Before my mom passed away, she told me many stories of the park “before it was a park,” when there weren’t too many people who visited or knew about it. My grandfather would take her and her sisters boating on the river, launching from the headspring. He’d bring his SCUBA gear along, and SCUBA down to the bottom of Blue Hole. He’d let them take sips of oxygen so they could dive down too (terribly unsafe!! LOL). Then they’d spend the whole day on the river, boating and swimming, sometimes without seeing even one other soul. When my mom was a teenager, she and her friends would just swim the entire river, from the headspring to the Santa Fe, where she told me they’d “frantically swim as hard and fast as they could” so they didn’t get “sucked into the dark, scary waters of the Santa Fe and float away forever,” LOL. She didn’t bring a tube or even a snorkel most of the time, she’d just swim. 🙂 My mom was a total fish!

I wish I could say I spent a lot of time at the springs as a kid, but my mother suffered from mental illness my whole life, and we didn’t leave the house/the city where I grew up (Jacksonville) too much. It’s really only been in my adult life, and through my own independent adventures, that I’ve truly connected to the springs. But I still feel deeply connected to my mom and those memories she shared with me, memories that seem to live in my blood, when I swim and dive at Blue Hole, or snorkel down the river.

Funny story: The first time I ever tubed the river, it was with a group of friends as an adult. Down the river, about 20 minutes in, one of my friends realized that his tube was deflating and he couldn’t swim! So I ended up giving him my tube and swimming the whole river myself. I didn’t realize until later in life that I was reliving my mom’s experience! It was almost as if the river sensed who I was and wanted me to share that experience with my mama.

Most of my photos of the Ichetucknee that I have currently are from winter, when I was struck by the beauty of the silvery bare cypress trees against the blue water.