Making the PBS Film “In Marjorie's Wake”: Navigating the Territory

Journal of Florida Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2011 so high that they vanish into the heavens, so Making the PBS Film “In completely gone as a mirage. Marjorie’s Wake”: Navigating the Territory Between the Hero’s Our film crew piles onto the flat deck of a Journey and a Floating Opera platform boat and pushes away from the shore, continuing to film the women and Bill Belleville their tents and the palm hammock as we go. The sky here in early autumn is wondrous, Environmental Writer, Documentary Filmmaker cumulus billowing out across the wide prairie just like it does down in the Glades. The golden afternoon light that settles across The low grassy marsh of this upper river has a water-soaked Florida river landscape an exquisite subtropical character to it, seems unlike any other in the world. It revealed in the robust colors of plants and particularly does right here on a spit of dry wildflowers that pulse in great waves of prairie where the Econlockhatchee flows ever-changing light. into the much broader St. Johns. We had earlier navigated Puzzle Lake, The two women who are cinematically which Rawlings had once described as a retracing a river journey Marjorie Kinnan “blue smear through the marsh” during her Rawlings once made on the St. Johns are own river journey. It is still very much of a setting up their tents for the night. They are blue smear, as sublime and enigmatic as it doing so inside a hammock of sabal palms, a was 75 years ago, and in a Florida that has slightly higher berm of rich earth where lost so much, that gives me great hope. slender, gray trunks poke out of the rich delta like giant pipe stems, each crowned Our boat carefully follows a shallow with a feathery spray of green. Nearby, the channel, weaving its way through the walls skeleton of a large cow lies almost intact, its of sedge and rush grasses, until the palm white bones picked clean by the black- hammock and the tents and the cow skeleton headed vultures. Three sandhill cranes glide disappear into the landscape, as fully gone overhead, crying to each other in that as the sand hill cranes. haunting way that they do. Finally, they rise Journal of Florida Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2011 We close on the houseboat we’ve anchored downstream a couple of miles in deeper This literary-nature film project, which at water. Once aboard, I walk the ladder up to first seemed like a lighthearted adventure, is the roof of the boat. It’s a rise of only a few now more real than life itself. If there is a feet but it’s high enough to let me see all I continuum between place and time, between need of a natural world entirely comprised recorded behaviors and human memory, of wild marsh and palms and random smears then this moment in the dark river night is of blue stretching from one end of the still searching for interpretation. horizon to the other. The purpose of this exercise, after all, is to The sun melts into the flat wet earth and the produce a documentary film. And if any bronze light is replaced by scarlet. Soon, moment or idea or thought is to be made there is no color at all, only darkness, and it real, it has be captured in the postmodern consumes the world around me in the most realm of high definition video. Otherwise, it complete way, creating a Florida night drifts away into the ether, as completely unlike any other you will experience in a gone from sight as the dark prairie and the theme park or a neighborhood or on a road. cow skeleton and the sand hill cranes. It seems as if the dark has even absorbed sound, until finally, I hear the elegiac call of the barred owls, drifting to me from somewhere far away. Back on the palm hammock camp site, the women have huddled into their tents, using small lights to read and to write in notebooks they have brought along. Suddenly, they hear the sound of a strange outboard motor, coming closer to them on the Econ. Then a strong male voice calls out to them from the shore, asking if he can come up to visit. Journal of Florida Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2011 Colorized postcard from the book “Florida's Sensibilities attuned to more solid, American Heritage River: Images from the St. Johns Region,” courtesy of Bill Belleville geologically-understood landscapes back on the continent often had trouble figuring out It was the year 2000 and our fledging not- the biological nuances of Florida's complex for-profit nature film group, Equinox system of wetlands, rivers, and springs. Documentaries, Inc., was prospecting for a With little understanding or connection to broadcast film idea that would express the this water-driven peninsula, it was simply best of our intentions. We were looking for easier to allow—or ignore—the sort of a documentary concept that would not just growth that was obliterating Florida's celebrate the rare natural landscape of singular natural landscape. Florida. It would also address the related, if illusive, "sense of place". In that pre- In more closely examining the “newcomer” Recession time, our state was growing at an equation, though, I also realized that there alarming rate, and we were losing an were plenty of transplanted residents who average of 20 acres of natural land an hour did “get it.” Indeed, most of the writers and to growth that was more often "sprawl" than poets who had historically created some of not. When the native landscape vanished, the best and most insightful works about the cultural component associated with Florida weren’t born here. That list was a “sense of place” was in jeopardy as well. long one and included earlier “newcomers” such as William Bartram, John James I believed the dynamic driving the loss went Audubon, Sidney Lanier, Hart Crane, Ernest far deeper than just poor decisions on the Hemingway, Elizabeth Bishop, James part of politicians who were allowing the Merrill, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Archie out-of-control growth. Three out of every Carr, Marjory Kinnan Rawlings, Patrick four residents—the people electing these Smith and many more---and that didn’t even officials—were not born in Florida. From begin to plumb the long and distinguished the perspective of natural history and list of artists who came here from geography, our peninsular state was off the somewhere else and “got it.” aesthetically. mainland grid for most of these newcomers. Certainly, being new to Florida didn’t preclude an understanding of it. Indeed, I Journal of Florida Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2011 arrived here as a transplanted young adult telling each other stories---whether we did seeking my own fortune. Gradually, I came so around a campfire or more recently, to realize that my new residency status through the printed word. This was not a carried with it a heightened sense of new concept; Aristotle examined the need responsibility that required me to both learn for story 2300 years ago in his Poetics. and to see in new ways. Despite all the myths and hyperbole that had been grafted More recently, mythologist Joseph onto Florida over time, there was still a very Campbell suggested the human need for a real and complex “vernacular” of nature and story was so powerful it was almost place at work here. genetically bred into us. Campbell even identified the classic story as the “hero’s I talked with Bob Giguere, the producer who journey” in which a person leaves the co-founded our film group about seeing ordinary world and travels to an unknown Florida in a new way. I also chatted with and perhaps threatening place, returning friends and supporters on the board of our with a treasure to share with the world. grassroots nonprofit. We all agreed that a Metaphorically, that “treasure” could be documentary that simply "preached" would valuable information—perhaps even do little good to change anybody's mind wisdom. about the sublime values of Florida. After all, the intent of creating a nonprofit film Could we identify an intriguing and literate group was to fill the void left by a story about nature and sense of place in mainstream media that defaulted to the more Florida that we could bring to film—one simplistic black-and-white depictions of our that would transcend the divisive politics of state. growth and appeal to the more sublime qualities of both the intellect and the As a guy who made his living writing emotions of our prospective audience ? If essays, articles, and books in the genre of we could, we might be able to set the stage creative nonfiction, I instinctively gravitated to allow viewers to connect on a deeper towards literature that relied on a fact-driven level with the reality of the Florida "narrative.” I figured, as humans, we had environment. From that more visceral spent most of our existence as a species connection might then come a true land Journal of Florida Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2011 ethic—one that would be far more resistant to the obsession with pell-mell growth and This would not be a feature film or a historic all its destructive consequences. reenactment with participants dressed in period costumes and pretending to be the Board member Leslie Poole, then an adjunct original literary team. Instead, it would be a professor in the Environmental Studies real excursion on the contemporary St.

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