The long way home: Florida

Editor’s note: Ocracoke Islanders Tom and Carol Pahl are on a year-long trek around the United States (following 70-degree weather) and report on their travels from time to time. This is their third dispatch.

By Tom Pahl

I regret to report to our followers and friends back home that, beginning our third month of the gypsy life, we have utterly failed in our prime objective. 

That being to stay comfortably within an average daily temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit.  As you may recall, we departed Ocracoke on Nov. 7 with that noble purpose filling our sails. 

Since that day, we have traveled 2,300 miles pulling our little travel trailer and 2,000 more miles roaming about sans trailer. 

All together we have spent a few days passing in South Carolina, a couple of weeks around Savannah, a few weeks in southwestern and southeastern Georgia, a little over two weeks in Connecticut for Christmas and now we are in Florida, where you might think we’d find some nice warm temperatures. 

But I would bring your attention to the photo of our outdoor thermometer showing this morning’s temperature (1/09/25) at 32 degrees.  Besides it being cold enough to ice skate in Connecticut, which one might expect considering how close New England is to the Arctic circle, we have twice (twice!) experienced solidified water, not outdoors, but in our trailer plumbing: once in Southern Georgia (21degrees) and once in Virginia (24 degrees). 

We have spent more days in “unseasonably cold” temperatures than we have in seasonably normal temperatures, never mind warm.  But, undaunted, we persist. 

Next week we head farther south to the Big Cypress National Preserve, Ochopee, Florida, approximate latitude 27 degrees north, where we truly expect to feel some warm air on our faces. 

It turns out to be quite a task to make reservations in these places, even though we have what is usually the smallest travel trailer in the campground. 

Apparently, we are not the only ones who thought of looking for warm weather to enjoy through the winter months down south.  The scheduling task has fallen onto Carol’s shoulders and I’m happy to report that she is holding up well under the stress and is making a fine job of it.

I try not to complain about the cold in such a way that it reflects on the scheduler’s acumen. After all, we have noticed in the news that this cold is the result of an unusually deep sweep of the jet stream encompassing a great swath of the southern states and is not directly related to our travels or reflective of a flaw in our overall plan. We will keep you posted on prime mission, in hopes that we can ultimately report success.

Our future holds a westward swing starting in February which will eventually bring us to New Orleans (decidedly not at Mardi Gras), and then into Texas along the gulf (of Mexico) coast for a bit. 

Toward the end of February, we will be in Big Bend National Park in Texas. Big Bend sits on the southern border, at the “big bend” in the Rio Grande River.  It is known to have the greatest number of bird species of all of America’s national parks. This is a matter of great excitement for us, as we are keeping a “trip list” and we expect to add a good number of birds in the two weeks we are there. I know, some would not find the same level of excitement in that as we do, but you find excitement where you can.

As we drift around, we seem to gravitate to water of all sorts and as luck will have it, we stumbled upon Silver Glen Springs in the Ocala National Forest two days ago.  It was a windy, cold day, by Florida standards (low to mid-50s), and we were pleasantly surprised to find that Silver Glen is a naturally warm spring that feeds into Lake George. 

The spring water is spectacularly clear, a constant 72 to 74 degrees F, with a tropical blue tint.  It comes out of one of Florida’s deep aquifers where the water is warmed by the earth’s geologic furnace.  According to the St. John’s River Water Management District, a huge complex of underground caves beneath the spring that runs for thousands of feet in length and a couple of hundred feet in depth provides the pipeline to the aquifer.

The springs bring an estimated 65 million gallons of water per day to the surface.  You can see the upwelling of water just a few yards from the bank.  While there is not a lot of discussion about the actual source of the heat, except to say the water is heated by the earth’s stored warmth, my uneducated guess is that it is the huge volume of water that accounts for the retention of geothermal energy.  It simply comes up in such volume that the water doesn’t have time to cool off before reaching the surface. For comparison, just one and a half days of water flow from Silver Glen Springs would provide a full year’s supply of water to Ocracoke village.

And as if that wasn’t excitement enough, it turns out that swimming at Silver Glen Springs is allowed, an activity we opted to forego after we witnessed other people shivering like Ernest Shackelton as they got out of the water.  But you can rent a kayak, which we did do.

Finally, and most exciting of all, we discovered that the springs are a winter haven for Florida manatees, which were drifting around without a care in the world.  The amazingly clear water provided a perfect view of these ancient marine mammals whose closest living relative is the elephant. We also saw striped bass, mud fish, bald eagles, egrets, herons, vultures, cormorants, turtles and various mollusks.  My only regret is that I didn’t join the shivering masses and go for a swim.  Next time.

One of the benefits of our gypsy lifestyle is having time to read.  We read the news on our iPads every morning, looking for the odd bit of humor or astonishment that may be buried amongst the reverberations of history repeating itself. It seems like torture some mornings, reading about the latest outrage or enrage or just plain rage, homicide, fratricide, genocide, the special protections offered the wealthy and powerful. Fortunately, we have an espresso machine that fits nicely in our tiny kitchen, and it seems that a frothy coffee somehow allows reflection enough to find a bit of inner peace amidst the mayhem. Where else is there to go?

And, of course, we read books. I’ve been reading histories with no certain theme or chronology, including Europe’s age of exploration, and the formation of America’s Federal Reserve System (Wow! Not the formation of the Federal Reserve!).  I fill in with a stupidly predictable mystery now and then, like putting my brain in neutral and coasting for a bit. 

My current book is “In The Garden Of Beasts,” by Erik Larson.  It is a novelized account of the tenure of William Dodd as U.S. Ambassador to Germany 1933 through 1938, the years of Hitler’s rise to power and Germany’s descent into totalitarianism and the deepest evil.  The book is meticulously researched with 44 pages of footnotes and an 11-page bibliography. 

The parallels to our current political situation are shocking, including the extensive use of disinformation and propaganda; the decimation of the civil service and the appointment of unqualified close associates; the demand for total loyalty; a disdainful disregard for the law; the firing up of populist anger against a particular population; the undermining of democratic institutions; the creation of personality cult leadership; holding party above country, and so on.  Larson wrote this in 2011, so it can’t be said that the author set out to exploit the divisiveness that defines today’s politics. 

It is rightfully considered hyperbolic to make Nazi comparisons, and most surely, I am not.  The world is not the same now as it was in 1933.  We have international alliances, the United Nations and disarmament treaties.  We no longer look at the world as a place to be carved up and divided among the powerful. 

We have guard rails built into our political and legal institutions that assure the rule of law.  The American people treasure freedom and democracy.  We have a long history of fighting tyranny.  I highly recommend this very interesting and readable book.