Mornin’ Hikers!

For those of you following the blog – I slept like a baby.  And this despite the grim, tortured eyes staring out from the portraits that hang on the wall above my bed.

And what of my bed?  It is an original fixture of this cabin, built by Henry Hamilton Wells a century and half ago.  It’s “box springs” are made of rope, strung beneath the mattress in a checkerboard fashion.  Firmness is adjusted by tightening or loosening the rope. 

The rope supports a mattress stuffed with horse hair.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, was wasted back in the earliest days of Florida’s pioneers.  The big surprise is that this bed is more comfortable than that upon which I sleep at home.  The expression “sleep tight” comes from these very beds.  Tightened ropes beneath the mattress keeps one from rolling to the middle.

Next to the bed is a fireplace with a huge hearth.  I build a fire in it an hour or so before I plan to sleep.  It does a nice job of warming the room. Next to the hearth is window which opens on to a wood scaffold.  It is upon this that the firewood to feed the hearth is stacked.  Open the window and grab some split logs for the fire, easy as can be.  This arrangement also meant that the Wells family didn’t have to go outside for wood at night, a good thing, given the dangers that once lurked in these woods.

There is a coffin three feet from where I lay my head. It sits upon a sandbox, rough hewn box designed to keep the sand from filling the freshly dug grave until the coffin is interred. These were built by a 92 year-old man by the name of Preston Nichols who once served as the town’s coffin maker. It is upholstered in white linen.  Coffins were built from the straightest of boards.  In fact, the sawmill operator would take his finest boards and stash them up in the loft above the sawmill to season up - nothing but the best for the dearly departed.

Back in the day, there was no need for a funeral director.  The deceased where washed and laid out in the home.  It was here that friends would visit and share memories.  They’d bring with them food to tie the family over until they were back on their feet.  Families depended on each other back in those days, and the whole community mourned the loss of one of their own.  The mourning was not only for the lost life, but also for the loss of that individual’s contribution to the well-being of the community.  So important was every pair of hands.

For warmth, my bed has three quilts.  Quilts and their making is an art born of necessity.  When clothes finally wore out, they were not thrown out.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, was ever thrown out.  Pioneers were our first recyclers. 

No, the best of these tattered clothing was sewn in to quilts.  The worst of it was twisted and made into rugs.  As a guest of the long-dead Wells family, I sleep beneath those quilts, and step out of my boots on those rugs.  I am as grateful for their warmth as they must have been a century ago. 

Just a short piece down the way from me is the Sexton cabin.  Its sparse furnishings make my place look like a palace.  It has but one room and it’s not much bigger than a one-car garage.  The Sexton’s conceived and raised sixteen young’uns within those four log walls.  The kids slept in the loft above the room when they grew old enough to ascend the ladder to it.  There were 15 Sexton sons and one daughter.  The Sexton family would host a “frolic” now and again.  Young people would come from miles around to dance and play music.  When they got thirsty, they’d dip a ladle into a cedar bucket on the porch and have a long drink of water.

I was introduced to fellow named Jerry Neel, 76, who told me a passed-down story about a Sexton frolic.  Seems that one ole’ boy switched out the water in the bucket with moonshine.  According to Jerry, that started the “frolic’n” in earnest. 

I am awakened by a choir of roosters each morning here.  My first order of business after dressing is to barefoot my way into the kitchen and kindle a fire in the wood burning stove.  I head out to the well behind the Yon place to draw my water from an old pitcher pump there.  It is cold and clear and sweet.  I fill the kettle and place it on the stove.  In less than a half hour I’m sipping the day’s first cup of coffee.  I add just a touch of cane syrup.  That’s how one does it here.  The amber sweetness of this home-made syrup favors the black coffee with a dash of Florida that no Starbucks can approach. Indeed, it is the taste of our history.

And those ghosts I wrote of in my last blog?  They’re all over this home.  In the floors worn down by a century of walking and in the quilts still piled high after a century of warming.  I feel them all around me as night falls and I write in my journal in the light of an oil lamp.  It is through them that I have come to know this warm hospitality that is unchanged since the first settlers carved a living and a state from these forests.

It’s here, in the Panhandle Pioneer Settlement, that these old ways remain alive and well. The settlement began as the dream of a man raised on a one-mule farm right here in Blountstown.  His name is Willard Smith, and yesterday we spent the afternoon together.  I’ll tell you his story, and more about this beautiful, peaceful dream of his, in my next blog.

But right now I’ve got a mess of eggs – I collected them from the coop behind my cabin just this morning – frying up in a cast iron skillet on the stove.  We’re going to eat good today, aren’t we, hikers?

Youbetcha, we will.  Cheers from the Florida Trail. Mike