A thick column of smoke rose from the jungle. Sometimes dark, sometimes flame-filled, it rose day after day, year after year. Spanish explorers were bewildered by it, drawn to it, tried to find its source. One legend says that the fire was set and kept ablaze by Indians deep in the swamp and untouched by the white man, that it was the blaze of sacrifice, the flame of ritual—evidence of a religion unknown to those white explorers with their crucifixes and guns. Another legend claims that pirates started the fire in a bed of peat in the swamp to mark the hiding place of treasure looted from Spanish galleons. Though many tried, no one could reach the smoke that rose and rose. Miles from it the jungle’s floor turned to a mud too thin to support a man’s weight. The secret of the fire’s source was safe. After 1886 the smoke stopped rising. The sky over the jungle grew clear. There was only the wind, and with it—the cry of the loon.

Some Indian lore says that the Creek word “wah-kola,” meaning loon, was the name of the spring that flows a few miles southeast of that jungle. “Wah-kola.”The sound passed down from parent to child through the centuries, each generation shaping the sound a little differently with their lips and tongues. By the 19th century the name of the spring had become “Wakulla,” a Seminole-Creek word meaning “mysteries of strange water” or “breast of life.” No one knows the history of the name for certain; much of Wakulla’s history has been obscured by time. But this much is documented: In the year I was born—1935—a complete mastodon skeleton was brought up bone by bone from the spring’s depths.

“ABSOLUTELY NO DIGGING FOR BURIED TREASURE”

This message painted on a board and nailed to a pine tree was the first thing I looked for after my father turned off the Tallahassee highway onto the narrow dirt road that cut through the woods to Wakulla Springs. “ABSOLUTELY NO DIGGING FOR BURIED TREASURE” nailed to a live oak, then another, signs scattered through the woods. I looked at the sandy soil with renewed wonderment each time we went to Wakulla.

We parked behind the Lodge and my brother and I went to the bathhouse and changed into our bathing suits. Then we walked down the path to the springs. Squirrels skittered across the grass from one tree to another, some pausing to sit up and look quizzically at us or other passing visitors. In front of us, glass bottom boats for the Wakulla Springs Cruise and boats for the Jungle Cruise on the Wakulla River were tied up at the dock.

Thick vine-filled woods grew on the other side of the springs. Alligators slept along the cypress-lined bank. We watched one slide into the water and swim slowly near the shore with only its snout and eyes above the surface.

Bubba and I turned to the left of the dock and walked down to the beach. Mother and Daddy were already sitting in the shade of trees hung heavy with Spanish moss. They sat at the edge of the sand in low wooden chairs with slatted seats and backs, and wide arm rests. Baby Mercer was parked in his stroller beside Mother. He squirmed to get out. Mother lifted him onto the grass and gave him his tin bucket and spade. He ran to the beach and dropped spade and pail in the sand and sat down. Bubba and I spread our towels on the sand, and then raced to poke our feet in the water that was always as cold as the coldest ice water imaginable.

Further down the beach enormous old cypress trees rose from the shallow water. Cypress knees erupted from the sand and water around the base of the trees. Further down still stood the diving tower with its three levels. Neither my brother nor I dared to jump from even the first level. At four he was too young and at seven I was too afraid. Mostly we swam or played in the water across from Mother and Daddy. Or, after our lips had turned blue from the icy water, we sat in the sun making sand castles.

When I swam, I swam back and forth in the shallow water where the bottom was sand. Swimming out to the raft meant leaving the security of the sandy bottom and swimming over long grasses that thickly covered the spring’s floor. The grass frightened me, and all that I could not see that might be swimming through that grass, just as I was swimming through the clear water above it. Swimming any place where my feet even threatened to brush along the top of the grass made my heart pound. Because the water was crystal clear, the distance from its surface to the grass was often deceptive. On one of our earliest trips to Wakulla someone told us the story of how—thinking the water was deep near the dock—a young man dived from it and broke his neck. The story stayed in my mind, and though there was certainly no danger of breaking my neck while swimming, the possibility of being deceived and letting my feet down to touch grass when I expected to touch only water, obsessed me. Even so, I occasionally worked up the courage to swim out to the raft. This day with my brother I swam only where I felt safe.

This turned out to be our lucky day, though we didn’t find out until we’d finished swimming. A Tarzan movie starring Johnny Weismuller was being filmed right then. And while we didn’t see it being made, just knowing that someplace in the jungle, or further down the river, cast and crew were busy creating another Tarzan movie thrilled me. Wakulla was supposed to be a lagoon someplace in the tropics of Africa. The Wakulla River, a relatively straight, narrow, and short river flowing from the Springs to Saint Marks, Florida, was supposed to be the Congo.

The living evidence of the movie being made was in a clearing between the springs and the picnic area. We happened onto it on our way from the water back to the Lodge and bathhouse. There in the shade was a newly erected pen made of logs. On its straw-covered floor two elephants stood swinging their trunks and swatting flies with their tails. Dust rose from their hides with each swat. Bubba and I followed as Mother pushed the baby over to see the elephants. Their keeper, a thin unshaven man, stood nearby with a small group of people clustered around him, listening to him talk about the movie. That’s how I found out that the Wakulla River was supposed to be the Congo. I waited until the crowd left and there was just the man and my family. Then hesitantly I said: “Sir?”

“Yeah?”

He looked at me, his friendly face bolstering my courage.

“Where are the other elephants?” I asked.

“What other elephants?”

“The other elephants for the movie.”

“Ain’t none.” He spit a dark stream of chewing tobacco on the ground.

“But what about all those herds of elephants stampeding through the jungle?”

“Them things are done with camera tricks.”

“Camera tricks?”

“Camera tricks.”

He dug into one pants pocket and drew out a pocketknife and opened it. With the blade he began to scrape at the dirt under his fingernails.

I swallowed my disappointment. But at least, I comforted myself, Johnny Weismuller had ridden one of those very elephants who stood just feet from me, batting their lashes to chase away the gnats clustered around their runny eyes. Or at least he’d probably ridden one. I didn’t dare ask the man if this were true. I’d accepted without a problem that Wakulla was supposed to be a jungle in Africa; Wakulla was mysterious and jungle-like. But until my conversation with the elephant keeper I hadn’t been aware of the possibility of camera tricks to create the appearance of what wasn’t there at all. It was too much for me to accept that the herds of elephants were like the magic tricks that a magician had performed one day in the school auditorium. I stood in the shade of the moss-covered limbs of a live oak, looking at the elephants and feeling miserably betrayed. I didn’t want to find out that Johnny Weismuller hadn’t even laid eyes on those elephants.

Daddy thanked the elephant keeper for his attention, then we walked on up the path toward the Lodge, a1930’s stucco Spanish style building with arched windows and doors, and red tiled roof. Mother, Daddy and Mercer went into the Lodge where swim suits and bare feet weren’t allowed. Bubba and I went back to the bathhouse and changed to shorts, T-shirts, and sandals. Then we all went to the soda shop for ice cream.

The Lodge always felt magical to me with its long marble soda fountain, marble floors and staircases. The large colored photographs of cypress trees, water, and boats on opaque glass, bordered in deep frames and lit from behind, enchanted me. One of those luminous photographs hung at the far end of the soda fountain, and—letting myself get lost in the wonder of it—I ate a large dish of chocolate ice cream.

Bubba and I finished our ice cream first and excused ourselves to go to the lobby to play a game of checkers before going home. There was an informal elegance about the spacious lobby flanked on one side by the soda shop and on the other by the formal dining room with its sea of white tablecloths and crystal. In addition to the marble checkerboard tables, I was especially drawn to what I now know were Aztec and Toltec designs painted in bright colors on the cypress ceiling beams.

Usually there were at least a few well-dressed adults around the lobby sitting in sofas or chairs, smoking, and talking softly. Often a couple of adults sat at one of the marble checkerboard tables contemplating a next move, or pausing to look out the window at the tree covered lawn and the water beyond it. The giant checkerboards were made of large light and dark marble squares. The heavy checkers were so huge that one filled my hand. My brother and I sat at one of the tables playing a game. That one late afternoon we were the only people in the lobby.

It was more a sense of presence than a sound that caused me to stop in mid-move and look up from the checkerboard and across the broad expanse of floor. My attention first fastened on the silhouette of a great blue heron in wrought iron that stood opposite its mate as andirons in the large stone fireplace. Then in my peripheral vision I saw first one of his feet, then the other. Then I saw all of him. Just yards from where I sat, Johnny Weismuller was striding silently across the lobby. He took long, easy strides, bare feet on the marble floor, his tan and muscular body naked except for a loincloth.

It felt like time itself had taken note of his arrival and had slowed everything to the slowest slow motion possible. Johnny Weismuller looked even taller and larger in person than he looked in the movies. I stared at him. Here in the Wakulla Lodge was the familiar face with its strong features, the dark hair and eyes, the long legs and large hands. He seemed to fill not only his body, but the entire room as well. Here was the man who was inseparable in my mind from the Tarzan that I adored; the Tarzan who roamed free in the jungle and called it home; who called to the wild animals as if they were his own family; who defied the rules of the Wakulla Lodge and walked through the lobby barefooted and nearly naked as if the Lodge was as much home to him as the jungle, and the only rules were those that nature made. Here was the Tarzan who was not afraid to swim where the grasses grew long and thick; who was not afraid to dive down into and through the grasses themselves, willing and able to face whatever he might find there.

Then he turned and walked up the marble staircase and was gone.

It is 1985, and my mother, my brother Mercer, and I sit side by side in the glass bottom boat. We look down through the glass into what the tourist brochure calls the deepest and largest spring in the world. As we leave the dock, thick grasses beneath us sway in the cold water’s currents. The boatman begins his own music, a music born of water, land, and the flesh and blood of his body just as cypress and live oak rise from the earth of Wakulla, and fish give birth to more fish in its depths. The haunting music of the boatman’s chant seems to have changed no more since my childhood than the call of the mockingbird or the cry of the loon. He calls out the names of Wakulla’s underwater wonders—aquatic life, schools of fish, and fantastic limestone formations.

It’s been nearly half a century since those childhood trips to Wakulla; it’s been many years since I’ve seen my mother and brother. Now I am sitting between them and we are all looking down—sometimes as far as one-hundred and eighty-five feet down—through the clear water, too deep for grass, only limestone and sand. Here at the spring’s depths lie a few remaining fossilized mastodon bones. School after school of fish swim over them. They flash silver in the light-filled water. Looking down I feel a little dizzy and light-headed. The three of us look far below a thirty-foot ledge of limestone to the gaping mouth of a cavern. Here only, the water is not clear. Here, at the spring’s source, water bubbles up a milky blue from the underground river that feeds it.

Mercer’s body tenses, but he doesn¹t look away. “It feels like my face is a mask,” he says. “It feels like my face is just a mask being pulled from the bone.”

I think of how far he’s come and how difficult his struggle has been since he was shipped home from Vietnam to pace circles around me in the psychiatric ward in Bethesda Naval Hospital, barefooted, talking about Daddy and the American flag; then home to Mother and a lifetime on Thorazine, Stellazine, and whatever other drugs the medical world offers as answer.

The boat has passed the spring’s bubbling source now and is heading back toward the dock, but I am still remembering the way Mercer dragged his feet that day in Bethesda. Bubba¹s second baby died that same week. After seeing Mercer, my family and I drove on down to the baby’s funeral. His small corpse lay there in the funeral home where his grandfather’s had lain barely a year before.

Bubba’s baby boy was beautiful. So small and perfect, and so like my own son Chris. Both of them looked like Mercer. I remember looking across the delivery room at Chris on the table where he’d been lain and thinking even then how very much like Mercer he looked. Chris’s face was turned toward mine and even across the distance of the delivery room I felt a connection with him as solid as the umbilical cord that had just been severed. But Bubba’s little boy had been born with the umbilical cord twisted around his neck. Bubba’s first little girl is dead, too, and our sister, Harriet. And after years of poverty that followed the early years of plenty, our father died and has been dead for so long now that Bubba’s daughters and my sons are grown. And still the boatman’s chant goes on and on.

A large school of fish passes below us. Long grasses have replaced the sand and almost touch the glass. I wonder what Mother is feeling now, sitting so close beside me in the glass bottom boat after the sad years of distance, anger and hurt between us. I know that she will never tell me her deep feelings anymore than she will ask about my confinements in mental hospitals. This is the way she learned to live in order to survive—to turn away in silence from what she cannot bear.

The boat nudges itself against the dock and the boatman loops the rope secure. He climbs out and offers his large hand to each of us. Mother takes it and climbs out onto the dock. I take his hand and follow her. Mercer climbs out unassisted. Mother, Mercer, and I walk toward the Lodge, but my mind is still filled with the underwater sights of Wakulla, and wildlife on the river—egret and eagle, and the great blue heron; the common crow and the cormorant; the cotton mouth moccasin curled in a cypress stump; the anhinga stretching its wet wings wide; the limpkin with its mournful cry.

“I did the best I could,” Mother says and this is true. And though we will not find a bridge strong enough to hold the weight of both our lives, I’m glad I’ve come home this one last time, this last year of my mother’s life.

I’m glad we’ve come to Wakulla once again.

“You couldn’t pay me to drive anybody else to this place, Sister” Mercer says, stopping to light a cigarette. Then snapping his lighter shut, he says, “I only brought you here because I knew you really wanted to come and I love you so much. Wakulla has always scared me to death.”

“Even when you were a little boy?”

“Yeah, especially then.”

“I didn’t know that,” I reply, realizing that I’d always believed he loved Wakulla the way I do. “I really appreciate your doing this for me.”

And I do. The ground under my sandals feels like home. I think: If I could stay here—paint, write, ride the boats, walk through the woods for a couple of months, I would leave able to hold the many parts of myself together in a harmonious way like Wakulla holds alligator and anhinga, cotton mouth, lily, dark jungle and clear water. If I could stay here long enough, I believe nature would give me back to myself. Or I would give myself back to nature. I could contain my strengths and weakness, as well as my feelings of loneliness and of connection with every living thing. But I say nothing. Mother is walking a little ahead of us, stooped and gray, shrunken and tired. Across the front of the Lodge before her—just as they did when I was a child—calla lilies repeat themselves like flames against the wall.

Copyright © 2003 Margaret Robison