FRIENDS OF SALT CREEK

How shall we look at Salt Creek?

First of all, who cares?  Isn’t this just another little stream which turns into a commercial/industrial creek, leading to a nondescript harbor?  It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it; it’s just not particularly special.  There are hundreds of creeks just like it all over Florida.  Only the most rabid ecologist could make a case that it is specially deserving of protection.

Or is that really true?  I paddled up the creek not long ago with low expectations, only to discover that it holds a few special treats for a careful observer.  First of all, the creek is home to many of the birds, large and small, which make Florida really special.  No one can ever forget the sight of a great blue heron landing in a longleaf pine, as we saw on this trip.

That graceful feathered dinosaur came flapping in at considerable speed, pulled up at the last minute to a perfect stall, grabbed a branch in his talons, and let out a querulous squawk to announce his arrival.  Never mind that the pine tree was between a marina and a warehouse; the memory is brilliant.

Or, how about the fat pelican perched on the roof of a warehouse?  That big, goofy clown of the airways looked down at us splashing our way up the creek – he must have had a laugh as we snatched plastic bottles and other trash out of the mangroves.  Why bother with that on Salt Creek?

Nature can be less than Garrard’s Wilderness or even Pastoral.  Of course, it’s wonderful to walk in the forest primeval with the leaves crunching underfoot, the smell of pine needles in your nose, and the sound of a mockingbird in your ears, looking over the ridge for the sight of a panther.  But that’s not next door for all of us.  We can’t all jump in our kayaks and paddle out on the flats of the Crystal River as it flows into the Gulf, with the baby nurse sharks lying sluggishly on the bottom and the rays flapping lazily along the riverbed.

But if Laura can walk to work over Thrill Hill and look down into Salt Creek to see a pelican working over the baitfish, that’s not a bad nature fix.  An osprey diving for his lunch is still a thrill whether you see it in the Everglades or from the dock at your local marina.

That’s what makes Salt Creek worth saving.  We shouldn’t aspire to take it back to the Tocobago times. Let’s just keep it clean, so it can support the plants, the fish and the birds which make it so much fun for us all.  Even Thoreau in his Walden cabin wasn’t waiting for Squanto to show up with a handful of corn and the drumstick of a turkey he had just shot with his bow and arrow.  He planted his beans and made other improvements to accommodate Nature to his needs and desires.  Let’s take a leaf from his book and just improve the little corner where we are.  That’s how I look at Salt Creek.

Too many ecologists and nature writers get so wrapped up in their romantic vision of Nature (with a capital N) that they lose sight of what’s practical, and lose their followers at the same time.  The perfect is the enemy of pretty-damned-good.

Instead, they should learn to spell nature with a lower case n, accept the fact that it’s never going to be as pristine as they might like, and make the best of it.  Introduce the changes (hopefully improvements) which a majority of people can live with, avoid the really stupid stuff like straightening the Kissimee River or draining the

Everglades, do your best to keep the corporate developers at bay, and build a consensus. By now, most of the general public is tired of hearing about the snail darter and the spotted owl; they want to find a compromise which will avoid mass extinctions and still let the loggers earn a living.

Consensus is not going to be possible on all the issues, so they’ll have to select a few issues very carefully and cleverly, nail their colors to the mast and fight the good fight but do that in a spirit of comity and not burn every bridge in the county.  Jenny Price seems to have a good message for us in her “Urban Denizen”.  I would summarize her theme as “Nature is where you are – make the best of it.”

Her five questions can help us to look at nature with a purpose.  Her first question – “What and where are the wild things?” is probably too global, but let’s zero in on a local application and say, “Salt Creek is marinas and warehouses, bridges and dams, garbage and pollution, but it is equally birds and fish, mangroves and palmettos, blue sky and flowing water.”

It’s too facile to focus too much on either side of this equation.  Both sides have their value or at least raison d’être.  The marinas and warehouses add value to the creek at the same time they lead to the pollution and garbage.  You can’t live in a house without tracking in mud occasionally and eventually wearing out the carpet.

That leads us to her question two, “How do people use nature as resources?”  Salt Creek’s marinas and warehouses are money-makers, and that means that they help pay the taxes which support our ecological efforts.  We can welcome commercial and industrial activity along the creek, while protecting it with appropriate regulations to limit dangerous effluents and other damage.  That doesn’t mean that the oil tank farms of the ‘20’s and 30’s were blameless – I’d bet that they leaked all sorts of nasty stuff into the creek now and then.  However, we’ve learned a few lessons since then, and can learn to stop that, too.

That allows us to get in our kayaks and paddle up the stream to see what we can find.  And what do we find?  Healthy mangrove thickets are providing a habitat for all sorts of fish and other marine life, even among the plastic cups and bottles.  There doesn’t appear to be much liquid pollution, although an occasional glimpse of petroleum’s rainbow sheen on the water tells us that we’re not in a pristine environment.  The herons, egrets and even ospreys soar overhead, along with the ubiquitous seagulls, confirming that there is food on the menu here in the creek.  And it’s all there for us to see if we’ll just get out and look.  This confirms to me that we’ve probably reached a sustainable balance; one which could be improved, certainly, but nonetheless sustainable.

Price’s third question asks how we transform the landscape we live in and how does nature act back?  In addition to all the examples above, perhaps the single most striking example for Salt Creek is the dam which turned Lake Maggiore into a freshwater lake in the 1930s. The first thing which happened was massive fish kills on both sides of the dam.  The salt water fish in the lake turned belly up, and the freshwater fish trapped downstream gasped and died.  Sea grass in the lake died and smothered marine life all around.  Later, when public works opened the dam to release excess fresh water in the lake, they killed mullet in the creek “… by the ton”.

“How do different people encounter nature differently?” asks Price in question 4.  There are so many examples.  Kayakers have a typical nature experience, but people having a beer along the rail at Fish Tales can also watch the birds.  The boaters may take a minute to look around as they putt-putt into their berths, and even the warehouse man may glance around while he smokes a cigarette on his break.  Who’s to say that any of these experiences is more valid than the others?  Which of these people is more virtuously attuned with nature?  An objective answer might surprise us.

Finally, Price wants to know how people imagine and understand nature.  This can cover the entire gamut, from enchantment at the flight of the egret to Totch Brown’s appreciation for egrets served as Chokoloskee chicken.  No matter how we may romanticize it, nature is still out there, red in tooth and claw.  Given a chance, the alligator will still eat your poodle, and the osprey will snatch the mullet out of the water for lunch.  And if the osprey has his perch on the top of your condo, your balcony will be covered with blood and fish guts.

If you can’t find nature in the city, you must be willfully blind.  Get out and enjoy it!

Just like any neighborhood in Anywhere USA, there are tales of strange people, obscure animals and ghost stories that people tell each other on Sunday afternoon BBQ’s or late night around a camp fire.  St. Petersburg is no different.  Sure we have ghost stories. Some of the world’s finest are connected to the Don Cesar or the Vinoy downtown — heck, we even had a monkey that made headlines internationally for his elusive antics.  Now we have another … well let’s just say it been around for awhile however due to the location and the nature of the beast the story is simply chalked up to be “Another Gator” story.

In the area of 11^th Street South on Fourth Street, right around Tony’s Meat Market and near the University of South Florida, there lurks a gator.  The stories seemed to have been around for about five to six years … some say more.  About a gator that has been report as being anywhere from 10-14 feet in length and it is said that this big ol’ bull is also missing his front right leg.  Some even say he is missing one eye.  Murmurs around the block say that BoG (Big ol’ Gator) eats dogs and chases children and watches the men as they come to hunt him, only to disappear in a wink of an eye when approached.  Now BoG is the name I have given this guy as everyone only calls him the big ol’ gator.

Sightings of BoG begin years ago, when he was a younger bull male looking for love in all the wrong places and ended up finding a home near Tony’s Meat Market.  He came and went with the seasons and was never hunted or caught by Florida Fish and Wildlife Services

front leg.  He has begun going after pets and people and now the locals are worried, will they or their loved ones be on the menu?

For three years now officials from the Fish and Wildlife Services have been trying to catch BoG but to no avail, he keeps slipping by them.  News stories from Fox News, Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times have run stories on this beast, pressuring the Florida Fish and Wildlife to issue a lethal force order on BoG last July. But no one can find him.

Many have seen him, some snapped pictures with their cell phones producing blurry images of a “gator” claiming “That’s Him!” Still no one has claimed BoG as dead.

With bridge work going on near the 11^th street canal, BoG has not been seen this year…yet.

An alligator will move away from the construction and disruption of his habitat.  To this day if you are near that canal or the Salt Creek people on foot will be quick to tell you: ”Watch out for the gator!”

Not to worry. I will be looking.

.  As the years went on he grew bigger and more aggressive. It wasn’t until recently that residents have noticed his handicap … his missing

A snake with fins slithered over the oysters—attached to the patches of boulders—along the seawall at Bayboro Hall. The bright red stripe along his back gave away his demeanor: cocky, arrogant, bully. Mullet jumped about above the water; the Red Snapper was on the prowl just below. I yanked my Pinfish toward the middle of the water … I sat quietly, patiently, and anticipated the jerk of the line. I knew it was just about to happen. I was going to catch that monster and be the envy of all in my class. Moments later, my professor summoned us away from our poles. I pleaded for one more minute. I spread my hands a foot and a half apart, showing him the size of my future prize. As he shook his head slowly from side to side, I drug my feet (and my pole) towards him along the seawall. After his lecture to the class and seeing the disappointment resonating on my face as I stared hopelessly back to the water, where my fish had got away, he asked, albeit in somewhat disbelief, if the snapper was really that big. Standing there with nothing but the small bait still swinging from my hook, I nodded that it was … at least in my head.

Four brave souls. They sauntered toward the water in pulsating daylight, wielding machetes, loppers, clippers, and a will to bring the thunder and leave their mark. They raised no eyebrows while brandishing sharp objects, walking across a modern college campus. The professor, who was in this gaggle of kindred spirits, raised no eyebrows either, even though a mentally-frazzled grad student he had just told to rewrite a paper was in this group that he was about to traverse to a secluded area with, sharp tools in tow. The faithful leader had nothing to fear though; these students were still blissfully reeling from a recent overnight class sailing trip, thus, the related kinship still saturated their collective-conscious.

The campus, an aesthetically-pleasing enclave nicknamed “The Jewel By The Bay,” had a beautiful landscape. Truth be told, however, the “Jewel” was somewhat of a cubic zirconium — natural wonders destroyed in order to install man’s landscaped version of  “natural beauty,” a campus landscaped almost exclusively with non-native plants.  Not to be outdone by the destructive irony that occurred in the building of their revered campus, these four brave gentleman were on a destructive quest to chop, cut, and hack a pathway through a forgotten waterway known as Salt Creek. One would think that an element of nature being forgotten would allow that element to remain in its pristine state. In reference to Salt Creek though, the forgotten nature, the nature in question, left it a neglected soup of litter, a haven for dilapidated boats that could potentially function as meth labs — something that had happened before on Salt Creek. This was a Nature Writing class, so all involved did not beat around the bush when it came to beating a path through bush. The four “Modern Magellans of Tampa Bay” paddled school-issued canoes through the mouth of the creek and went under “Thrill Hill,” a bridge aptly nicknamed by bird-loving motorists who wanted to channel their inner osprey and experience the gift of flight by crossing the hump of the bridge with such excessive speed that they temporarily soared.

After slinking their way through the creek, the four approached some travel-impeding foliage, and began to cut a pathway conducive to canoeing. Some foliage was chopped methodically, but other foliage was chopped vindictively, such as Brazilian Pepper, an invasive species in Florida, even when it isn’t blocking aquatic thoroughfares. They braced their canoes as best they could, and haphazardly unleashed a flotilla of fury on everything that blocked their egress, although they had agreed on a policy of only chopping down what was necessary to free-up areas that had been blocked. This mission was an instance of “urbaniture” where man made a compromise with nature, the implicit agreement being that these men would only destroy the plants to a degree that would make the creek navigable, thus, absent of situations requiring a generous slathering of Neosporin, even though said remedy was easily-obtainable at the new Dollar General, a mere hacksaw’s throw from the creek. They were only trying to clear a pathway, not attempting to establish dominance over nature. This was maintenance to allow functionality, not maintenance to end all future maintenance, which was somewhat considerate of nature, and fed into man’s desire to never do more work than necessary.

As they continued to clear what was blocking their path, another human approached. This particular gentleman had been fishing not too far up the creek. He sidled-up to the makeshift trailblazer crew and saw them working diligently, yet still cautiously enough not to capsize. He exclaimed “Hey! I don’t know if ya’ll are supposed to be cutting that!” One of the members of the group mumbled to his cohort “Well, how about you come back when you know for sure … douchelord?” After that, the protector of the nuisance foliage took in the scene for about twenty-six awkward seconds, then departed from whence he came. Of course, being advocates for nature themselves, the four men understood that the gentleman’s intent was to ensure that no destructive activities occurred on the creek. On the other hand though, if he wanted to protect the creek, perhaps cleaning-up some of the copious amounts of litter in and around the creek would have been more productive, especially considering that the litter pollutes the water that he catches fish out of  presumably for consumption.

Fittingly enough, the four gentleman clearing the creek, were doing so with plans of returning to clean-up this exact litter. One thing about the nature of man, is that his desire to act as an authority often overlooks practicality and what is in his best interests. In this case, the scolder in question neglects to do creek improvements which could be directly beneficial by providing cleaner water for the fish that he catches. His version of creek improvement was one where he granted himself the opportunity to exact verbal justice on those he saw as wrongdoers who were actually a motley band of volunteers looking to improve the water that he enjoyed. This underscores man’s need to roost in points-of-intrigue in nature to reset his brain … because the contradictory nature of our thought patterns as social animals often lacks coherence, and left unchecked, our modern ways of thinking can amount to a contradictory and counterproductive shitstorm. The gentleman in question opted-out of using Salt Creek to reset his spirit, in favor of reprimanding others when he didn’t know their intent.

After having to duck in order to slither under a bridge that looked like it was infested with speckled neglect and instant-lockjaw juice, “The Chop Mafia” ended-up at Bartlett Park, a city park in a low-rent neighborhood, where the creek was almost treated as an inconvenience that disallowed the building of more tennis courts. However, there is a dock jutting into the creek and a park bench facing the creek for those who would like to watch the mullet jump and witness the scenic tide of Natty Light cans rolling-in. The four bushwhackers observed the scene and hoped that their work of clearing a pathway for canoe and kayak access, would one day lead the city to frame the creek as more of an asset than a nuisance.

After soaking-up the  awesomeness of the moment and some proverbial self-gladhanding for “accomplishing exactly what they had set-out to do,” The Pickaxe Platoon ventured back through the path they had just cleared and basked in satisfaction. At one point, vehicles were passing on both sides as the foliage on the creek’s shore concealed them from the roadway. People passed by on their daily routines, totally unaware of the creek and the altruistic destruction that had just occurred mere feet from where they traveled. The birds roosting in the trees did not seem baffled by The Pathclear Posse in the least; they almost seemed relieved to no longer have to worry about when humans would discover this rare enclave. They could do what animals are always forced to do, and learn to live with man’s whims, instead of trying to hold onto the elusive “undiscovered untouched.”  This was “The day the foliage died,” but only to a degree that was needed. It was an example of man and nature working clumsily together in compromise, where all parties got at least some consideration. Whether the creek will become pristine through due-diligence and the touch of the right humans, or if it will be left alone to have what’s left of its pristine nature befouled remains to be seen, but on this particular day, Salt Creek got its “hair did” and was treated as the prettiest girl at the dance.