Floridiana Gloriana

Horseshoe Beach | c. 1998

I love this photograph from Horseshoe Beach (in Dixie County) because of the strange clarity with which the white buildings stand out against the sea.  That was a trick of the light rather than anything I achieved myself.  It's a scanned photograph from out of my files. 

I can't explain the big boat being built alongside those buildings.  I don't know what it was or is for.  I think I might have gone back and that it might have been a restaurant----but I really don't know!  I suppose I could find out if I wanted to research it, but I prefer to let it remain a mystery.  So much has happened since then....  I remember loving the place and thinking I'd never forget that day.  Alas---I've forgotten it all except my resolution not to forget. 

...we're still here.

I haven't heard any reports from other parts of the state, but after many a school and early work closing, the hurricane really didn't do more than dump a lot of water on us and move northward. It was grey, rainy, and (for awhile) sort of windy, but not worse than we usually expect on a summer afternoon. As someone said, the threat of intense storms increases as the season progresses, so I am not being smug or anything. At least it cooled things down a bit.

It's very peaceful now. I can hear the frogs trilling in the creek out back---a very pretty sound and audible even over the air conditioning. I'm hoping the weather stays sufficiently comfortable to make a trip to the coast possible over the weekend. The place I have in mind is about as different from Key West as it's possible for a place to be. It's comparatively unknown and undeveloped.

There's a reason, after all, why the west coast (or at least the part that's in northern Florida) is known as "the nature coast." The above photograph was taken in December---what I call a Florida "white Christmas." The sand at that particular beach was just as white and fine as it looks. At another west coast beach I visited it was yellow. And on the northwest coast it's the color and texture of brown sugar. For the white sugar sand you have to go to the right places.

The water of the Gulf is different from the Atlantic. In the places where it's shallow it's a clear, glassy green when the sun shines on it, a bluer tint where the water is deeper. In the Tampa Bay area, there are places that will knock your eyes out, but in the north the effects are subtler.