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Europeans appreciate our place - Do we?
By Mary Jane Ryals
In this town, where do you take a cosmopolitan European for lunch and an afternoon tour?
Florida State's International Programs director in Spain has asked me to show his cousin visiting from Europe around. Javier has spent the week at the Engineering School.
And because I'm from Tally, automatically I think, Oh, god, this little redneck Riviera? Top of the capitol? Chez Pierre? Indian Mounds? One of the museums?
I pick Wakulla Springs on a lark. Simply because it's my favorite boat ride.
I pick him up at the FSU/FAMU College of Engineering, and we head down 319 passing the usual church signs: "Judgment without Jesus is Eternal Hell" and "Life is Precious: Handle with Prayer." We buzz by tire stores and trailers, cracker houses and miscellaneous accoutrements of the Deep South for sale: rugs, boiled peanuts, flags.
Perhaps flags take us to politics, and he wonders why Bush is allowed to send more troops to Iraq when the U.S. doesn't want it. How do I explain that our president is a ninnyhammer and skeleton in our American closet who's been allowed to get away with far too much? But he knows well - Spain has its own story of screw-up leaders. We discuss it all.
Javier is dressed in a tailored dark jacket and button down, typical urbane Spain style. His behavior matches it - sophisticated, thoughtful, quiet. And his English is impeccable.
He wonders, as we head south toward water, if we are in the swamplands, and with so much forest, don't we have a problem with forest fires? We would in Spain, he tells me of his arid country.
He's opening invisible doors for me - we're southside Tally, where scrub oaks and pine trees flourish. To people from urban Europe, we are a forest. If he saw my house surrounded by young pine, magnolia, and dogwoods, would he think of the disappeared medieval forests of Europe, of Red Riding Hood or of Hansel and Gretel?
At the lodge, we eat a Southern lunch of fried chicken and then walk around.
He's asking names of trees - hickory, live oak, bay. He recognizes camellias, laughs at the name Spanish moss.
The boat is sprinkled with people at about 20 percent capacity: two photographers with lenses at least a foot long, cameramen from Dothan documenting for a show on Wakulla Springs, a few couples, one from Germany and us.
The sky stretches over us like a baby blue sheet, the water dark as dreams. Immediately, across the wild waters, we see a tree loaded with elegante white ibises. We spot to the right and left shores of the Wakulla, great blue herons and snowy egrets, and limpkins, stalk-legged in the shallows. In the middle of the river, Suwannee cooters sun on logs.
Gliding around are hooded mergansers. Black and white anhingas exhibit their wings drying in the breeze.
Then we see the alligators. Mostly small ones basking on the river banks and tiny isles.
Back and forth across the boat the passengers dash when they see something new. My guest with his cell phone camera, and the Germans with their camera, small bursts of German language, and pointing fingers. The photographers with their long lenses.
The tour guide clicks off the boat to let us listen. Only the wind, the sound of birds calling out to each other, the slosh of water against the metal boat. This is better than prayer or siesta. I could sit here a while, listening to the moorhen sound like a crazed monkey.
On the way back, the guide shows us a whole tree of turkey and black buzzards, and across the water atop another isle, a ten-foot gator with a back about two to three feet wide.
The breeze is almost warm on a January day, a few damselflies winging in the afternoon slant of sun.
Javier's normally serious face is suddenly lit up. I've never in my life seen so many kinds of birds.
I ask him if he can believe that someone wants to put a bottling company on this spring. He shakes his solemn Spanish head slowly and says nothing.
We drive back to town. At the edge of Tallahassee, Javier, now animated, says this is the prettiest, cleanest place he's been in the U.S. We pass lines of power wires stretching beside clusters of pines. What will this place look like in twenty years? Sometimes it takes someone from far away to show us what we have now.
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