The Occasional Short Piece Dept.: The Springs of Weeki Wachee

In the winter, my mother would pile me and my sister into one of those huge, bulbous cars of the fifties and drive us from Tennessee to Florida. We’d sit in the back and count cows until one person got to 500 or the other person gave up.

Once in Florida, we’d pull into a parkway rest stop and get a free glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed. Tasting oj under palm trees opened me up to the idea that there were exotic pleasures in the world and maybe if I went far enough in a big enough car, I'd find them.

Sure enough, it happened. At Weeki Wachee Springs, north of Tampa, after miles of cows, I suddenly found myself in the presence of mermaids. They would gloriously flap around with fish and manatees and seemingly operate without air for whole stretches of time. I was completely stunned and mesmerized.

In Delray Beach, we’d stay in my grandparents house near the intra-coastal canal. I loved the thick, scented air of South Florida, the sail boats on the blue water, the porches covered up with flowering plants, the palm tree at the back of the house which ran along the ground so you could walk up its trunk.

My dad would come down, at some point, and explain something about the canal and how far it went up the coast and how you could sail down it.

I wandered the sides of the canal, dreaming about boarding a schooner and heading out into open sea. Maybe I would wind up in Africa, where snakes hung from trees among mysterious shrieks and mutterings. Maybe there were real mermaids out there, like the ones I had seen at Weeki Wachee, and they’d come up to young men and guide them up remote rivers.

I have almost no memory of the rest of my life back home. I don’t recall grade school teachers or what we studied. There was only the Lone Ranger at six o’clock, my hill, the field down by the creek which would later become a Little League Park, the girl next door who was two years older.

Without the amazing taste of fresh orange juice, the blue of the canal, the red of bougainvillea, the green of the mermaid tails, it’s entirely possible that my life would have never left the gray scale of the Eisenhower years in Tennessee.

On the other hand, who knows if I would have followed the tides of my curiosity about everything, if I would have fallen in love with mountains and forests and seas, had I never seen the mermaids of Wicki Wachee.

(Post Script: From time to time a threatened species, the Weeki Wachee swimmers still perform twice a day at the park’s underwater theater. The water temperature is 72 degrees.)