What do the fox squirrels think when every summer they count more and more furless visitors to their sandhills? If Jameson is correct (that culture is replacing nature, having become a product in its own right), then perhaps what starts out with the simple idea of preserving nature and making it more meaningful (counting it) will by the capitalist process end up turning Wekiva into another form of the Florida Aquarium.  

I remember as a boy of 12 or 13 riding all the way to Orlando on hwy. 92-17 to swim in "Sanlando Springs," now a development called "The Springs." I think we paid a quarter to get in. At Blue Spring in Deland we would just scurry over the back of the thing from the dirt road (still there, but fenced i think) and swing from a rope to dive in. The more favorable alternative at Sanlando was this--to my child's mind--gigantic slide that started you out in the trees and landed you with an enormous splash into the pool. By Wet and Wild standards it was then the most spectacular adventure, a virtual kingfisher reality, available. 

The joy of swimming at Wekiva for me is to lie on your back and watch the trees and the clouds go by. Down river i remember best the many happy hours of gunwale-pumping our canoes until someone fell into the water to the cry of "Gatormeat! Gatormeat!" Perhaps it would be better to direct all the tourists to the Florida Aquarium and reserve the real thing for all the natives. Of course, that still means a traffic jam of canoes at the intersection of Rock Springs Run and Wekiva. Aggressive marketing of canoe rentals could probably double that. Should such riverjams concern the Florida naturalist?  

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, at the end of her book about the biology of neighborhood in the real Florida, asked the key question: who owns Cross Creek? Her answer occurs already in her first sentences on page one: "Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of the Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water. We are four miles west of . . . " (italics mine). "We" means the land and water, all the creatures of the place including the seven families. In a modified post-postmodern sense, all and none are owners. 

There seems to be a huge difference between capitalist commodity (let's call it Spectacle) and the real earth experience. It is the difference between real human-animal action in its proper habitat and a replica in photograph, t-shirt, video, or postcard. To share common ground with the gators, box turtles, bream and gar-fish, otters, fox squirrels, black bears, orange argiopes, to rub knees with a cypress and eat some watercress for lunch the next day, is to be a part of the community and has nothing to do with tourism, spectacle, the cultural shtick of Nature that the brochures sell Florida with. 

But here's the crux: when the tourists come to see Wekiva, if it really sinks in, then perhaps they will learn to stay home by their own creeks and riverbeds and bays, practice good water and rivergreen management, build their own festivals, support their local poets and artists, and celebrate their own-ness.

  Camus's recently published novel has been entitled The First Man because it depicts the native Algerians struggling for independence while lacking any sense of history or culture. The protagonist, like Adam, is starting from scratch, as though in the world of culture and capital nothing could be worse. Indeed, poverty has this danger. But the other side of that is what we all bring to Wekiva or Cross Creek, even as new-comers or late-comers, namely a willingness to discover the earth and our natural place in it. The Second Man, the child of Spectacle and Virtual Reality and TV Wilderness, can easily lack more than culture or nature, the sense of doing together, the biological experience of community, the WE-ness of Cross Creek.

  Last January i was teaching a course on nature writing and photography, and so i took the class to our newest attraction, the Florida Aquarium in Tampa. I had heard about it at an Audubon meeting. A unique new concept in wildlife exposition, the Aquarium tries to follow the drop of water from an internal Florida spring all the way to the river delta, the mangrove coasts, the coral-reefs of the keys, and then the depths of the ocean. Here the principal species of plants and animals, above and below water level, are presented in simulated natural settings, trying to be true to Florida natives, nothing exotic in the whole place. The closest thing i had seen to it was the Monterey Aquarium where you can see otters (and others) feeding and cavorting in an actual kelp-bed from the other side of a giant plate of glass. In Tampa they have spent eighty-four million dollars as part of their portside renewal project to display and create native knowledge of wildlife and at the same time help restore lots of viable water to the bay at the same time.

  After the two-hour drive from winter Park, my students entered the place and went immediately into the gift shop, following a sign that promised a twenty percent discount. This right after paying $13.95 to get in, a bargain by central Florida standards for Spectacle.

  Photography and museums like the Florida Aquarium have one desire in common--the exotic, strange, romantic delight, brought together in one album--pictures at an exhibition. We do get to see some wonderful up close shots of turtles and ducks and most exciting for me the roseate spoonbills hopping from railing to railing or scooping up food from the bottom. When you have gone to all-day lengths to scope among a thousand waterbirds in a backwater at Merritt Island five hundred yards away to sight one pair of these pink shovelers, this is a powerful experience.

  The keenest delight for me, however, as i enter the grandfatherly world, is to watch all the biophiliacs who don't have to pay to get in. They bounce around from side to side, catching fiery glimpses of gators and crabs, ducks and garfish, wandering about at their own eye-level. Their delight at the proximity of the waterlings is measure enough for me of the value of museum.

  The state of the animals is another question. Are they happier in the assurance of their meals and the security of their neighborhood? Are they taking to domestication as well as we are? How do the plants feel living in this giant green house not quite big enough for authentic cypress trees? What sorts of interactions are churning up in this manmade ecology?

  Tensy, one of my more poetic students, is quite angry that the spoonbills are so domesticated, but I begin to wonder if released again into the world would they adapt to the suburbs like the pair of eagles who have recently taken up residence on Interlachen Avenue in Winter Park and who last year obligingly flew overhead for the video i made outdoors of the students and their albums.

  The Florida Aquarium is like a good poem. It has compressed the experience of the entire peninsula into a three-hour indoor tour. You can see many of the commonest creatures in their simulated habitats and learn quite a bit about the ecological relationships that would obtain among them if they had a real habitat. Without danger or community, with nothing to do but watch them and call them to the attention of companions, you can come out of there with something far more graphic and immediate than any video or book with excellent photos (i recommend Swamp Song, if you want a good read or Channel Nine's St. John's River video).

  Since so many folks retire to Florida from faraway habitats, they are like Camus' First Man and Woman. They lack history or commodity in Florida, have no community of remembrance of things past or knowledge of habitat here. Better for them to see the Aquarium and thus become acquainted in their neighborhoods with the creeks and rivers that bring all their animal and plant neighbors together. Perhaps we should require for residency in the state a visit to Florida Aquarium and a test on the constitution of Florida's watershed and its natural history.

  Right now, the Florida Aquarium is on the cutting edge of the watershed movement in America, a powerful aftershock of the green revolution. It also represents major advances in biosphere technology, though no humans have volunteered to subsist in there for two years' time.

  It does seem silly to worry about the quality of life for animals and plants in the nature museums of Florida, as i was earlier, when Biosphere I is itself in danger, if not already dead, as Bill Mckibben and others would have it. We used to have this word nature (a vastly misused and inscrutable buzzword in America since Emerson) that we can't use anymore since Biosphere Ia arrived--you know, since the atmosphere has so changed--that we can no longer imagine a place where the planet is not under human stress, if not control. Ah, yes, the postmodern age. We ourselves are living, not so bravely perhaps as our forebears, in a little green house on the galactic prairie.

  When Emerson said, "Nature that made the mason, made the house," he was arguing for the inclusion of the spectacle of the city into the concept of Nature. Of course, he hadn't seen yet the full consequences of the industrial revolution, let alone late capitalism. What then of the making of nature itself into spectacle, the marketing of nature to the nature-starved, urbanized folk? What would Thoreau say to the absurd notion of being charged admission to Nature? Everyone understands that Sea World is not the sea and that real orcas can be seen in Alaska's rainy waters. Is Wekiva Springs State Park the real Wekiva?