That was always an opening scene from the first Ichetucknee tubing trip of the season, an eagerly awaited ritual of all my youthful summers growing up in Lake City. Most often it was with my friends from MYF, the Methodist Youth Fellowship of Lake City’s First Methodist Church. To this day, I think fondly of the bouncy ride down the sandy road through moss-draped oaks to the springs, followed by the first glimpse of that incredibly deep cobalt-blue pool, the delicious dread of that first shock of 72-degree water on a 100-degree July day, the incredible sense of opening your eyes under water as you dove deep into the spring boil and felt the pure, natural force of that crystal clear water bursting forth from a mysterious source below, the indescribably wonderful sensations of warm sun and cold water on a two-hour tube ride.

In my teens, my buddy Eric Dukes and I often snorkeled the length of the river with a little inflatable raft, seeing how many beer cans and bottles we could snatch from the undulating eelgrass on the bottom of the river. It was the early 1970s, and we never thought of what we were doing as “environmentalism,” it just made us mad that thoughtless people would leave their trash in “our” Ichetucknee. Of course, it also never crossed the what-passed-for-minds of 15-year-old boys that “their” Ichetucknee would ever be threatened with anything worse than a bunch of Budweiser cans.

Shortly before my high school graduation, my dad bought a little cabin at Three Rivers Estates on the lower Ichetucknee. One of my first dates with the woman who was later kind enough to marry me was a party at that River House. The rehearsal dinner for our wedding was there, along with the reception for one daughter’s wedding and recently, the actual wedding of our younger daughter. In between, there have been countless birthday celebrations, Thanksgivings, and Fourths of July, the latter celebrated by pursuit of a particular happiness—hot boiled peanuts and cold beer in lawn chairs in the river.