Part 7

There is nothing like weather. It is man’s comfort and his misery; more important still, perhaps, it is his prosperity and his ruin. Indeed, it has almost divine prerogatives. It wounds and it heals; it kills and it makes alive. And this, which in good degree is true everywhere, is especially true in a country like southern Florida, the Mecca at once of pleasure-seeking winter vacationers, health-seeking tourists, and livelihood-seeking settlers. For all these, Florida is what it is because of its climate, that is to say, its weather. Speak with whom you will, weather is the topic that naturally comes uppermost.

Yesterday (January 22) was one of the most delightful days imaginable; for a pedestrian, I mean to say. I know an insect collector, a gentle soul, little used to complaining against the order of the world, who pronounced it “horrid.” For the successful prosecution of her industry there lacked a few degrees of warmth. Florida insects, it appears, are much less hardy than their Northern cousins, keeping indoors, and so out of the net, in temperature such as a Yankee butterfly or beetle, thicker-skinned or thicker-blooded, would scorn to be afraid of. But if yesterday was perfect, to-day, by my reckoning, at least, has been finer still--perfection heaped upon perfection. Yet every one hereabout is more or less unhappy, and with more or less reason. In the night between these two perfect days an air from the North descended suddenly upon us, and the temperature took an alarming drop, some say to 38°, some to 31°--a drop which meant discomfort to all, and disaster to many. When I put my head out of doors at seven o’clock this morning, on my way to the post office, I was startled. My first thought was to run back for an overcoat. Instead of that I put on steam.

Breakfast over, I betook myself to the pine lands, my rule being to improve cool days in that sunny region, leaving the shady hammock woods for hotter weather. It was cold enough for overcoat and mittens. In Massachusetts, with anything like the same temperature, I should certainly have worn them. Here, however, it was not so plain a case. I was to be on foot till noon, and I felt sure that long before that time the lightest outer garment would become intolerable. So I buttoned my one coat tightly about me, stuffed my hands into my pockets, and hastened my steps. For a mile, perhaps, I kept up the pace. By that time the sun had begun to make itself felt. At the end of the second mile the temperature was nothing less than summer-like, and before the third mile was finished my coat was on my arm; and as I came down one of the city streets, on my return at noon, and met two Seminole Indians walking abroad dressed, after their airy fashion, in nothing but waistcoat and shirt, the sight of their comfortable uncivilized legs was calculated to make a perspiring man envious.

By nine o’clock, indeed, the weather was superb; but presently I came to an opening in the woods. Here was a field of tomato plants in front of a new, unpainted house. Some recent settler had cleared a piece of ground and established a home in this land of perpetual summer. And to support himself and his family he had “gone into early tomatoes.” So much was to be seen at a glance. And yes, there stood the man himself in the midst of his plantation. I went near and accosted him, expressing my hope that the frost (for by this time it was plain there had been one) had not damaged his crop. He had been badly frightened in the night, he confessed, but thought he had mostly escaped harm. “I was glad,” he said, dwelling upon the verb with a pleasant foreign accent, “when I saw the thermometer” (pronounced etymologically, with the accent on the penult). I fear he was worse hit than he knew. At all events there were many acres of wilting tomato plants only a mile away on the same road. One man, whom I saw looking over his field, was calling the attention of a solicitous neighbor to the fact that a certain part of the plantation had fared better than the rest. A few burning stumps had happened to be left smouldering on one edge of the field overnight, and the wind had drifted a light blanket of smoke across that corner.

But even in unprotected gardens the different parts had not fared alike. Here the tender plants were wilting as the sun shone on them, and yonder, only five or ten yards away, there was no symptom of blight. So true is it of tomato vines, as of nobler creations, that one shall be taken and the other left. The frost is like the wind, it striketh where it listeth, and thou seest the effect thereof; and the poor man suffereth with the rich.

Such are the cruel uncertainties of truck farming in this sub-tropical region, far down toward the very tip of Florida. Like the speculator in copper or in oil, the farmer goes to bed rich and gets up poor. But, like the dabbler in “shares,” the farmer is not easily discouraged. Though he has moved from one point to another, farther and farther down the peninsula, the frost pursuing him, he will still try again. There is one thing to be depended upon (let us be thankful to say it)--a sanguine man’s hope.

So much for tillers of the soil. For the rest of us, mere idlers and wayfarers, concerned only with questions of sight-seeing and momentary comfort, a day like the present needs no bettering. My own course, as I have said, lay through the pine woods--sunny, spacious, not in the least like anything that a New Englander would call a forest. At short intervals the road, white and hard, ran past a small clearing, generally with a house upon it. Here would be orange trees, mango trees (just now in bloom), splendid hibiscus shrubs, pineapples, perhaps, with other novelties pleasant for Northern eyes to look upon, or, quite as likely, a field of tomatoes (the fruit nearly grown), or a sweet-potato patch.

Near one of the houses the loud cries of some strange bird troubled my curiosity. The opera-glass showed me nothing, and I was none the wiser till beside a second house I heard the same voice again. This time I put aside my scruples and made a set attempt to solve the mystery. A woman before the door was inquisitive about the stranger, but the stranger was still more inquisitive about the bird; and by and by, on a lower perch than I had thought, there the fellow stood at the top of a shrub, directly before my eyes, a Florida jay. It was nine years since I had seen a bird of his kind, and the sight was welcome accordingly. Perhaps he knew it. At any rate, whether for my pleasure or his own, he held his ground and kept up his harsh, shrikely vociferations.

The Florida jay (a crestless bird, not at all the same as the Florida blue jay, which abounds everywhere and is everywhere noisy, especially in the villages) is strictly a bird of the peninsula, being found nowhere else--a remarkable instance of extreme localization. I ran upon still another individual before reaching the end of my jaunt,--on the outskirts of Lemon City,--and all three were in dooryards. Oak scrub (where you may look out for rattlesnakes) and human neighborhood, these, as I read the signs, are the Florida jay’s desiderata.

In general, as compared with the hammock woods, the pine lands are nearly birdless. An occasional sparrow hawk (another strangely trustful creature, very common in this country), an occasional mockingbird (more than once in splendid song), a shrike now and then, a flock of myrtle-birds, and another of palm warblers, a good many white-breasted swallows and turkey buzzards overhead, with a bunch of silent sparrows skulking beneath the dwarf palmettoes,--these are what I now remember.

Birds or no birds, flowers or no flowers, I should have enjoyed the eight miles. The bright sunshine, the temperate, genial warmth, the endless, widely spaced woods, the blue sky, and on one side the blue expanse of Biscayne Bay,--summer in winter,--I am not so long from snowy Massachusetts but that these things are enough to make for me a kind of perpetual fiesta. As I said to begin with (and it is as true of thoughts and feelings as of the tenderest of garden crops), there is nothing like weather.

BEWILDERMENT

If any untraveled Northern botanist wishes to be puzzled, hopelessly confused, clean put out of his reckoning, let him come to Miami. His knowledge will drop away from him till not a rag is left. Let him arrive, as I did, after dark, and in the morning take the road southward to Cocoanut Grove. The distance is only five miles, and the walking excellent. I should like to go with him, and listen to his exclamations and comments.

The cocoanut palms before the hotel, as he leaves the piazza, he has no need to inquire about; such things he has at least seen in pictures. And the parti-colored crotons, likewise, are nothing new; he has seen the like in hot-houses, if nowhere else. And the scores of big, round hibiscus bushes, each with its score or two of regal scarlet blossoms,--these, or poverty-stricken imitations of them, he has admired before now in the Boston Public Garden and elsewhere. The acalypha shrubs, also, he will perhaps recognize upon a second look, though he has never before seen them growing as a hedge, carefully squared, three or four feet high, and as many feet thick. Yonder euphorbia bush, too (Poinsettia), with its flaring, flaming rosettes of scarlet floral leaves at the tips of the stems--this, like the crotons, he is more or less familiar with under glass. All these are cultivated plants, pleasant to look upon out of doors in mid-winter, but of themselves not especially interesting, perhaps, to a botanist.

But now, at the foot of Thirteenth or Fourteenth Street, less than a quarter of a mile from the hotel, we come to some vacant lots. Here are a few dingy live-oaks (still with last year’s leaves on), and in their shadow, sprawling over the tangled undergrowth, a wilderness of gadding morning-glory vines. How lovely the flowers are--pink and blue! Unless it be the ubiquitous fish crow, there is nothing else so common in this Miami country as the morning-glory; and the vines, acres on acres, hold in bloom, one kind and another, so I am given to understand, almost or quite the whole year round.

Now we leave the sidewalk and are in the pine woods. The trees--long-leaved pines--our botanist knows well enough, the train having brought him past a thousand miles of such, on his way hither; though, even so, he might be puzzled to tell to which of two related species (Palustris and Elliottii) they belong. From the rude bridge, as we cross the Miami River, he admires the myriad-footed, glossy-leaved mangrove thickets that line the banks, especially as he looks up the stream. Just beyond are ancient live-oaks, the huge spreading branches of which support a profusion of air-plants (poor relations of the pineapple), with here and there an orchid. I should like to show him an Epidendrum such as I secured ten days ago--an open spray of a dozen blooms, handsome enough to grace the finest of hothouse collections; but I have not been able to find a second specimen, with all my searching. However, a smaller, one-flowered species is common enough, and if he is sufficiently enterprising he will climb one of the trees for it, or--as I did--cut a stick by means of which, with more or less hard work, he can pry the bulbous root from its foothold.

“What is this yellow flower?” he asks, as we go on.

“I don’t know,” is my answer. “Some member of the pulse family.”

My companion knew as much as that already.

“And this bush, with its strangely contorted pods?”

Here I am more at home, and proud to show it. The plant is Pithecolobium Unguis-Cati, I tell him. Small wonder the pods are twisted.

With this we come to more live-oaks, on which are more air-plants and orchids, and just beyond is a confusion of thick-leaved trees and shrubs.

“What is this?” he asks; “and this? and this?”

I have no idea, I am obliged to answer. But the tall tree a little farther on is Ficus aurea, I hasten to remark, with a show of extreme erudition.

“A fig-tree?” he answers, in a tone of surprise; for, being a botanist, he knows, of course, that ficus is fig.

Yes, I assure him, it is a kind of fig (rubber tree, it is otherwise called), though the leaf is small and, as botanists say, “entire,” not in the least resembling the modest fig-leaf of convention. I know the tree’s name, as I know that of the shrub before mentioned, because I was told it yesterday. One’s knowledge (of names) increases rapidly under favorable circumstances, in a country like this.

Yonder very noticeable shrub, bearing large globular bunches of small bright-purplish berries (no eye could miss them), is the French mulberry, so called (Callicarpa Americana); and the larger and leafier bush near it, set along the branches with more loosely disposed orange-colored berries, is Trema micrantha, a plant which Chapman’s Flora credits to but one place in the United States,--“Shellmounds in Lastero Bay, South Florida,”--though hereabout it is one of the commonest of the common. Both it and the French mulberry are prime favorites with various kinds of birds. Mockingbirds and catbirds are feasting on the berries at this moment.

And yes, here is a tree that I knew would excite my companion’s curiosity. No stranger ever drove over this road (and the first drive of every newcomer to Miami is taken this way) without asking his driver about it: a large tree, all its leafy branches far above the ground, with a strangely conspicuous mahogany-colored bark, the outermost layers of which peel off in loose papery flakes, after the manner of the canoe birch. On my first jaunt into the hammock I heard more than one driver pronounce its eloquent name--gumbo-limbo. The two or three men of whom I made inquiries could tell me nothing more, till my host, who professed no botany, modestly suggested a reference to the dictionary. There, sure enough, I found the clue I was seeking. The tree is Bursera gummifera, or Jamaica birch, one of two Florida representatives of the tropical torch-wood family. It is among the chief of my South Florida admirations, especially for its color. It and the Seminoles should be of kindred stock. In the lobby of the hotel, the other evening, I heard one man rallying another (who had been fishing and playing golf bareheaded) upon the magnificent complexion he had put on. “Your face reminds me of the gumbo-limbo,” the joker said. The comparison was obvious. I had been thinking the same thing.