“Who was Tate, you wonder? In Sumatra they still tell his story: how he left the frontier village at dusk a century ago with his two hunting dogs and his puppy Spark, to kill a panther that had been raiding Sumatra livestock. He carried a Long Tom shotgun and a Barlow knife, and he thought he knew where the darkening waters ran.” -- Gloria Jahoda, "The Other Florida" (1967)Tate's Hell State Forest, between in the Apalachicola and Ochlockonee rivers in the Florida Panhandle stood at the farthest reaches of my childhood. Childhood was defined by an area extending from the hills of Tallahassee south through the
Apalachicola National Forest to the Gulf Coast and then west to the Apalachicola River and then north past the Apalachicola River's bluffs and ravines and the Garden of Eden (near Bristol) to the caverns at Marianna on U.S. Highway 90.
My scout troop camped throughout this area, setting up tents in the longleaf and slash pine flatwoods to the sink holes and coldwater springs to the barrier islands south of Carrabelle. We saw boars and alligators, anghingas and limpkins, and swore up and down that we heard the rare Florida Panther. The "other Florida," as friend Gloria Jahoda called it in her book was basically wild, uncivilized, raw, and yet to be spoiled. There was a time, when I knew every unpaved road.
"Civilization" was initially unkind to Tate's Hell (near Carrabelle on the map), seeing worthless land that could be put to better use once the old growth was logged off and the swamps were divided by roads as a place to plant and manage pine forests. The roads alone took a heavy toll, for they disrupted the natural movements of the water throughout the swamp. Much of the more recent history of Tate's Hell has been an attempt to repair the ruin Floridians first brought to the place.
As the Tate's Hell website notes, "At one time Tate's Hell State Forest supported at least 12 major community types which included: wet flatwoods, wet prairie, seepage slope, baygall, floodplain forest, floodplain swamp, basin swamp, upland hardwood forest, sandhill, pine ridges, dense titi thickets and scrub." With effort, it may come back, though never as great as it once was. The
Florida Panther will never come back, assuming it survives at all in South Florida where the last 100 reside.
I couldn't help but personally come back to this country for major portions of my novel
Garden of Heaven. For one thing, I knew the territory. More importantly, I wanted an environment that would be completely foreign to a protagonist who grew up on a Montana sheep ranch. I didn't want the Florida of Daytona Beach, Orlando, or Miami, but a place that was still wild, where--if you were lucky you could still hear Coowahchobee (in the Seminole language), the highly endangered panther calling at night--the world was basic and primal and "other."
Tate's Hell really was named after a man named Tate who got lost in the swamp tracking a panther. When they found him, he said "My name's Tate and I just came through hell." He died after saying that, but the name stuck.
What a perfect counterpart, I thought, geographically and symbolically to the meadow in Glacier National Park called the Garden of Heaven. I also liked the symbolism of the nearby Garden of Eden, a site that--when I was growing up--supporters said really was where Noah built his ark.
The other Florida is slipping away now, but since it was a part of my growing up, I am happy to have captured a bit of it in my novel, and I wrote it as I remembered it:
He heard the mating call of an owl like a pure bell in the dark.
He heard crickets and chuck-wills widows speaking of secret things.
The bellowing of an alligator sounded like a heavy coffin being dragged across a wood floor.
Barking tree frogs, snorting pig frogs, and patient bull frogs swallowed the darkness whole.
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MalcolmPanther photograph by GingerP43 on Flickr.
