There are times when I believe that the old Florida is gone forever. That quiet evenings on the front porch, listening to music of the cicadas as the aroma of orange blossoms wafts across the lake, are but a distant and irretrievable memory. With the orange groves mostly frozen out in my part of Florida, I am all too often reminded by their dead trunks of the way things used to be. I never thought much about orange groves when I was growing up surrounded by them. Now I look back with the kind of nostalgia that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings expresses so well in her book, Cross Creek. She writes: "Enchantment lies in different things for each of us. For me, it is in this: to step out of the bright sunlight into the shade of orange trees; to walk under the arched canopy of their jadelike leaves; to see the long aisles of lichened trunks stretch ahead in a geometric rhythm; to feel the mystery of a seclusion that yet has shafts of light striking through it. This is the essence of an ancient and secret magic... And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home."
I know that feeling well. But there are times when, even as I sit out in the evenings on the land where I was born, listening to the whippoorwills call to one another across the lake, I feel that same homelessness, since my home of Florida is rapidly evolving into something else.
But something happened not long ago that reminded me that the "native" culture of old Florida still survives. I was sitting in the living room reading the Sunday paper when I heard someone drive onto the property. I looked up and saw a pickup coming down the long sand road that winds it way through what used to be our grove. Out where I live company is a major event. I put down the paper and went outside to see who it was.
The pickup was a rusted early-model Ford. There was a gun rack with a shotgun on it in the back window, and the bed of the truck was overflowing with moss.
Spanish moss is unique to the southeastern United States, and it has almost come to symbolize the Deep South. Spanish moss hangs from live oaks and other tree branches and even from telephone wires. Its range is primarily coastal, as far north as Virginia and as far west as Texas. Believe it or not, Spanish moss is in the pineapple family. Some people mistakenly believe that it is a parasite. But it is an epiphyte or air plant. It takes water and nutrients from the air and converts them to energy through photosynthesis.
A portly black man in his late thirties heaved himself from behind the wheel of the truck.
"How you doing?" I called.
He took off his straw Stetson and wiped his brow with his hand. "Hot", he answered.
In the country it is considered bad manners to directly address the issue at handÑa custom I find myself readjusting to after a week of work in the city.
First we talked about how hot it was. Then we talked about fishing, briefly, since my knowledge of the topic is limited. A boy got out of the passenger side of the truck. He was a handsome kid, barefoot and shirtless, about ten years old, and the man introduced him as his son. That provided another topic as the man expounded on the laziness of the younger generation.
Finally, he said, "That's some tall bamboo you got there," and pointed to the fence line on the north side of the property that was overgrown with bamboo. On the old homesteads of Florida, bamboo was commonly planted along fence lines. This patch had been planted in the 1930's.
My own curiosity had gotten the best of me. "What are you doing with all that moss?" I asked.
"I'm a moss picker," he answered, as if it were obvious.
In earlier days, Spanish moss was used to stuff mattresses and pillows. I had read once about the moss-pickers in Louisiana. Many of them are Cajuns who go into the bayous in shallow canoes (or pirogues) and reach into the cypresses with long, hooked poles and pull moss from the trees. When their boats are filled, they bring the moss back to town to sell. But I was not aware that people still pursued this traditional trade in Florida.
"Where do you get the moss?" I asked.
He looked around us at the oaks drenched with moss, some strands hanging down and nearly touching the ground. "All over," he said. "Around here, down in Clermont."
"How do you pick it?"
His son giggled and his father gave him a sharp look, then smiled himself. They were probably thinking that anyone who didn't know how to pick moss must be pretty stupid.
"You see," the man began, "I get me a long pole and I reach up into the tree and pull it out. Fill up my truck and go home."
"What do you do with it?"
"Sell it."
"Where?"
"In Orlando."
Again I was struck by the incongruities of life in Florida. "What do the people you sell it to do with it?"
"Make paper out of it," he said.
As they say, you learn something every day.
"So you want to get some of this moss?" I asked impatiently, indicating the oak trees in the yard and hoping to get to the point.
"No."
Somehow I was offended. Wasn't my moss good enough? Did I have some kind of low-grade moss or something? "There's plenty of it," I said hopefully.
"No, I got lots of moss."
I was stumped, but decided to let him get to the point in his own time.
"Yeah, I reach up into the trees with a big, long pole and pull it out of the trees," he said. "Fact, I need a new pole." He looked over at the fence line. "How long you reckon one of hem bamboo poles are?"
"Pretty tall."
"I'd like to cut a piece of that if you don't mind."
"Sure, help yourself."
As if on cue, the boy grabbed a pruning saw from the seat of the truck and disappeared into the cane patch. In a flash he pulled out a bamboo pole about 25 feet long and expertly trimmed the clumps of leaves from it.
"Yeah, that's big bamboo," the man said. "But you ain't never seen bamboo like they got over there in Vietnam. It's big as your arm."
We chatted a while longer. He had been born and raised a few miles away, and we talked about the changes that had come to Florida.
About every two months the moss picker comes back to cut a new cane pole. I enjoy talking to him about the old times: good and bad. Where else but in Florida can two people in their thirties talk about the "old days"?
It's nice to know that some people still remember.
