A Naturalist in Florida
| ARCHIE: Through millions of years Florida was spread with veld or tree savanna. Right there in the middle of Paynes Prairie itself there used to be creatures that would stand your hair on end. Pachyderms vaster than any now alive...llamas and camels; and bison and sloths and glyptodonts; bands of ancestral horses; and grazing tortoises as big as bulls. It has been no time at all - no more than four to eight thousand years ago - since the animals were here, when you think about how wholly they are gone. | |
| The prairie is about the best thing to see on US 441 from the Smoky Mountains to the Keys. When William Bartram was there the prairie wrought him up, and his prose about the place was borrowed by Coleridge for his poem Kubla Khan. | |
| I live on one side of the prairie and work on the other. I have crossed it a thousand times. Two thousand times. And always it is something more than getting to work or going home. I have seen the cranes dance there, and a swallow tail kite, and on the road during one crossing, 765 snakes. | |
| The prairie is a solid thing to hold on to in a world all broken out by man. There is peace out there, and quiet to hear rails call and cranes bugling in the sky. |
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