My Place on the Gulfshore - Coming to Iona

My wife and I live in an apartment just off Iona Road, where it angles away from McGregor and streaks toward the river. Lori and I are happy for the present state of our neighborhood, respectful of its past and excited about Iona's future.

If it did not have a name, we could call the place simply, "at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee," the great river that for us begins in the bays behind Sanibel and Pine Island and narrows eventually into locks and channels before it reaches Lake Okeechobee. I have lived within a few miles of the place for nearly 40 years. I remember when I was 15, riding on the back of a Honda 60. My friend and I zoomed toward Fort Myers Beach and what we believed was paradise. In those days, Gladiolus Drive was lined with Australian pines. It seemed as though we were in a tunnel. The wind blew at our hair and our shirts, we leaned with the bike as it leaned against the curves. We cut along Pine Ridge, the back way, and caught San Carlos at the Swap Shop. When we crossed the swing bridge over Matanzas Pass, the white sand and blue sky seemed to explode in front of us, stark and bright after the shaded avenue of trees.

Iona was named by an early settler after the island he'd left behind, just off the coast of Scotland. The community begins near the base of the first bridge that was built to connect Fort Myers to Cape Coral. Iona borders McGregor Boulevard; it is the land between the road and the river. The land runs out at the west at Punta Rassa, where the first tarpon was caught on a line 120 years ago, and where the news of the destruction of the battleship Maine was first received by telegraph, and from whose wooden docks lumber and cattle were shipped to Cuba. The geographical boundary of Iona includes the southeast side of McGregor for a couple of miles of mostly mangrove forest. San Carlos Boulevard splits the land, wetlands and prairie and pine woods of long ago, houses and trailers and stores today, until the first little channel before Fort Myers Beach, named Hurricane Pass, after Donna.

Iona has changed dramatically from when I was a boy, and the pace of change is accelerating. It is being "developed." Once rural and rustic and relaxed, it is becoming urbane and expensive. But Lori and I are not intimidated or dismayed by this speedy evolution. Where along the Gulf coast are there communities and whole neighborhoods that are preserved in time, like bits of wood in amber? Lori and I know that we are part of the change; therefore we are grateful for what is, hopeful for what Iona will be, and awed by those features which are immutable: the wide river and the billowing clouds that float in the clear blue sky, and the displays of oranges and purples and pinks that are the palette of nearly every sunset.

There is a small cottage on the side of Gladiolus Drive, perhaps one-half mile from the wide river. It's an old cottage, maybe 50 or 60 years old, built of yellow pine, probably, with a narrow, screened-in front porch. If you stood in front of the cottage and cupped your hands over your ears to diminish the whoosh of the cars and trucks that pass by, and focused just on the simple structure, perhaps you could imagine an earlier time when cottages such as this one were ordinary, not historic and rare. To the north and west, to the south and east of the little cottage, along the road named for the flowers that were grown in the sand fields beside it, were farms and pastures and groves. Those places are gone now; the land is filling to capacity with zero-lot-line residences protected by gates from interlopers: great mansions, isolated and inaccessible by design.

Between the little cottage and the Caloosahatchee, between the little community that blossomed before concrete and stucco exploded from the gray sand, is one of the most exclusive addresses in Lee County. Gulf Harbor began as River's Edge, which had been a sleeping giant, which had been a red-skin potato farm, which had been a mangrove and buttonwood forest. Now there is a golf course and clubhouse, and gatemen who dress like Bahamian police. There are no grander homes in Lee County, except perhaps down Iona Road a mile or so in St. Charles Harbor, which had been a battered and poor marina until it was discovered, wiped clean and similarly reinvented. The character of Iona abides somewhere between that little cottage, a reminder of the past, and the marble and brass of Gulf Harbor and St. Charles, the future.

Where we live along the river, on the shell islands, in the riparian fringe and onto the palmetto prairies that extended away from the coast, the land once knew Calusa and runaway Creek, the Seminole, Zachary Taylor's "Long Knives" and cattle drovers. The early settlers were plume hunters, mullet men, smugglers and outlaws. Living was tough along the banks and wetlands; the faint of heart did not apply.

It was, however, a group of farmers who finally conquered the ebb and flow of the tides, who withstood the perpetual nuisance of mosquitoes and sand gnats, ran off the rattlers and panthers, and persuaded a labor force to settle nearby. The farmers came because the land was "frost free," because of the wide expanse of river and the nearby Gulf of Mexico. The farmers cleared out the palmetto and pine, and persuaded the county to help pay to drain the mangrove swamp. They planted hundreds of acres along the south side of the Caloosahatchee. Before the Seaboard Railroad came to town, Truckland (as Iona was called) could not compete with the hardy growers on Sanibel, who were able to ship vegetables and fruit from docks and piers up the river "to town," and on to the Florida Keys and Tampa. The tracks changed that. Iona farmers were among the very first to ice freshly picked vegetables in insulated railroad cars. Crops from Lee County began to make the way to Chicago, New York and Boston.

The Iona farmers began by growing pineapples and limes; they found that the land and the climate would sponsor great yields of squash and beans, cucumbers and melons, okra, tomatoes and red-skin potatoes. Some of the men had a different vision; they were nurserymen rather than farmers, and they planted groves of citrus varieties and mangoes and litchi-nut trees. In Harlem Heights, where the field hands and packing-house workers lived, the people planted banana and guava and avocado to supplement the bounty of the supper table. Today in Harlem, the trees are ornamental; the residents buy what they need at a Publix or Winn-Dixie, where the fruit that is sold is grown in Central America and Mexico.

After World War II, flower crops replaced vegetables. The Western author Rex Beach and other growers of some distinction came to Iona. Men with money and discipline snatched up ready tracts of gray sand and filled the vast fields with gladiolus bulbs and chrysanthemum cuttings. Along McGregor and A&W Bulb Road and Thornton and Kelly Road, the land was resplendent with color. Lee County called itself "The Gladiolus Capital of the World" because of the cut flowers harvested in Iona and shipped by plane and train to London, Washington and Toronto. Those years were the heyday of Iona, but they could not last.

There came a slow time, in the '70s and '80s. The far-mers began selling out. Costs were up and what the grocer or florist would pay was down. The fields were allowed to go fallow. Nothing much happened to Iona until it was discovered 10 years or so ago by men with deep pockets and big ideas. These men decided that Iona would be a great place to build houses, apartments, condominiums. Iona suddenly became a very desirable place to live, for young people moving into the middle of life, and for older people retiring to begin new adventures. It is perhaps the finest place in Lee County to launch a boat, to cast plugs at the bars and passes at the mouth of the river for snook and reds, or to bait small hooks with live shrimp and pull snapper and sheepshead from the mangroves. In that earlier time, the boundaries of Iona could have been identified by locations of marinas. Deep Lagoon was the closest place to town to skid a skiff down a ramp, while tiny Port Comfort, on the way to Sanibel, belied the potential of Connie Mack Island, which would become Jonathon Harbor.

For people who are content to watch the water move and the osprey fly and the sky change colors as though being stroked by the brush of a heavenly artist, there is plenty in Iona to enjoy. My wife and I share a fascination for the river and sunsets and the great variety of birds we see every day. It is remarkable to me that frigate birds, which I long associa-ted only with deep water and shell islands, can be spotted frequently, floating on air currents over the causeway to Sanibel, while the osprey, hawks, pelicans, gulls, skimmers and herons are common above the mysterious blend of salt- and freshwater. Some evenings we walk to the river to watch the sun go down. The water changes its hue from green to gray, according to the light and shadow. The sun, which drops away over Texas, flashes its blues and crimson and gold on its way down. Its displays cannot be replicated by a mortal painter. It remains the greatest show on earth, captured for a time on land, where we live, where the flower farms used to be.