Our search for the "perfect beach" continues somewhat abated by weather, mosquitos and no-see-ums. As is pointed out in the first of my REACH BEACH books, the perfect beach, like beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. GUIDE TO COLLIER COUNTY BEACHES. A beach can be perfect at any time on any day or only at that time on that day. It depends on numerous factors or just one factor. The beach may be perfect as a result of the angle of the sun, the layers of the clouds, the varying colorful hues of the water, the presence of a dolphin or a manatee though generally things that are out of your control. However, the one factor in your control is that you brought yourself and/or your friend or your spouse or companion here on this day, at this time, in this light, in this weather. If things work out...you could be a hero. If the sky's open up and thunder and lightning crack... then you could be the goat, though if your companion has an open mind, you might get another chance, assuming of course, that no-one dies. On this particular day given the weather, the mosquitos, the no-see-ums, the traffic on I-95 and the fact that I had swapped Gertie for Suzy as a travelling companion almost caused me to spend the day in Pat Croce's Pirate Museum in Saint Augustine. But I'm glad we persevered in our quest to find the perfect beach and in so doing provided some new blogger fodder and I got to visit the Pirate Museum the next day anyway after which I found a very nice copy of the 1979 Franklin Mint edition of Robinson Crusoe for a $1.00 at a commercial flea market.
Circumstances caused me to leave Gertie at home about a seven hour drive southwest of here and take a 45 minute commercial ferry boat ride on the St, Mary's River to Cumberland Island National Seashore. Susan, my wife of 41 years and I were vacationing in Saint Augustine FL and we have her car which has no trailer hitch but does have air conditioning. My trusty but ancient Toytota 4-Runner has a trailer hitch but no air conditioning. As well, the sun-roof no longer opens unless it is raining and then it won't close. It is late July in Florida with daily temperatures in the 90's and humidity that averages somewhere between 60% and 101%. I have cumulatively drained 42 inches of rainwater off the top of my pool since the beginning of June. Life is full of difficult choices. I opted for the A/C thus causing Gertie to languish forlornly in the damp heat.
You should also know that my wife is definitely not an outdoor person She is averse to just about everything that the outdoors offers including sunshine, rain, bugs, no-see-ums, tics, snakes, sharks, rays, water, wind, heat, humidity, sweat....well you get the picture. When I was a Boy Scout I opted for wilderness camping and earned my canoeist merit badge at the age of 12. When she was a Girl Scout leader, she led them to a sleep-over in a local Westchester county mall. So I have to say that Sue demonstrated some rare "gamer" attitude when she agreed to accompany me on this day trip, though in the end she made it clear that the best part was the rocking chair on the Ranger Station porch; that she had only been slightly nauseous from the diesel fumes of the boat's engine on the way over and BTW she wouldn't camp on this island in a million years. Despite the deprivations, the trip was not a wash-out as far as she was concerned as she discovered that John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were married on this island in 1996 and that definitely made the whole trip worth doing. This is how Cumberland Island will be forever defined in her mind.
The mid-point of the St,. Mary's River serves as the Florida/Georgia border and we spent most of the day on the Georgia side. While the entrance fee to the National Park may be the best $4.00 you ever spent, the ferry ride itself is an additional $20 a person. Gertie would have done it for a lot less, but she is not here. Thousands of gunkholing opportunities do abound here in this massive saltwater marsh and should Gertie (or a larger successor) and I ever find our way this far north again, we're sure to take a stab at it. I think the best way to see this island is to anchor a cruising sailboat or power yacht in the west channel for a week or two and then circumnavigate daily by dinghy or kayak returning to the mother-ship each evening for daiquiris or margaritas.
I was first made aware of the Cumberland Island National Seashore in a book by John McPhee entitled ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ARCHDRUID. While I had been a McPhee fan for decades I wasn't aware of this particular title published in 1971 until I moved to Naples in the early 2000's and found a copy in a Friends of the Library sale for 50 cents. The first of his books that I read was entitled THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY because it was in my sample case when I represented his publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux as a book traveler in Canada in the early 1970's. It was free and I wanted to know what I was selling. I liked GIVING GOOD WEIGHT (about New York's Union Square Farmers' Market) and my favorite was LOOKING FOR A SHIP (about travelling the world's oceans on a tramp steamer). I liked COMING INTO THE COUNTRY (about Alaska) and the PINE BARRENS (about New Jersey) as well. It wasn't until today though that I truly understood the brilliance of the selection of the words that make up the title. Druids, of course were (or still are) tree worshippers. An Archdruid would be the head honcho tree worshipper responsible for this grove of trees in the same way that an Archbishop is responsible for the well being of his diocese. I always understood that David Brower (the founder of the Sierra Club and the subject of the title) was a tree hugger (as they used to be called pejoratively in the early days of the environmental movement) but after this visit I am so very glad that someone was prepared to do that so that any of us can have a day like this. All the live oaks on Cumberland Island are the parishioners of his diocese and he saved them from a developer's bull dozers. Until I saw the trees today, I could not appreciate the scope of the Arch in the Druid. So here I am looking for a beach (I generally don't do woods) and I find a "magic forest". But its not just ten trees or a handful of big 200 year old live oaks, or a single one as is the "Senator" in Saint Augustine but 20,000 acres of live oaks most of which are hundreds of years old and dripping with draped Spanish moss. The entire island is about 36,000 acres, 17 miles long and the rest of the area is salt marsh, tidal flats and one heck of a HUGE beach. If you want to read more about John McPhee, follow this link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McPhee. Here are a few of the " tree shots".
I think the Park Service is missing a bet by not serving up "Happy Hour" cocktails like Pittypat's Porch does up in Atlanta on cracker rocking chairs very similar to these. Everyone on this porch was very happy and because no-one dared to miss the last ferry of the day, we all had an extra hour to rock. We could have really rocked to a couple of mint juleps or sazeracs though.
