Chapter fifteen
Shortly after buying this acreage, they had bought a house on the Crystal River. They had not closed on the house on the river when they decided to do some exploring. They hadn’t seen what was in the jungle area of their property and were getting curious.
One morning while having their usual coffee down by the docks, Rick said, “Let’s put on our boots and jeans and go hiking in the jungle.”
“I don’t know Rick, I’ve never been in a large woods, let alone a jungle and I hear they have poisonous snakes in Florida.”
“Well that settles it, were going. This is the first thing I’ve known of that you haven’t already done.”
“What about the snakes?”
“As far as I know, they have snakes everywhere, besides we’ll wear our boots, and I’ll take my pistol.”
They called this part of their property the jungle, only because it looked to them like something out of a Tarzan movie. Although they didn’t know it, many of the Tarzan movies had been filmed a short distance from their property at Silver Springs, near Ocala.
They had been fighting their way through brush and vines for an hour when they came to a clearing and sat down to rest. They were soaking wet with sweat and Rick was starting to rethink the wisdom of this trek. The vines were so thick and tangled in places that you had to backtrack to find an alternate route. Even the palms were often growing so close together that all you could do is go around them.
After they caught their breath and started looking around Rick said, “This isn’t a clearing, it’s a road.”
“It doesn’t look like any road I’ve ever seen.”
“I grant you it hasn’t been used in a long time, but it’s a road. I doubt if it has been used in twenty years, but it is a road and roads always lead to something so lets see where it goes, at least the walking will be easier.”
Rick’s misunderstanding of how fast things grow in Florida led him to miss how recently the road had been used by a good ten years.
They followed the path and came to a small one-bedroom house set beside a very large spring or series of springs that fed a small river. The cottage wasn’t locked, and they figured it was theirs anyway so they went inside. The interior was a disaster. It looked like teenagers had used it for many years as a combination party house and love nest.
It consisted of a medium sized living area with a large opening on one side to a kitchen. On the backside of the living room was a door that led to a large bedroom. One side of the bedroom consisted of glass sliders that opened on to a veranda over looking the spring. There was a wide covered porch across the front of what they soon came to think of as the cabin. The porch faced the gulf about a thousand feet to the west. Due to the jungle however, the only view from the porch was trees and a portion of the river. The entire interior was strewn with trash including numerous condoms. Rick said, “It’s nice to see the kids are practicing safe sex.”
Sarah said, “Yuck.” Then she said, “Rick it’s perfect.”
“Well, I don’t think I’d go that far. It needs a lot of work and all of the furniture needs to be burned. God only knows what’s living in it and I wouldn’t let Toby sleep on that bed. The house is wood frame. It might have termites.”
“Rick stop being such a killjoy, I love it. Look at the view of the spring and river. If they knew this was here they would have charged you another hundred thousand.”
“You may be right. I would certainly think the man that sold it would have known. I wonder how the kids got in here. They sure didn’t come in the way we did. Let’s go look around.”
They followed the stream to the gulf about a thousand feet from the cottage. It wasn’t easy walking as the jungle grew up to the edge of the river and was extremely over grown. It took them an hour to get to the gulf and back.
“Well this is how they got in. It looks like you could run a small boat up to the cottage without any trouble at all. Were going to have to post the property and I’ll see if I can rig some kind of barrier across the river with a lock on it.”
The original rancher had built the cabin for his wife as a birthday gift. She had discovered the spring on one of her nature hikes, and had fallen in love with it. The cabin had been built forty years ago, but hadn’t been used since before the rancher’s wife died ten years ago. The ranchers wife had been a amateur artist and love painting the spring and surrounding area. About a year after the woman died, a curious teenager ran his boat up the river and he too fell in love with it albeit for a different reason. It was evident even then that the cabin wasn’t in use, of course that soon changed once the young explorer spread the word.
The teen population couldn’t have dreamed of a better place to party. It was so isolated that they could not possibly make enough noise to give themselves away. It soon became not only the favorite party spot, but also the preferred lover’s lane. When the young man discovered the cabin, the road from the cabin to the ranch house was already becoming overgrown and it wasn’t long before it would be unusable.
Palms and citrus trees surrounded the cottage. Even with the beer cans, bottles, assorted snack wrappers and unidentifiable trash, it was obvious that this had once been a well-landscaped yard. It was only a little over three two hundred feet into the jungle from the cleared pasture land but was completely hidden until you were right on top of it. The spring was about thirty feet wide and the stream it fed was only slightly narrower.
Once they got back to the cabin, they were even more soaked with sweat than they had been, if that’s possible. They stripped down to take a dip in the spring to wash off the sweat. They hung up their sweaty clothes to dry while they cooled off in the spring.
They walked over to the spring and Sarah let out a whoop. There were four manatees swimming in the pool.
The spring and stream were so clear that the stream appeared to be about two feet deep but in reality was more than ten feet deep. The pool around the spring sloped off fast from a few inches at the edge. Although the pool surrounding spring also appeared very shallow, it was in excess of forty feet deep and the crevice that the flow spang from was much deeper than that. There was a limestone ledge about four feet wide on one side approximately three feet under the surface. They later discovered that this made a perfect spot for bathing, or just wading and watching the manatee. They soon learned that manatees are not afraid of people. Having no natural enemies has made them seem almost tame and Sarah soon discovered the joy of swimming with them and feeding them lettuce.
Neither of them had seen anything like this and considered it unique although in reality the area surrounding Kings Bay had many such springs. The crystal river was fed by springs much like this one, as were many of the canals in the area. It was the reason for the wintertime manatee population that brought most of the tourist trade to the area.
“Rick if we hadn’t already bought the place on the river I would say we should move in here.”
“I was thinking the same thing. Maybe some day we will, but for right now we have a very nice place and it would take a lot of time and money to make this spot habitable.
I think for now I would like to keep this place our little secret. If we use the stream as our main access to the cabin so that we don’t create a road, it’s unlikely that anyone would stumble across it. I am going to post the entire property for hunting and trespassing as soon as I can. That should keep most honest people out.”
The first thing Rick did was build a floating gate across the stream, about a hundred feet from the gulf with a padlock and a no trespassing signs to keep out the kids. He also posted no trespassing signs across the portion of their property that fronted on the gulf. He then set about cleaning up the yard and flowerbeds but soon decided it would take more time and work than he wanted to expend.
The yard alone must have contained hundreds of discarded beer cans and bottles, besides other trash. He discussed it with Sarah and then called José and talked to him about the problem. José felt so indebted to them that he put his business in Tallahassee on hold and dropped everything to come and help them. He wound up moving into the cabin for over a month. In that time, he not only painted the cabin inside and out, but also got the yard looking good and cleaned out the flower and shrubbery beds. He also built a nice little dock on the edge of the spring.
While José was working on the cabin and grounds, Rick and Sarah cleaned out the spring. Over the years, the kids had thrown so much trash in the spring that the bottom resembled a farm dump. Sarah and Rick took lessons from one of the many dive shops in Crystal River, bought equipment and spent hours diving e spring until it was pristine.
José had no sooner finished the painting than Sarah started moving furniture in. They floated many things in on their deck boat, but most of the building supplies, furniture and larger items were trucked in by José. Rick seemed almost paranoid about not creating a discernable drive to the cottage. He had instructed José to use a different route across the pasture every time he came to the cabin to avoid creating a road.