florida has very few places where the limestone becomes monolithic. By what engineering, geologic or human, has this occurred? It must be concrete, but so irregular and matted now with lichen and mosses, perhaps a platform for a boat landing.

Rock at Shell Island Landing

I climb the bank to the clearing and it reaches into a tender music for me, the kind you make when someone who loves you has just called at the right time. The shell midden is more or less round and flat with a knob at the right center, but slopes down toward the back of the island. The second level of clearing is buzzing with wasps as I head over to the tree on the channel side that hangs over the river and where folks like to launch out on a rope for a swim. This one black wasp with two yellow rings around its belly flashes blue-purple neons across its wings and I try to take a picture. Can I capture that fleeting color? The problem of abstraction rises again: how to get a frame that doesn’t move to capture a creature that doesn’t really stop and tends to recede from long-legged hominids. This process is complicated by an aggressive red-orange wasp who keeps trying to drive me away. Soon I see the problem—a hole about a centimeter wide with a circular patch of dark-colored sand outside of it. Pitched at an angle into the earth, you never saw an excavation so neatly wrought. I am distracted from my quest of the bomber with the flashing electric lights to the inch-long fire-wasp decked in Halloween costume, flying about and playing archaeologist on Wekiva’s central midden. Once I stand still enough, the wasp lands, scoots down the hole, and a second later backs out, dropping a few grains at her hind feet. All about the mound I see a few other such patches at the front door and start to try to take a picture of this bulldozer, right here on Rollins Island. The tack of getting a full shot of its motions is helped by the fact that the distance she goes to the bottom regulates the arrival of the hind legs backing out of the nest. Since my digital camera takes longer to snap than it takes Mrs. Wasp to scoot back under, in fact longer than the whole time of emergence start-to-finish, I finally calculate the overall interval and start snapping the shot before she appears. In the nano-second that she reverses her path, the whole beautiful inch of her with six orange legs, a black tipped rear end and a fuzzy black head, two darkly transparent wings folded neatly straight back over an orange abdomen, the camera clicks. So sometimes it pays to abstract not just for the shape of this one activity, but for the whole developmental pattern it dwells comfortably in. Later I find out from my guide book that this is a specimen of sphex ichneumoneus, the great golden digger wasp. The golden tint of the wings in extension I could never see in flight, but the patches of golden hairs on its head and body do show in one of my still pictures. She is likely making her contribution to a colony here and storing up provisions for her offspring, tasty grasshoppers, the most common food-stuffs she stings without killing and leaves for the larvae to devour live. The other wasp is called a potter wasp because she builds an elaborate mortar attachment with diverse chambers and food sources for her male and female offspring. Does she know without the mapping of ultrasound imagery which of her larvae will be which sex? Signs of other 21st-century squatters are everywhere on the surface of the digger-wasp’s mound—the pile of a campfire, dozens of beer-caps, a plastic chip bag, a pair of boys jockey-style underwear on the end of a stick, an aluminum can, and a shriveled up contraceptive device. All this counterpoint to the sign I discover when I circle the island in my kayak before heading

home: NO TRESPASSING, owner ROLLINS COLLEGE. The sign does not sit at the head of the island or any of the three most likely places to beach a canoe, but at the foot of the island, back in under the trees. Unless you pull in the back cut, this sign will not reach your consciousness. It probably should read: NO LITTERING or something friendly and encouraging about keeping your trash in your boat. A river is a street and you can’t keep people out--any more than wasps—esp. children and other desirables! Well, I mean you can’t stop them from dumping on your island and all around it. In many parks I see a sign at the trail-head which urges no food or drink beyond this point, but you might as well put a sign out to stop the wasps from nesting or the human young from making love on the river. Have we done that? Where did the Timucuans do it? Without a concept of private property, did they have a sense of privacy for making love? According to Granberry’s Timucuan dictionary, their words for love were many and frankly, to me, a little hip-hop: hoba, cume, huba, cachu, man, and cayo. This last item, by the way, also serves as an adverb meaning frequent. The mystery of Shell Island is hiding in the slanted cavity of the digger wasp. It makes all the difference in the world whether we see behind the category of the insect to this particular individual. What is calling her forth? Who is calling to her to plant her offspring on this day in this little excavation? The guarantee of it, the promise of the golden digger is in that calling forth which I hear above all other sounds in this precious Timucuan Wekiva habitat. Did she hear the calling when Timucuans were still gathering oysters and prying open mussels here, more than a thousand years ago? What combination of chemistry and motion set her into orbit with a mate to answer the needs of the species and its river ecology? What a strange world it is now for us that by some other, just as powerful chemistry we ferret out of these river notes a truth that sets us forward on a path of action or passion. I want us all to build and provision ourselves with the precision of the Halloween digger in the bone-mound island.

SONG OF WEKIVA CHAPTER II: LAND USE AND PRIVATE PROPERTY

©2010 Steve Phelan