To my right glowed the city skyline of Jacksonville. The detour was a long way out of the way, and it’d cost me a day’s time, but Fingers would have wanted to see it. Taste the water one last time. Black Creek is some of the prettiest and purest water in Northeast Florida. He used to make me bring him here, and when we’d pass under the Black Creek Bridge, he’d walk to the bow, tie both bow lines behind his back, and then give me his best Titanic impression. Every time. Without fail. Then we’d idle upriver, tie up beneath some giant cypress tree, and he’d pop the cork on some new wine. The earth in a bottle.
I turned right. Or, as a boat captain might say, “hard to starboard.” As a city, Jacksonville, or Cowford as it was once known, grew up on opposite banks of the same river as men brought their cows to ford at a narrowing of the river. As it grew in population, it spread out from its epicenter and became a city of bridges. While most rivers run south, the St. Johns River is an anomaly of geography and runs north—as do the Red River, the Nile, and a couple of big rivers in Russia. I ran upriver, passing beneath seven ginormous bridges of various colors and materials, including one aggravating railroad trestle, and eventually crossed the big water of the St. Johns where, at times, the breadth of the river spans nearly three miles.
Throughout her history, the state of Florida has been home to some great writers, including some Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners. Judy Blume, Brad Meltzer, Stuart Woods, Elmore Leonard, James Patterson, Mary Kay Andrews, Carl Hiaasen, Jack Kerouac, and Stephen King. Then there are the giants: Madeleine L’Engle, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Smith, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Preceding all of them was the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, who put a human face on slavery with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Maybe there’s something in the water.
South of the Buckman Bridge, the water is wide. Three miles or more in some places. Off my port side, in a little hamlet called Mandarin, Harriet Beecher Stowe lived seventeen years on a thirty-acre orange grove where the locals treated her like royalty. Prior to the Civil War, tourists rode paddleboats up this very stretch of water to the Ocklawaha River, and finally into the Silver River, which led them to Silver Springs State Park—later to be made famous by photographer Bruce Mozert. The water was so clear they developed glass-bottom boats through which they could view the “mermaids.” The park became known as Florida’s Grand Canyon and was unparalleled in popularity until a man named Walt introduced a mouse named Mickey just outside of Orlando.
Fingers loved the history. Soaked it up. He read and reread their books, took me in this very boat to Silver Springs and pointed to the shoreline. “Mrs. Stowe lived right there.” But one of his favorite spots was a little creek known to few.
South of Jacksonville, I throttled down at the mouth, passed under my eighth bridge, and entered Black Creek. Like the Suwannee River, St. Mary’s, or Satilla, Black Creek is dark water—but that doesn’t mean it’s bad water. It’s actually very good water. It derives its color from the tannic acid generated by decomposing organic matter such as leaves. In short, the water looks like strong iced tea. At the mouth, Black Creek drops from six or eight feet deep down to over forty. Back when fresh water supplies were transported in barrels, the captains of seagoing vessels favored Black Creek for its purity and because the tannic acid kept the water fresh longer. They would sail up the St. Johns and into Black Creek, hit depths of forty-plus feet, and then use ballast stones to sink their barrels to the bottom where the water was especially good.
Some even claimed it tasted sweet.
I ran up the creek as far as it would let us, letting Fingers taste the air and water from inside his orange box. When the creek narrowed, two bald eagles descended out of the trees above us and then lifted on the updraft. Maybe they’d come to say goodbye. I ate lunch beneath a rope swing where Fingers liked to swim, opened a bottle of his wine, poured two glasses, and drank them both—not wanting to let his go to waste. I swam, napped lazily, and then idled my way back to the mouth.
When the depth finder read forty-three feet, I anchored, grabbed an empty milk jug with the top screwed on tight, and took a Peter Pan off the bow. I followed the bow line down, pressurizing my ears twice and pulling the jug with me. When I reached somewhere between thirty and forty feet deep, I screwed off the top and let the jug fill completely, then screwed back on the lid and swam to the surface where I took one sip and then stowed the jug inside the head. I’d seen Fingers do the same thing a dozen times. Every time he’d sip, swallow, and swear the water tasted sweet.
I returned through Jacksonville at dusk, the sun setting over my shoulder. I’d started to think about a protected shoreline where I could anchor for the night. When I reached the Jacksonville landing, I noticed something swimming in the water. Something not a fish. I pulled up alongside to find a Labrador retriever making his way downriver. And when I say downriver, I don’t mean he was favoring one shoreline or the other. He wasn’t trying to make it to shore. He was trying to catch a boat long since gone. I cut the engine and came alongside, but he made no attempt to climb in. He just kept swimming.
“You all right, boy?”
The dog barely noticed me. I lifted him from the water and set him inside the boat, where he didn’t even take the time to shake. Finding himself no longer swimming, he immediately ran to the bow and stood sentinel-like, looking and listening downriver. He had no collar and no markings. Just a beautiful, almost white Labrador. From the looks of him, he was pretty fit. Teeth and strength of a young dog. I guessed him to be somewhere between two and three. I looked for any sign of a boat or somebody screaming some dog’s name, but we were alone.
I couldn’t very well throw him back in, and I figured if someone was looking for him, they’d have a much better chance of spotting him up there versus submerged in the water. Plus, we were headed the direction he’d been swimming. If we weren’t, he never would’ve gotten in the boat. His beautiful color and regal lines, mixed with his unwavering commitment to his lookout vigil—not to mention the bright-orange box tied beneath his legs—meant if someone was looking for a dog, we’d be tough to miss.
When I took him to shore and set him on the Riverwalk, he simply ran along the shoreline downriver until something prohibited him from running any farther—at which point he launched himself into the river and started swimming again. After doing this three times, I pulled him up in the boat and told him to sit. Surprisingly, he did.
“Look, I can’t very well leave you in the water. You’ll drown.”
No response.
I pointed to the bank. “You won’t stay onshore, and I can’t follow along behind you while you swim to the ocean and die.”
Still no response.
“Do you have any suggestions?”
He looked to the bow, then back to me, but didn’t move. Then he lifted his ears and tilted his head sideways.
I pointed to the bow. “Okay, but there are a couple of rules.” He returned to the bow, pointing his butt in my direction. “No chewing on anything”—I pointed again—“especially that box beneath you, and absolutely no peeing in this boat. If you gotta go either one or two, you take it over the side.”
If I was getting through to him, he made no admission.