Salt Creek Journal Nature, Community, and Place in South St
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Salt Creek Journal Nature, Community, and Place in South St. Petersburg Editors Michelle Sonnenberg Hannah Gorski Alison Hardage Faculty Advisor Thomas Hallock All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced without prior permission from the publisher. University of South Florida St. Petersburg 140 7th Avenue South St. Petersburg, FL 33701 ISBN-13: 978-0-9802315-3-3 ISBN-10: 0-9802315-3-1 Library of Congress Catalog Info Copyright© Tampa Bay Writers Network, 2016 Beneath the lush turf are buried fortunes; the laughter of playing children; the sounds of sultry blues; and the smiles of those sneaking their first kiss. A sacred space where memories have left an indelible impression. - Terri Lipsey Scott On the Legacy Garden, at the Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American History Museum Table of Contents Introduction: The Lost Creek by Thomas Hallock 11 1 Your Biome has Found You by Gloria Muñoz 19 2 Bayboro Improvements 21 3 In My Head by Brandy Nichols 25 4 Reifying Salt Creek by Michelle Sonnenberg 27 5 Fish Tales by Dave Pacetti 31 6 Drug Raids by Jack Alexander 33 7 ‘Dem Gator’ by Sally Gage 35 8 French Fried Monkey by Russell J. Crumley 37 9 Sewing Box by Hannah Gorski 41 10 Natural Contradiction by April Sopzcak 47 11 The Ecology of a Gift: Lassing Park 49 by Bob Devin Jones 12 Paddling Down a City’s Artery — Salt Creek 53 by Jon Wilson 13 Trash Talk by Resie Waechter 57 14 The House on the Lake by Jacqueline Williams Hubbard 61 15 In the Legacy Garden by Sarah Kirstine Lain 65 16 Baby Bass by Wendy Joan Biddlecombe 67 17 Born on the Fourth of July: Mordecai Walker and 69 the Roots of Protest by Arielle Stevenson 18 Nature and the City by Kent Curtis 77 19 Captured on the Shore by Roy Peter Clark 83 20 Tide, Trash A Problem by Bill Marden 85 21 Mini Lights, Mini Lights, Come out Tonight 89 by Eric Vaughan 22 Dead People by Cathy Salustri 91 23 Wild Salt Creek by Ariel Ringo 95 24 Thirteen Ways of Looking at Nature in the City 99 by Daniel Spoth 25 Straight Lines by Sarah Hierl 103 26 The Used To Be Tour by David Lee McMullen 105 27 The Wilderness behind Walgreens Anne Younger 109 28 Nest by Anda Peterson 117 29 Knowing Salt Creek by Alison Hardage 121 30 Blockage by Michael Sadler 123 31- Below the Canopy by Heather Jones 125 32 Gators by Amanda Hagood 127 33 But Where Did All the Mangoes Go? by Rosalie Peck 137 Contributors 141 -For Terry Tomalin With thanks to the English Program and the College of Arts and Sciences at USFSP for support of this project. Salt Creek Journal Thomas Hallock paddling under the Fourth Street Bridge (Hannah Gorski) Introduction: The Lost Creek Thomas Hallock “This creek runs behind Gryphon and Darwin’s house,” I told the neighborhood kid. The neighborhood kid was fifteen. He was coming off a difficult Spring, far more than the usual teenage angst. His mother is a geologist, and he should be into nature, but he’s not. Gryphon and Darwin used to live near us, in St. Petersburg’s Old Southeast neighborhood, until their mom got sick. The family needed a bigger place with the illness, so they bought a house near Boyd Hill, a treehouse on the ground, with a swimming pool and this clear little brook in back. It was a rough summer for teens. My own son barely passed ninth grade, after struggling through an underfunded middle school that has succeeded most — I think — in eroding his self-esteem. He needed volunteer hours for financial aid in college, and knowing he would go more willingly with friends, I organized work crews here at 11 the nature preserve. We went Tuesday through Thursday mornings, usually with a friend (who was facing transitional problems of his own). A couple of other neighborhood kids joined in, high schoolers too young for jobs, too young to drive — angry they couldn’t sleep in, itching to get out of the house. We raked muck from the eutrophied stream banks; we plucked invasive Caesar Weed and Air Potato from the low-lying areas. We cleared out non-natives, refreshed the suffocating soil and dug holes for pots of beautyberry, firebush and Muhly grass. “Before Prozac,” I joked to the neighborhood kid, “people took nature.” I was actually serious. I can footnote that claim. Puberty sucks. The teens in my life battle a rage they come by honestly. Nearly all of them struggle with something. I want them to put off the sex and drugs for as long as possible ... at least until they’re thirty. Not having much to go with, I pointed out the creek’s path. Maybe the lost kid would make the connection. Upstream, this creek runs through a culvert that is blocked at the preserve by a chain link fence, then behind Gryphon and Darwin’s house, before disappearing into water hazards on the nearby golf course. Downstream, it feeds into Lake Maggiore, then Salt Creek, where it becomes a ditch through one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The creek finally discharges into Bayboro Harbor, into Tampa Bay. The kids volunteered because they had to. I gave my son five bucks an hour as incentive, in the hopes he would learn how to hold down a real, or paying job. A good life is cultivated, nurtured ... managed. For no good reason, our culture idealizes childhood. Since the romantic period we have clung to fantasies of innocent youth. Along with these dreams of golden-age summers, we harbor a jejune fantasy of unspoiled Nature — an untouched Eden that, of course, never existed. My great insight from volunteering? That wilderness is hard work. Before becoming a nature preserve, Boyd Hill was an exotic garden, featuring ornamentals like Ladyfinger Fern and Bowstring Hemp, invasives that volunteers like myself now pull up. I was weeding wilderness, growing a relationship. My son and I do not talk well. Kind words between fathers and sons bounce off hard surfaces. Instead of using words, we work. I cannot tell him how to respond to the situations he will face in his teenage years. I can only environ. We weed the preserve. We learn to connect. 12 Salt Creek Journal is a plea for connection. Self-produced at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, this little book looks for new ways to write about nature in the city. The project originated from a course in environmental literature that I get to teach most Spring semesters. For the past five years, I have guided students up Salt Creek, the fragmented channel that adjoins our campus. The creek itself, I should emphasize, is nothing special. No deep calling, no voice or vision ever directed us to this marginalized ditch. But pedagogically, or from a classroom standpoint, it offers both solution and challenge. Classes in nature writing pose definite logistical obstacles. The courses often involve travel. (We burn a lot of gasoline looking at wilderness.) The students at my school in particular often balance college with full-time jobs and family. They do not have the luxury to hunt down pristine Nature. So we stay close to home. Our focus on the local, in turn, has raised an interesting question: How do write about the nature right where we are? Let me explain. In nature writing classes, students cannot resist the stock clichés. Wilderness. Fallen Eden. Pollution. (Not to mention the noble desire to “put litter in its place.”) Believing they should venerate Nature, given the name of our course, students retreat to the tired storylines: a return to simpler times, the “real Florida” that must have been beautiful — but was also hot, buggy and brutally violent. Rather than going back to pre-Civil Rights Florida, rather than falling back to these fantasy paeans to “untouched” paradise, we paddle Salt Creek. It has been a new kind of adventure. We drop kayaks and canoes off the docks at the campus waterfront, and paddle across the dredged harbor, up the channelized creek. With the new setting, different questions present themselves. How far can students go, aesthetically and literally? Do we look past the pollution? Most casual kayakers turn around at Third Street, or the “Thrill Hill” bridge. The braver souls shimmy under the low-hanging overpass at Fourth Street. Even few venture further, into the surprise wilderness that surrounds Bartlett Pond. From there, Salt Creek cuts diagonally across the street grid and through the city’s Southside, where a mangrove rookery hides in plain sight. At Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard (or Ninth Street), the culvert connects to what is now known as Lake Maggiore — and what used to be a tidal estuary called “Salt Lake.” 13 Salt Lake? Or Lake Maggiore? The ecology is as confused as the name. Here, it helps to know the history. The channeling in the early twentieth century quickened Salt Creek’s tidal flow, disrupting the hydrology. Newspaper reports describe “confused” mullet that swam to their death in these suburban headwaters. The dead fish left a horrid stench, and so a dam was built at Ninth Street (now MLK), to keep fresh water in and marine life out. After 1925 the lake was called Margy-ory and today we say MaGORy, no doubt confusing Italians visitors (who reserve the hard “g” for “gh,” as in spaghetti or the composer Ottorini Respighi). Land management, likewise, is muddled. Different share holders all complete. Boyd Hill shelters the southern shores, where a patchwork of ecosystems provides the perfect setting for Florida Ecosystem 101.