Friends, Silver and Gold

Bluegrass Night at Marsh Landing, Fellsmere

We just left our new RVing Women friends Donna and Fran in Fellsmere, Florida, after three wonderful days in their excellent company. We landed at their house in time to time to take in Bluegrass Night at Marsh Landing, a lovely old-Florida restaurant owned and run by Fran and her daughter Susan. Housed in a renovated historic building, the restaurant walls are covered  with old photographs and taxidermy and other items from Fellsmere’s past, making the restaurant also the de-facto Fellsmere museum. But Marsh Landing is primarily a unique culinary destination, drawing from an area far greater than the 5,000 people (mostly farmworkers) who actually live in Fellsmere. Every Thursday night is Bluegrass Night when all 320 seats are filled and folks are frequently turned away at the door. Fran herself is a big draw, having served as Indian River County Commissioner for 12 years and obviously well known and well liked. Later this year, Susan (who is also a local favorite and the current mayor of Fellsmere) will be taking over management of the restaurant so her mom can retire. 

 

Liz gets into fossiling with Donna and Fran

Fran and Donna were the women that got us started on our kayaking adventures at Rainbow Springs in December, and this time they took us out to the Peace River in central Florida for a canoe/kayak expedition in search of million-year-old fossils. Donna is an expert rock hound and fossil permit holder, and we floated the river until her eagle eye honed in on a likely spot. Sure enough, a reach down into the shallow stream brought up a fossil dugong bone (ancestor of the manatee). We tied up, unloaded gear and climbed into the knee-deep river that flowed past our feet and ankles at 72 degrees. The next two hours were spent in the water, shoveling and sifting gravel. We returned to Fran and Donna's house with many sharks teeth, an equine tooth and lots more bone.  Fran and Donna plan to start full-timing in their motorhome this summer and we are looking forward to meeting up with them in New Brunswick in July.

Janna communes with pelicans on one of our bike rides

Prior to that, we had another couple of weeks with our dear friend of many years, Mary Rice who lives in Fort Pierce. During that time, Mary submitted a major manuscript on sipuculan larvae, Janna got new glasses, Lilypad had her 30,000 mile check-up, Liz did a lot of yardwork, and we got our corporate and personal taxes done while sitting at Mary’s dining room table. We also took in the fabulous Fort Pierce Farmers Market, the SEAL Museum, a lecture at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Institute, a performance of “Late Night Catechism,” and put many more miles on our bicycles. 

Zora Neale Hurston's Gravesite in Fort Pierce

On the day before we left Fort Pierce we went and paid our respects at the gravesite ofZora Neale Hurston, an author Liz has revered since discovering her 45 years ago through UW anthropology courses. Hurston was studying for her PhD with Franz Boas when Alan Lomack from the Smithsonian Folklore Program lured her away to collect stories and music from southern African-American communities. She wrote and published four novels and dozens of plays and short stories, but died in poverty in 1960. She was relatively unknown until 1973 when she was brought back into public awareness through the work of Alice Walker. Now she is considered to be one of the pre-eminent writers of African American literature of the 20^th century. The gravesite was unmarked for many years, but Alice Walker found it in a small Black cemetery in Fort Pierce in 1973 and added a gravestone, which we saw when we were there in 2003. Since then, a much larger tribute has been installed, the work of artist James Liccone. We visited it on a rainy day in Fort Pierce, one of those moments when you feel honored to honor one of the Greats. 

Now we are headed towards the west coast and panhandle of Florida. We are looking forward to meet-ups with Friday Harbor friends Debbie Pigman this week, then Teddy and Alice Deane around the first of March. As we count our blessings, which are many, old and new friends are high on the list.