Travel by DAR

Far-Flung Florida: Houseboating

(First published in Esquire)

"This is House Boat Seven coming up on Dead Boy Creek, do you read me?"

I never thought I’d hear my 9-year-old bookworm, Spencer, barking words like that into a nautical phone, but he was the captain, steering our 8 ton, 44 foot houseboat along the backwaters of the last unspoiled river in northwest Florida.

"Repeat, this is House Boat Seven, about to drop anchor for the night. Today has been amazingly awesome!"

Our amazingly awesome adventure had begun two weeks before, when I rebelled. Did our family really have to spend our entire Florida vacation in the company of Great Aunt Minnie? Couldn’t we do something down there besides endlessly sit around a geriatric pool? I called a chum for suggestions. Prescott was something of a character, a world-class adventurer who had settled in Florida after years as hang-gliding instructor, champion fisherman, author of unpredictable prose, ex-boyfriend of a professional bricklayer, and unsuccessful Orlando mayoral candidate (his edress still reads "peasantrevolt.com" – the tagline for his campaign).

"Prescott, my family wants to do something out of the ordinary in Florida this winter."

"Rent a houseboat, dab nab it!" he drawled. I could visualize him leaning back like a yokel, sucking on his teeth as though he’d never been raised on the Upper West Side. "They give you forty minutes of instruction and set you out on the river by yourselves, with a nautical map to go anywhere you want."

"Isn’t that a bit scary?" I said. But even as the words left my mouth I knew I was hooked.

Two weeks later, we were bidding Minnie adieu at her St. Pete poolside and charging up the Florida coast. When we started getting passed on the right by pick-ups (one hour) and seeing signs for boiled peanuts (two hours), we figured we were sufficiently off the beaten path. When we spied sawed-off tree trunks holding down tin roofs (three hours), we began to realize just how un-touristy our vacation was going to be. But when we turned into the tiny hamlet of Suwanee, Florida, in the midst of a national wildlife refuge, we were both jubilant and relieved. Suwanee is like Key West before the day-trippers took over, a picturesque settlement overgrown with cottonwood trees and run through by canals. All the houses are built on stilts to protect them from periodic floods, and enclosed by screened-in porches to protect them from the flying varmints called skeeters. Luckily, we were there in March, when the air was mild and buzz-free.

Our first glimpse of the houseboat at Miller’s Boatyard produced shrieks of glee. My kids were impressed as well. It was roomy and filled with light. There were comfy bunks and futons everywhere, clean linens, flush toilet, hot shower, and enough sliding glass doors to nullify even a whisper of mildew smell. In the bow a gas grill sat opposite a plastic picnic table, and up the ladder a sun deck ran nearly the length of the boat. The galley had more landlubber amenities than Prescott had let on, including fridge, microwave, and toaster. The radio in the galley may have sported a fork for an antenna, but it looked able to fetch us NPR to accompany our meals afloat.

True to Prescott’s claim, our instruction was minimalist. Jay spared us the niceties by jumping right in. "Number one, the cruising manual’s a lie: There are no docking facilities in the river, the last one closed 15 year ago, so don’t worry about that. Number two, the fuel gauges don’t work, so don’t worry about that, either, when the needles jump all over the place. Number three, don’t pop your Schlitz til you’ve dropped anchor – when it’s at rest, a houseboat is a house and you can drink til you drop, but when it’s in motion, a house boat is a motor vehicle and you’d best not touch a drop."

"Not even root beer?" asked Spencer’s seven-year-old brother Jeremy, peering dubiously into the water which was, in fact, the color of root beer.

But Jay was gone. We were left to our own devices, as promised.

Three days later, we’d become full-fledged river rats. Spencer and Jeremy had taken the wheel for hours on end, their feet naturally gravitating to the helmsman position, spread wide, having mastered the art of safely zigzagging their way from one side of the river to the other with no obstructions in sight – a little like letting the kids steer the old family Rambler through an abandoned parking lot in the middle of a jungle. (Actually, the sensation of steering is a little like navigating a shopping cart loaded with sand bags, with a broken wheel in front because it lists to the left.) Reading the homemade nautical chart, they had plotted where to spot the two red upturned Adirondack chairs on the bank that signaled a series of sandbars coming our way. They had figured out where along our 30 mile route we could have pulled ashore, if we’d wanted to, and availed ourselves of a nearby restaurant which offered its salad bar from a bathtub. They were adept at sounding out the counter-intuitive syllables of the trees we passed: the yuccas poking out from the lush canopy of sweet bay magnolia and sassafras loblollies. They could name the fish that disturbed the cellulite surface of the water (pickerels, catfish and "Florida’s scrappiest bass and bream"), though they loudly failed, again and again, to snag even one on our Wal-Mart fishing line.

They knew the history – that the Suwannee, a federally designated wild river, turns out to be the original "Swanee" that Stephen Foster chose for his classic song, "Old Folks at Home," even though America’s first professional songwriter never laid eyes on the river and chose it only because it sounded better than his first choice, the Petey River in South Carolina. They knew how to make their voices reverberate from bank to far-off bank ("Swanee" derives from the Creek Indian word for "echo"), and where to look for ten-foot-tall manatees erupting from the surface just yards from where we grilled our hot dogs. The manatees were all graceful hulk, no neck, like walruses on steroids.

They even knew how to anchor – facing into the wind in the middle of the river, rather than near the shore. They knew that one because they knew that the long grouchy-looking black snakes dotting the shore here and there were not long grouchy-looking black snakes. They were gators.

Best of all, they knew how to make things sound scarier than they were, just like a genuine yokel, by telling tales of gators and such. When the truth was, the whole adventure was painless, peaceful, and not scary one bit: We were never out of radio contact for more than a few minutes, and the gators tended toward bashfulness.

The upshot? Now when some Great Aunt-saturated soul asks them what to do that’s out of the ordinary in Florida, they can lean back, suck on their teeth like the best of ‘em, and drawl:

"Rent a houseboat, dab nab it!"