![]() ![]() It was as if the world were pregnant, and this was her womb. Every ounce of energy turned to procreation. Brown pelicans, wingspans as wide as dinner tables, banked above the rookery. ![]() The white laughing gulls were crowned with onyx, their wings gray stoles edged in black. A jury of black skimmers rose from the thicket of willets and flew to an exposure of sand farther east. Two or three ruddy turnstones scooted about, their shoulders gleaming like polished mahogany. On the bay side, hundreds of willets, more than I’d ever seen or imagined to see, clustered so tightly that they appeared to be a single flat animal that occasionally stretched one of its thousand wings.Īcross shallows where tidewater flowed, a marbled godwit furiously probed wet sand. One clear Saturday twenty-five years ago, my friend, the oceanographer Jeff Chanton, took his family and mine motorboating out to a long crust of sandbar extending from a barrier island. Back then, all those years ago, I saw the crazy fecundity of Apalachicola Bay with my own eyes. Wild food, healthy food, comes from functional places, from fertile fields and fertile forests and fertile oceans. ![]() We forget sometimes that food comes from places. Then came the earthy, fleshy, volcanic madcap, followed by an aftertaste of the salt sea. The waiter brought lemons and crackers, horseradish and hot sauce. I watched gulls circle, listened to fish crows, felt the evening sun on my forearms. I remember a dozen glistening oysters nestled in their half shells, delivered to our table after a day at the beach, while I relaxed with friends in the salty air. The Panhandle coast was famous for its blindingly white beaches, its history of land preservation, and, more than anything, its mother lode of oysters. The coast was Tallahassee’s playground, and I spent long, blistering days belly-surfing in the waves. I had enrolled at Florida State University, hoping to study with a poet whose work I admired. For millennia this estuary was one of the most productive in the northern hemisphere. Vincent, which form a cupped and protective hand. Rich with life, the bay is almost perfectly shielded from the vagaries of the ocean by two barrier islands, St. Wide and full of life, micro and macro, the Apalachicola River gathers the wildness of Apalachicola National Forest and rolls past the seaside village that bears its name to deliver nutrients to the bay.Īpalachicola Bay is legendary. It is joined by the Flint at Lake Seminole, pours through the Woodruff Dam, and emerges as the Apalachicola. This watershed starts in the Blue Ridge foothills as the Chattahoochee and flows south, dividing Georgia and Alabama. On the Panhandle coast of Florida, the so-called “Forgotten Coast” because it’s the least developed in the state, an enormous sedimentary river meets the ocean. ![]()
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