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Promises to Keep
by John Jopling
| THERE WERE ALWAYS two schools of thought: the headfirst, full-body immersion folks, and the more timid, one-baby-step-at-a-time, fists-clinched-tight-under-the-chin crowd. The former group could be relied upon to emerge from that first, breath-taking dive—into what we all knew was the coldest, clearest, cleanest, bluest water the world had ever known—laughing and splashing their more timid friends, assuring them, “Really, it’s not so cold once you get used to it.” What frequently followed was a forced conversion of the go-slow crowd by the head-firsters.
John Jopling is president of the Ichetucknee Alliance. He wrote this article in 2013 for the blog section of first version of the Alliance’s website at ichetuckneealliance.org.
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.
Our little stretch of the river has also been the scene of a family tradition only marginally less sacred to us than baptism. We’re now into a second generation of Jopling kin, including my grandsons, to experience—usually in the first month or two of life—the rapid flexion of fat little knees as tiny toes receive their inaugural dip in these waters.
Yet, sometime—long after it should have—a harsh awareness started to intrude each time I gazed on these timeless waters. The cobalt blue I remembered from the past had moved more than a few shades in the direction of green. Old photos on the walls of the River House were painful reminders. While newcomers to the river still marveled at its clarity, old-timers like me were often startled at the number of days each year when sediments clouded the water. Expansive beds of clean eelgrass were replaced mostly by bare lime rock, often slickened by algae.
These changes did not escape my aging dad’s still-sharp eyes. Many of his best days, he would say, were spent on this river as a boy growing up in Lake City in the 1920s and 1930s, and then as a dad, granddad and great-granddad in the second century he graced with his life. Dad fished this river into his eighties, tubed it into his nineties. In the deepest sense, I believe the river coursed in his veins as it does in mine.
Father’s Day 2013 will mark the third Father’s Day weekend since Dad’s passing. A month or two before his death in June 2010, I sat with Dad on the screened porch of a rebuilt River House and we quietly watched the diminished yet still beautiful flow of that river going by. After a while, Dad asked, in a most matter-of-fact voice, if I would promise him I would do what I could to take care of “our river.” I blinked hard, swallowed and said, “Sure, Dad.”
I plan to keep that promise. The Ichetucknee Alliance plans to keep that promise. Join us. Keep the promise. Not just to my dad, but to all of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.