| WET KIDS WHO’VE BEEN swimming in a spring have a special odor, clean and happy.  We used to take ours to the Ichetucknee often once it was made a park, and I can still feel the sweet air they sent forward to us in the front seat as—this was before children were strictly seat-belted in—they slept curled up in the back all the way home, which was the house we’d built using lumber (and windows and doors and sinks, etc.) from the Flavet we’d paid $600 to take apart, and the pasture it stood in and the chickens and cows and fruit trees and gardens that went with it.  The kids always fell asleep after we’d been to the Ich because they were worn out from all the hours of jumpings-in and the squeals that accompanied splashing first each other then any random kids, and there were always a few of those who felt like joining them.

Living down two-plus miles off an un-signposted dirt road (ours was outside LaCrosse) was considered so remote back then that friends who visited us from Gainesville used to ask us how we ever found the place.  We found it, I wanted to say but didn’t, because we chose it, and now, after ten years of building and planting, our way home was second nature.  As an aside, I’ve always thought it telling that both our kids, who are three years apart and not at all alike, wrote their college essays about why they were glad they’d grown up in the country.

For town kids, even if, maybe especially if, they happened to have pools at their houses, trips to springs must have felt exotic.  And extra-wonderful because you got to wade in on mossy rocks not concrete steps. And for all kids, by the time you got knee-deep and started shivering, since spring water, being a constant 72 degrees year round always feels freezing at first, you’d be forced to choose one of two remedies, dive all the way in, or chicken out and retreat, which was what my twenty-something extra daughters who visited me from England did the first time I took them there. But even that first time, they quickly figured out what the deal was and because they were game girls, they went with it.

What both my extra daughters and pretty much all kids figured out was that if you don’t dive in, you can’t get to the spring head but if you do, you can swim across to it and hover to your heart’s content over the gorgeous turquoise flower that blossoms there. And then, if you’re feeling brave, you can dive, pike position, towards where the flower’s stem disappears into the dark, and if you straighten your legs behind you and start kicking, you’ll find your skin tingling more and more because the deeper you go, the more bubbly the water. Then, if you happen to be wearing goggles, you’ll be able to see the cave where the bottom of the flower begins. And if you have any sense of adventure at all, you’ll be dying to explore it but of course you won’t have enough breath to stay down long enough to do it. If when you’re home, you’re curious enough to investigate, you’ll find out that, because our whole state is floating on honeycombed limestone, there are lots of underwater caves to explore. But also that you should never go into one unless you know what you’re doing (there are courses to teach you) and even if you do, not alone. Because things can go wrong and if they go badly enough wrong, you may not come out. Ironically, one reason people get into trouble down there is that the caves are so beautiful, they get overwhelmed—“the rapture” it’s called—and forget to keep track of turns and oxygen supplies.

But caving’s for the few, and we’re the many, so no matter what, if you’ve ever gone full-frontal into that transparent water, whether you’ve braved the spring head or not, when you do get out, you’ll feel fresh, not chemically fresh the way you feel when you’ve been in a commercial pool, and definitely not with stinging eyes. Which is just another way to say that swimming in a spring can make you feel brand new, as if it hadn’t been water you’d been swimming in but liquid enthusiasm.

While we’re on the subject of the Ich in particular, it’s worth mentioning that there are actually two springs in the park, the one the river flows into and another you can reach via the boardwalk on your left as you come in. The hidden spring is, at least to me, the more jewel-like of the two because it’s small, about the size of a water nymph’s cupped hands—so I’ve always felt it was guarding a secret that if I thought hard enough and loved it enough would rise to the surface of my mind, shaking water off its hair all the way.

Something else to mention is that whereas it’s true that most of my children’s memories of the Ich have to do either with the main spring or with, as they got older, floating down the river on an inner tube or, when they got even older, kayaking down it, there’s also a bank-side trail that passes through thick growth which has always reminded me of the Zen story about a master who built a pond on a small hillock behind his house. And when his disciple asked him why he’d put it there and not on the edge of the famously beautiful prospect just beyond, instead of answering, the master knelt before the pond, and filled his hands with water, and the disciple saw that as he looked up, his eyes met the view. In such a way, we see the river through gaps in the bushes, framed as exquisitely as the branches that sometimes frame the moon.

Something else I remember about the Ich from when my kids were growing up was the extreme clarity of the water back then, almost as if it wasn’t there. This clarity held up all the way down the river, and once my ex and I canoed to where it met the tannic fingers of the Santa Fe and farther to where the Santa Fe met the Suwannee and the water turned almost opaque. And over time, I’ve come to love all three rivers, but it’s always the Ichetucknee which, to me, was the princess.

Think what it means to have something so pure in your life. Imagine grasses swaying under the water, imagine the fish that shelter in the grasses, and the egrets and herons and ospreys who watch for them in the day, and the owls by night. Imagine the river in moonlight, with crickets and frogs singing all around you. Imagine its light dimming until you can find the bank only by intuition. Imagine tying your little boat to a cypress knee and wading to shore, carefully aware of where you step. Imagine the little lights in the surrounding woods. Stories are born on nights like that, and you sit around a fire and tell some, then you sing for awhile but in the end, you fall silent and join the dancing flames and the sparks they send upward. Think how different your life would be if you’ve never known any of this existed. Then cherish this place as hard as you can, and protect it for the generations you’ll never meet but are always around you, like the planets and the stars. And always keep in mind that time has never been anything like the way you thought it was. For example, as I write this, I can sense the years melting, like perfectly toasted marshmallows falling into a campfire, as my little ones yawn, strip off their wet bathing suits, throw them on the grass, and run top-speed, naked and giggling, into the house.