Earl, Duke of Ocheesee Landing

Brother Hanson and I waited out Hurricane Ida beneath the eaves of Sneads Pavillion. This landing is known as “The Lake” by Sneads High School students. We met Kyle and Tyler and Tyler here because it’s where they spend much of their free time. They drive big trucks with tinted windows and they smoke cigarettes and sometimes drink Budweiser here. We had to stay two nights on account of the ferocious wind whipping across Lake Seminole, sending flotillas of green leafy plants down from their beds in Seminole’s northern wetlands.

We finally got on the water Tuesday and spent a night on the only bit of high ground for miles, a grassy sand bar at the edge of river and swamp. The water’s rising everyday since the latest deluge swept across the watershed, this one in the form of Ida, briefly a hurricane.

This river carries a lot of weight on its shoulders. I understood this watershed better after watching it rise from seven feet last week to twenty-one today. It is intimidating to sleep beside it, knowing that it could swell into your tent with no warning. It floods out of its banks and the water moves up tributaries, the current pushing against cypress trees so that the flatness seems to be tilted away from me. As the river rises down here, it takes a few days to fill the thousands of acres of swamp and lowlands. We float halfway up trees. Then we run into a village of nine houseboats, their anchor lines strained against the flow.

Three families live at Ocheesee Landing full-time: Earl and his wife, Scott and his people, and John and Patricia Wallace. It is an independent thing to live in a house that floats on styrofoam and shifts with the currents, an aluminum jon boat the only connection to land and the rest of us non-houseboat creatures.

John and Patricia Wallace sat on their two-person porch when we floated by. They offered us iced tea. Ice comes from the cooler on the back porch. Between the porches, cypress siding encloses a room big enough for a double bed, a few chairs, and a table. The stove is on the front porch. They mainly fry catfish, catch around 20 fish a day. John wants to build an extended porch and barbecue on the back – can’t eat fried food all the time.

John built the house in the front yard of their old house in Altha. When the last daughter moved out, so did John and Patricia, straight to Ocheesee. Their porch faces the sunset and they can fish out of the living room. Patricia didn’t mind living on land but she’s never been happier than with life on the water.

The Duke of Ocheesee, the Godfather, is Earl. He and his wife have been on a houseboat down here for fifteen years, since before the road from town was paved. (Earl had it paved when he was county commissioner.) They have two pontoon boats and a jon boat and the house measures 1700 sf, 900 indoors and 800 worth of porches. It is wheel-chair accessible because Earl’s two brothers are both paralyzed, one from a swimming accident as a boy, the other from a freak tree-fall accident – he was a lumberjack.

We meet Earl at sunrise. He steps onto his porch the moment the sun pokes out from above the tree tops across the river where the bluffs of Torreya State Park rise over one-hundred feet off the river. Earl wears his mechanics jump suit and holds a tall white coffee mug with two round breasts on it. He owns his mechanic shop in town and his wife is a nurse, working nights now so she’s on her way home.

Michael and I camped under one of the oldest oak trees in Florida. We had a campfire and listened to the hum of the gas generators powering the Christmas lights on Earl’s porch. The houseboats glowed through the submerged trees eerily enough to make me wonder why all spaceships sightings happen in deserts.