Week 29 - Osceola NF to Ocala NF and back

It was Friday night at Cobb Camp and the weekenders were rolling in with massive trucks and tents, hauling multiple ATVs on trailers. Hard as it was to leave my new friends, it was time to go. After I'd packed up on Saturday morning I visited a little more with PP, and read him and L the kayaker a poem that had come to mind while hearing PP's stories. He said it was deep and he'd need to spend some time translating it into hillbilly, but that he got the gist and enjoyed it. As I was about to ride off, he spotted a snarl of fishing line I'd got wrapped around the back wheel while offroading. I had to remove the axle to get it off but was really glad he caught it before it turned into something more serious. Clearly I need to do more thorough pre-ride inspections. But after that I said goodbye for real and was back on the road, heading south to Ocala National Forest down boring highways with occasional backroads through pretty farm country.

Campsites in Ocala were a bit of an unknown. All the paid campgrounds were too full for me to stay the week, and there was only one established "dispersed" (aka free and no reservations) campground. Also I'd heard rumors that there was a lot of methamphetamine-related activity in the area as well, so I wanted to avoid the kind of place that was so off the map that a meth cook would choose to set up there. I figured I'd just spend the afternoon scouting around and see what I could find. I stopped in Salt Springs to do my laundry and gorge myself on a stromboli, and liked the place so much that I decided to camp nearby if possible. The other locations I'd considered further south were a lot more remote and wouldn't have any services nearby if I needed them. I went to check out one site that had been posted on iOverlander, but quickly found out that it's really hard to ride a fully loaded motorcycle through deep, loose sand. Maybe it would be easier with more skills, or really wide tires like the TW-200 has. But anyway, by the time I got back to the main road my arms were a little sore, and I was hoping all the Forest Service roads weren't like that one, which on the map wasn't even marked as the roughest kind of road.

Luckily the next road I tried, FR 33, was made of a hard-packed clay/sand mixture that was mostly easy to ride on, except for stretches of rolling washboard that made Punkin's creaky old suspension cluck like an agreived chicken. I passed the $8/night Shanty Pond campground which was closed for the pandemic (why USDA, why? pretty sure nobody was planning to throw a party in the pit toilet), and took a road that appeared to lead to a small pond. Lo and behold, there were fine campsites all along the road, and at the first one was a guy napping in his Jeep with a dog in the passenger seat that looked just like Lassie. He sat up and said we was thinking of camping there for the night. I took this as a good sign and found myself a nice spot a bit further in, with two big longleaf pines for my hammock, a shady live oak for my tent, a southern exposure for my solar panels, and a view out over the pond at the back.

After setting up camp, I explored a little and found another site at the end of the road, where a group of 20-somethings had set up camp. They were from Port St. Lucie, friends from high school, four men and three women (two of whom were passed out drunk in their tents, snoring audibly). It was a bit cold and rainy, and they invited me to sit by their fire under the sprawling live oaks. I found out that two of the men worked at a boat factory assembling consoles and trim, and the two passed-out women were nurses. One of the other men had been a boy scout, and another wore cowboy boots and was a very knowledgeable outdoorsman, so between all of them I picked up a lot of information about life in Florida. Boy Scout told me how scouts in Florida make shelters thatched with palm fronds and how certain palms cut like a razor, and Cowboy gave me directions to some nearby swimming spots. They explained how Florida has delicious lobsters (more delicious than Maine's but only the tail is good to eat), how they're known as "bugs", how they've become rare because of over-harvesting, and how some people catch them by driving out whole burrows by squirting bleach into one end (which is very very illegal). Cowboy's tent was of a type I'd never seen before, where the entire floor is basically a double-width cot, so it doesn't matter what the ground is like as long as the legs don't sink in too much. After awhile I headed back to my camp to write my blog, and could hear them partying for a long while, but not too loudly. They struck me as real sweet kids.

In the morning it was still cool and drizzly. I heard some very unfamiliar bird calls, and when I went out on a walk I ran into a couple out geocaching with their five rescue dogs, who told me that the birds were sandhill cranes. I rode the few miles back into town, stocked up on groceries, and ate lunch at a place called Odd Todd's. Out front there was a road sign with a silhouette of a bear and under that "NEXT 16 MILES" and under that "HOT BOILED PNUTS". I definitely felt I'd arrived somewhere different (I grew up north of the boiled peanut line). Back at camp I ran into Jeep guy heading out, and he told me how he'd once ridden the TransAmerica Trail on a KLR 650 and I said I'd like to do something like that one day. In the early afternoon I heard some signs of life from the end of the road and went over to hang out with the kids as they made "breakfast". The two nurses were now awake and two other people were passed out instead. Apparently it was hard seltzer that had done them in the day before, and some vodka that was intended to be mixed with juice but never was. Apparently, even apart from the pandemic, being a nurse in Florida is a little crazy because you have to deal with crazy Floridians. One of the nurses was telling a story about someone with their finger bitten off by a family member and there was some confusion about which of the several such cases she was talking about. When it started raining a bit harder, I retreated to my tent and spent the rest of that rainy Sunday reading and lazing around, and waved to the kids as they headed out for a day on the river and then a three hour drive back to their jobs down south.

Then the weekend was over and it got really quiet. Well, except for my non-human neighbors: birds, crickets, bullfrogs in the pond, and so on. The mornings were quite drizzly, but over the course of the week the drizzle shaded into fog, and the afternoons got gradually hotter and drier. I explored the area around my camp, which turned out to be at the intersection of several distinct ecosystems. The pond was surrounded by a little "prairie" which is officially known as a Floridian highlands freshwater marsh, "highlands" being a very low bar in a state where the highest points are "mountains" a few hundred feet above sea level. But because the sandy soil is so incredibly well drained, it doesn't retain water and nutrients well, and the prairies are an improbable mixture of marsh and desert, with a ring of dense reedy grasses in the lower parts, then sandy stretches colonized by soft pale green tufts of lichen, clumps of wiry grass, scrub pines, and even prickly pear cacti. It's fun to be in a place where I have so little experience, because it doesn't take much looking to run across natural mysteries. Like the piles of sand regularly spaced across the forest floor as if someone had been frantically hunting for buried treasure, which I later found out were excavated from the tunnel systems of the southeastern pocket gopher. On top of these, ant lions had dug their conical traps. One day I ran across a snake sunning itself by the pond, and after emailing a picture to a helpful herpetologist at the Florida Museum, I found out it was a dusky pygmy rattlesnake. I also saw some deer, woodpeckers, the wakes of fish in the pond, and many ground-nesting birds exploding away from me with a startling whir.

But my most exciting encounter was when I was sitting in camp and heard something crashing through the undergrowth. I thought it might be a bear, the thought of which was exciting and a bit scary, but then out of the bushes burst two beige turtles with carapaces the size of large mixing bowls, one chasing the other and slamming into it with a loud thunk. When I got up to get a closer look, they turned around and hoofed it in the other direction, still thunking away, and I saw them go into a large burrow that I hadn't noticed before, no more than a hundred feet from my camp. I knew right away they could only be gopher tortoises, which are a crucial part of the longleaf pine forest ecosystem. And right inside the burrow I could see the back end of one of them, and could hear them still thunking away. I emailed the herpetologist again to ask what the heck they were doing, and he told me the behavior is called "shell ramming", and happens both in courtship and when two males are fighting. I felt really lucky to have seen them, and I resolved to get myself some binoculars so that next time I can get a better look without having to get so close.

But during the week there was very little human presence around my camp. Even though I could hear the cars going by on highway 19, the long straight forest roads were so empty it was almost eerie. I saw a few turkey hunters, one pair in a metallic teal 1989 Geo Tracker (which I coveted more than I want to admit), and another pair walking past my hammock at dawn in head to toe camo. At one empty campsite across the road I found that someone had written "NO N*****S" on the top of an oak stump, which I rubbed with a lump of charcoal from the fire pit until the message was obscured, kind of hoping the writer would come back, sit down on it, and get up with a black ass. One time I saw a couple Ford F350s with tinted windows meeting on a lonely stretch of road and thought to myself that it was exactly the sort of vehicle a Floridian Walter White would drive, but otherwise there was no sign of the rumored meth cooks. I picked up a lot of beer cans, and in another campsite found a chromed muffler cover that fairly begged to be turned into the centerpiece of a dangly-dingly.

The days warmed up until even in the shade I was working in just a pair of shorts: no shirt, no shoes, no problem. Of course along with the warmth came a few ticks, mosquitoes, and biting flies, but not so many as to be really inconvenient. On Thursday afternoon, as the temperature approached 90 degrees, I took off work and headed down to one of the swimming spots Cowboy had told me about. I took a lovely shortcut along the edge of Hopkins Prairie, with majestic views through tall pines of waterfowl on the distant marshes. There were sections of deep sand that gave me some good offroading practice, and I arrived a little sweaty. The spot was a sinkhole, a deep pool of clear water sunken below ground level, connected through limestone tunnels to the aquifer that keeps the water at a refreshing 70 degrees or so year round. It felt like a natural version of what's called a "tank" in India, a cool oasis sunken into a desert-like landscape. I passed the afternoon swimming, reading, napping, and watching the clouds. It was the main thing I wanted to do when I headed for Florida, so I felt like now I could head north again and not feel like I missed out, although I certainly want to come back someday and spend more time in this landscape. Next time I'd really like to have a boat.

The ride back to Cobb Camp was uneventful and the scenery was a lot prettier in the fine weather, with green shady bottomlands and rolling cow pastures studded with trees. When I got there I found PP sitting on his tailgate and JT conferring with R the mechanic, who was fixing the suspension on her minivan. "I thought I heard a weed eater roll in," he said.

Things I Learned

• People collect the fruits of the saw palmetto and sell them to be used as an herbal medicine.
• Gopher tortoises sometimes drag sticks in front of their burrows to deter predators.
• Female pocket gophers tend to dig branching burrows to have a better chance of finding plants to eat, while male pocket gophers tend to dig straight burrows to have a better chance of finding the burrow of a female.

Wonderful Things

• Fog beading on spiderwebs at sunrise, making the trees look as if they'd been festooned with lanterns during the night.
• Crushing the longleaf pine needles under my feet and walking through their intoxicating mellow aroma, like spiced caramel. It's becoming one of my favorite smells.
• Purple thistles and yellow butterflies by the side of the road.