A River In Time

Romantic as that might seem, if you've ever heard what those birds sound like, you probably know that I was jolted from sleep, heart pounding in my throat, wondering what on earth was making that demented, predatory noise. It was decidedly unearthly, yet somehow vaguely familiar. Though it didn't occur to me at the time, sound editors often use peacocks' eerie, two-note cries to spook up Hollywood jungle scenes.

I soon learned the birds were pets of an artist-a Sanibel expatriate who'd discovered the island in its isolated, pre-causeway days and had lived there contentedly until she'd lost her elbow room. So she went looking for another place where someone like her-a wealthy, bluestocking New Englander gone eccentrically native-might live in peace with a collection of exotic fowl, tribal art and fruit trees. She settled on a few acres along the Orange River with room for a second house for the help and an efficiency for the friends and relations who flock to her subtropical Algonquin breakfast table from around the world.

And there she's stayed, happily anonymous and surrounded by neighbors as colorfully eclectic as her animal collection.

Just a couple of doors upriver, a wide pasture slopes down to the water. On hot days, cattle amble down the muddy banks and stand motionless except for some lazy tail-swishing, hock deep in the dark, slowly moving current. With its arching oaks and clear vista, it's got to be one of the choicest pieces of property on the river.

The people who live there in a dented single-wide seem happy enough, as do the guests who join them almost every weekend with coolers and fishing poles. I see them when I take the canoe out for a Sunday paddle, the adults drinking and joking on the pressure-treated dock, the kids stripped to cutoffs and flinging themselves into the river from an old rope swing.

The two places and their people-neighbors but worlds apart-neatly reveal the paradox of the Orange River and its surrounding environs, known widely but not officially as Buckingham.

Winding through the eastern part of Lee County for about 12 miles, the river starts as a spring near Lehigh Acres and flows through pines, palmettos and cypress swamps toward the Caloosahatchee River, which it eventually joins.

Once called 12-Mile Creek, it came to be known as the Orange River in the early 20th century when pioneers planted groves up and down its length. According to local lore, at harvest time, pickers would just dump the oranges into the water so they'd drift downriver to packinghouses near its mouth.

On one hand, the area is classically Southern, classically agrarian. It's Florida all right, but it's sure not the Florida of standard tourist development image-making. The Gulfshore that's sold to Northerners is dazzlingly bright, done up in gleaming white, sunshine yellow, crystal blue, splashed with some Caribbean pastels. Around the Orange River, the palette is completely different; colors are deeper, richer, sun-dappled rather than sun-soaked. If the water in the Gulf, at its best, sparkles gin clear, the Orange River gleams armagnac gold. And there are more variations on green than even the most enterprising paint marketer could name. Ireland might boast more than 40 shades, but has anyone tried to count the greens here?

As recently as 50 years ago, the area was rural in earnest. Several of the region's original ranching and growing families settled here: Hendrys, Baucoms, Flints. One patriarch, the old cattleman Charlie Flint, used to drive around in a huge red Ford truck with "Mayor of Buckingham" emblazoned on the front. Before he died a couple of years ago, he wrote his memoir (unfortunately, in sometimes impenetrable dialect): Barefoot to Boots. In it, he talks about growing up near the Orange River, about huge clouds of screeching sandhill cranes, about the moonshining cane-growers and palmetto-grubbers who lived on its banks. He writes: "I wish I could say that it's the same now as it was-but I can't. I can say, though, that the Orange River was a real good part of livin' and growin' up in Buckingham. ... even if it ain't but 12 miles long."

Some old families remain (even some Flints). But enough of their once-vast tracts have been splintered and sold to make this area a reasonably affordable target for newcomers like me. We want our own piece of oak-shaded country living with room for a few head of cattle and a saddle horse. Carved into five-, 10- and 15-acre ranchettes-or estates, depending on the fanciful poetics of the realtor-enterprising buyers can still find land for less than $5,000 an acre. Once we've got our piece, we put up a sturdy perimeter fence, sink a well, dig a pond and get the kids a couple of barrel horses. All told, there are about 4,000 of us now.

To some extent, those of us who weren't born to this place, who've moved here by choice, buy into a certain dressed-down rural aesthetic. Personally, I've always liked boots, and now that I live here, I have not just an excuse, but a good reason to wear them and not look like some wannabe cowboy. (Or so I tell myself.) We may commute to office jobs in Cape Coral, Fort Myers and Naples, but many of us do it in big domestic trucks with rifle racks and trailer hitches. Weekends, we might drop by the regular bluegrass pick-ins at the Buckingham Community Center. We stop for sweet Florida onions and boiled peanuts at Buddy's Kuntry Kubbard (though wise Buddy just started selling cappuccino, too). And at night, we're lulled to sleep by cows lowing to calves; in the mornings, awakened by roosters. Or peacocks

I wonder what the old-timers think of us. Plenty of them still live in the area, though many more are buried in the little cemetery, some in

Confederate flag-decorated graves. Others have moved, leaving their old board-and-batten barns slumping toward the weeds. I sometimes paddle past their now-gnarled groves. Even old trees can bear fruit, and sometimes a floating orange will bump up against the hull. Thin-skinned and impossibly juicy, this water-scavenged citrus is some of the sweetest I've tasted.

The river is always offering me such surprises. I've sat still on the boat's aluminum bench and tried not to breathe as manatee mothers and babies grazed. I've seen young snook streak past, frolicking families of otters and log-basking turtles. I've marveled at the plants that seem to exist in a constant state of wild riot, especially when it rains.

Just for fun the other morning, on a single clump of live oaks next to the river, I noted every other sort of plant growing up their trunks or on their branches: Virginia creeper, wild grapes, air potatoes, strangler fig, smilax, resurrection fern, poison ivy, ball moss, wild pine, passion vine, gold-foot fern, Mexican flame vine-just a rampant tangle of life, some of it native, some of it exotic, but all of it thriving.

There's a metaphor in there, I suppose.

I hope there is.