Forget the glass – worry about the water

When Guy Marwick, Marion County environmental activist, gets up in the morning he doesn’t stop to wonder if the glass of water on the kitchen table is half full or half empty.
Nope. Not Guy, It could go either way. Instead he worries about the future of the liquid stuff inside the glass.
The water in the glass comes from underground, gurgling through the Florida Aquifer then bubbling up into Silver Springs, Rainbow Springs, two of 700 springs dotted like scattered diamonds around Florida.
“All 700 springs in Florida are in trouble,” said Guy, speaking during the legislative/media dinner at Silver Springs attraction on Friday, September 21, 2007, part of the sixth annual Marion County Springs Festival.
He ticked off the troubles:
1. Nutrients from fertilizers on yards & golf courses. That is why water quality in springs is down. He remembers seeing reflections of light on the bottom of Silver Springs, now the bottom is covered with algae.
2. Development. Don’t’ feel left out, that includes all of us. We are all part of the problem, busy developing and living in the recharge areas near springs. Ninety percent of all sandhill community ecosystems in Florida are already developed, reducing recharge areas considerably. What is a recharge area? The sandy soil that absorbs rainwater filters it like cheesecloth, reducing toxins before gravity pulls the water down into the Floridan Aquifer.
3. Problems with over pumping of the Aquifer. “Sometimes people just don’t get it, ” says Guy, and he gives a shocking, non-getting-it statistic – 50 percent of home water use is for watering our lawns. “That is unacceptable,” Guy says. He is right. What are we thinking? That’s drinking water on the lawn. Time to buy native, drought-resistant plants. Turn off the irrigations system. “My lawn looks really nice when it rains,” Guy says. Right on. Work with Mother Nature.
4. The good news is that water use in the United State is down since 1975, that is every place except Florida, the worst state in the United States for water use.
5. Dredging of rivers, not a biggie, but still a concern.
6. Too many motorboats.
7. Overuse, over loving of springs, like Silver Glen Springs in Ocala National Forest, where there are so many boats on weekend they raft to each other for almost a mile.
8. Dams, like Rodman Dam, blocking flow.
9. Consumptive use permits given ever so freely. “We are seeing growth we can’t support,” Guy says. But then again, no one will put their head on the chopping block and say – this is it, the number of people Florida can support without turning into a desert.
“We need concurrency,” Guy says. “We can’t build houses without roads, how about water?”
Guy talks of going to meetings held by St. Johns River Water Management District where utilities from around the region were asked to tell St. Johns how much water they wanted and where they wanted it delivered so St. Johns could tell them the cost.
Much of that water will be sucked out of the Ocklawaha River. Guy doesn’t think that is acceptable and he is not alone.
What to do? Conserve, build more desal plants (there are already 120 desal plants in Florida, most doing brackish water, did you know that?)
“We need legislation, education, participation, involvement and sometimes litigation,” says Guy.
And here you thought it was a simple test – choose the glass half full or half empty.
Forget the glass. Go with Guy. Worry about the water.

Lucy Beebe Tobias is a freelance writer and photographer in Ocala, Florida. Her book 50 Great Walks in Florida is available for pre-order at www.upf.com

Pre-order 50 Great Walks in Florida

My goodness,what a blessing. Here’s the overview and review of my upcoming travel guide. Enjoy. You can pre-order the book at www.amazon.com or www.upf.com

Lighthouse at St. Augustine still a beacon

ST. AUGUSTINE – Lighthouses have a romance all their own. They are strong silent beacons rising in solitary splendor above the shoreline. The towers had keepers, rugged individuals and their families who lived right next-door and devoted their lives to making sure sailors at sea had a beacon.

Lighthouses bear the brunt of storms and survive but then, in true tragic romance fashion, they often doomed by being located on the cutting edge of coastal erosion.

Florida, surrounded by water on three sides, has 33 lighthouses. A good place to start your lighthouse journey is the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum.

In 1565 the Spanish settled in St. Augustine. By the end of the 16th century a watchtower was built. On this Spanish watchtower foundation a new tower was built out of coquina rock and first lighted in 1824. Called the St. Augustine Light Station it was the first lighthouse in Florida.

Erosion threatened to topple the tower. A new one, taller and 600 yards further inland, was commissioned. The architect was Paul Pelz, who later designed the Library of Congress.

Finished in 1874, the barber-striped lighthouse is built to last. All materials came by ship. It is constructed with Alabama brick, Philadelphia iron and Georgia granite. The lamp was lit on October 15, 1874. Two years later a two-story brick house, divided in two for two lighthouse keepers and their families, was completed. The keeper’s quarters are a museum today.

The new lighthouse arrived just in the nick of time. During a storm in 1880, the old fell into the sea. The ruins lie underwater in St. Augustine Inlet.

There are 219 steps to the top of the St. Augustine Lighthouse. The view from the top looks over St. Augustine Inlet and the ancient city of St. Augustine. You can buy a ticket for climbing the tower and seeing the museum or opt for the museum alone and forget counting all those stairs. Children must be at least 44 inches tall to be able to climb the tower.

The barber-striped lighthouse rises 165 feet above sea level. Getting to the top is the equivalent of climbing up the stairs of a fourteen-story building.

Visitors may be tempted to look for an elevator button on the ground floor. Dream on. There is no elevator button in this or any other lighthouse. Generations of lighthouse keepers must have wished for elevators. In fact, maybe they had fantasies about sprouting wings to fly to the top every day. The stairs wind up a spiral that gets narrower towards the top. Every landing has windows. Admire the view and catch your breath at the same time.

As you climb, think of the keeper’s jobs – going up and down all those stairs several times a night, bringing fuel to keep the light in the tower burning bright.

To make sure you get the point that this was not a cushy job – a bucket the lighthouse keeper had to fill with fuel is in a stand at St. Augustine lighthouse. The first fuel they used was lard oil, replaced later by kerosene.Visitors are asked to pick up the empty bucket. It weights 30 pounds empty. Now think about it full.

A sign asks what you would do to make it easier carrying that fuel up the stairs. I looked up the spiraling staircase and wondered about setting the heavy bucket down on each step. Not an efficient idea. Surely there has to be a better way.

Electricity didn’t arrive until 1936. It must have felt like such a luxury to flip a switch on the ground floor to light the light instead of carrying fuel up 219 steps.

For those who do the climb the gift shop sells a certificate (the cost is .94 cents) saying that you have done the deed and are entitled to all the privileges that go with such an accomplishment.

Every lighthouse has a unique flash pattern signature, or nightmark. St. Augustine’s pattern is a 30-second fixed flash. For mariners traveling during the day there is a daymark – the building’s black and white strips with a red lantern. From the night and day marks, mariners can establish their location.

Visitors can see the beautiful handcrafted Fresnel lens that was first used in the lighthouse. It is located in the museum.

From 1876 to 1955 the St. Augustine Lighthouse had keepers. The last one resigned in 1955 when the light was automated. Abandoned for a decade or more, vandals and arson took its toll on the lighthouse station. The Junior Service League of St. Augustine began a massive restoration in 1980 and the results are impressive.

The museum, housed in the brick two-story building that was home to the keepers, shows how keepers and their families lived and displays historical events including the use of this coastal area to train soldiers in World War II. The chase for German submarines offshore is recorded. A rotating exhibit shows artifacts found in shipwrecks. The remains of almost 300 ships, sunk offshore from 1572 to 1999, lie in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

On full moon nights the lighthouse has a special event called “Sunset Moonrise”. Cost is $23 for non members and includes a champagne toast atop the tower. The next event is July 29 from 7:45 p.m. to 9 p.m. To find out more, contact Pam at (904) 829-0745.

Two lighthouse books worth mentioning:
“Florida Lighthouses” by Kevin McCarthy, University of Florida Press, 1990 and “Florida Lighthouse Trail”, Thomas W. Taylor, editor for the Florida Lighthouse Association, Pineapple Press, 2001.

This story appeared in the July 2007 issue of The Observer. Lucy Beebe Tobias is a writer, photographer and artist in Ocala, Florida. Her book, 50 Great Walks in Florida, is now available for pre-order at www.amazon.com

To know more
What: St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum
Where: 81 Lighthouse Avenue, St. Augustine, Fl. 32080
Phone: (904) 829-0745
Web site: www.staugustineligihthouse.com
Admission: If climbing the tower and doing the museum, admission is $8 adults, seniors 60+ costs $7, children 6-11 pay $6. Visiting the museum only costs $6 adults, $5 seniors and $4 for ages 6-11
Getting there: Go through St. Augustine on A1A, cross the Bridge of Lions. Once on Anastasia Island, turn left onto Lighthouse Avenue (across from the Alligator Farm)
Nearby: Anastasia State Park, Alligator Farm and historic St. Augustine

Picking up the trash

We’re standing on a dirt road in Ocala National Forest, Marion County, Florida. Volunteers have turned out on a Saturday morning for a forest cleanup. None of us have ever met before. Retired folks, Boy Scout troops, men and women who work all week and came here on their day off and a few families complete with kids.

One of those kids is Clay. It is his birthday. Clay is ten years old today. He wanted to come do this thing and so his mom brought him to the cleanup. Way to go Clay! A forest ranger tells Clay he gets to be the keeper of the bags and gives him a full box of black lawn bags to hand out on the job site. It is only right. Clay is the birthday boy.

Off we go in a car caravan led by a forest ranger. Turning onto a dirt road deep in the forest we all get out. For a few moments no one says a word. We just stand there. We’d been warned it was going to be ugly. No one had any idea how ugly.

Both sides of the road are littered with household garbage, construction debris, furniture, car parts and tires, lots of tires. Crews working during the week have already dragged furniture out of the woods to be picked up by front-end loaders arriving today. But there is much debris tangled in the bushes and lying on the ground. That’s our job. We get to pick it up one piece at a time. The Forest Service has issued thick work gloves and garbage bags.

Why, I ask those around me as we bend to our task, do people throw trash in the woods?
“Lazy,” says one volunteer who lives in the forest. I believe he is right. That is part of it. They just turn onto this dirt road and fling away. A lot of the household garbage could be put in the county recycling center for free. There is a center nearby.
“Too cheap.” This comes from a man who moved down to Florida from Pennsylvania. “All over America people are dumping trash in the woods,” he says. “They don’t want to pay garbage pickup or landfill rates.”
There are people up in Pennsylvania dumping trash in the woods? For some reason this surprises me.
“Yep, every chance they get,” he replies.
We find everything. Shirts. Pants. Broken dolls, bleach bottles, phone books so old they pages are disintegrating. Beer bottles, tons of beer bottles. Fast food wrappers.

“This is everyday household stuff,” says one woman. And I know what she is thinking. We put this trash out at the curb in town. It gets taken away. There are county dumpsters for those who have no pickup to bring their trash. How hard can it be to go to the dump?
Apparently pretty hard.

Two men start stacking tires near the road. A coach whip snake is under one tire. We’ve been warned about snakes. This one can’t wait to get away from us. And it is harmless.
The sun beats down. Everyone is hot and thirsty.

We stumble over a pile of small blue tiles, many of them broken. All are so embedded in the ground we have to pry them out. Nearby lies construction lumber, the grille of a car, and pieces of wire. Will it never end?

Part of me wonders if the dumpers aren’t sitting at home laughing. Think of all those bleeding heart liberals out there cleaning up our trash!

Well, I’ve got news for you. I didn’t see a bleeding heart liberal anywhere. I saw moms and dads, Boy Scouts, working people, retirees and oh yes, Clay. He could have been at the mall ordering ice cream. Instead he was in the woods handing out garbage bags and helping his mom fill hers.

What was the yuckiest thing he saw?
“I picked up a piece of foam and there was a huge cockroach underneath.”

Yuk. An even bigger cockroach was the person who committed the violent act of throwing that foam in the woods.

It doesn’t make me feel better to have been part of the cleanup. It just makes me sad.
Why throw stuff in the woods? I still don’t understand why it happens. And even more important: How do we turn this around so NO ONE would consider committing such an act of desecration EVER AGAIN?

Answers, anyone?

Lucy Beebe Tobias is a freelance writer, photographer and artist in Ocala, Florida. ©2007 Lucy Beebe Tobias. All rights reserved.

Give something of yourself to your mom

Mary Hunt writes about money matters. Her nationally syndicated column before Mother’s Day combined money matter with what really matters. Florists, she told her readers, will make a good third of their annual income on Mother’s Day. Restaurants do very well indeed. It is a huge helping for them. Oh yes, it is a big spending holiday.

But Hunt had a radical idea – forget the flowers, pass on dinner. Instead do something personal on Mother’s Day. Write a letter, Make a cake or a card from scratch. In other words, give a piece of yourself back to your Mom. She’ll love you for it.

I thought Hunt was onto something.

And so it came to pass that I looked up the times for masses at a nearby Catholic church. Going to mass would make my mom happy. She believed in church on Sunday and fish on Fridays. She blessed herself with holy water every time she went inside a church and her rosary beads where worn from use. The blessed virgin was her favorite and she prayed to her a lot. Mom was righteous about regular confession and giving up anything you really liked for Lent. That last one never really appealed to me.

Mom wouldn’t think of stepping inside church doors without a hat or veil, gloves on both hands and her shoes polished. Stockings would have perfectly straight lines up the back and of course she wore Sunday best clothes.

Her plans for me as I was growing up included finding a good Catholic boy. She looked for favorable candidates and made suggestions. Sometimes she even invited them to dinner. It drove me nuts.

In her mind there was a natural progression from finding the right one, getting me married and having grandchildren. In my mind there was no reason to hurry things. There was a world to see and explore.

Mom did not live to complete her mission. She died three days after Christmas the year I was a senior in college. I graduated, married that catholic boy and had three children. They’ve grown up now and have children of their own.

Although I don’t go to a Catholic church any more, mass seemed like the perfect way to honor my mother. It would certainly make her happy to know I was inside a catholic church. On Mother’s Day I showed up ten minutes before a 10 a.m. service. Pulling into the parking lot, it didn’t take a genius to figure out something didn’t compute. There were five cars in the parking lot. It turns out that mass is at 11 a.m. someone forgot to upgrade the church Web site.

Wandering through the big double doors I saw lovely stained glass windows. Off to one side I found a sweet statue of the Blessed Virgin and a number of candles at her feet. Lighting a candle for my mom, I sat down nearby and told her all about the grandchildren and granddaughter she never met. They would have loved her. And I told her I missed her still.

I thanked her for the many times she was my best friend as well as my mom and asked forgiveness for those times when I didn’t take her advice to heart, especially in my teenage years. Let’s just say I was a trying child who had her own ideas about future flight plans and that’s putting it mildly.

Getting ready to leave, I saw a boy about 12 years old going towards the lectern. His mom stood in the aisle. In a sure, firm voice he said his name and that he was the lector for today. Ah, practicing for the 11 a.m. service. I stood still and listened. His mom nodded her approval, encouraging him with her full attention and smiles.

It was déjà vu.

The torch of unconditional love passes from hand to hand. Another generation is growing up, testing its wings and trying out new things. Mom is right there, encouraging, loving and helping the fledgling fledge.

Happy Mother’s Day, mom. I’ll try to make it to mass on time next year. Honest.

Lucy Beebe Tobias is a freelance writer, photographer and artist in Ocala, Florida. ©2007 Lucy Beebe Tobias