Beware! Beware! The Flashing Eyes! The Floating Hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

"Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream," Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

“Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich

Not too long ago, I visited a favorite watering hole – Blue Spring State Park in Orange City, north of Orlando. The place gets mobbed in the summer, but it has historical resonance, and like all Florida springs the water, bubbling up from the aquifer, stays constant at 72 degrees. When July's heat and humidity seem to hover in the low 90s day and night, the number 72 resounds like a magic spell in my mind.

I took Elvis, the young Dominican-born man who works for my cousin Buddy and sometimes for me, and Elvis's new lady friend. I have taken it upon myself to see to Elvis's moral and cultural education. (I do not mean that in an anti-Dominican way. His upbringing was just fine. I mean that the moral and cultural education he has received since coming to the U.S. needs serious help.) Buddy is a bad influence. I want Elvis to graduate from college without a) getting arrested, b) becoming a redneck like my cousin, or c) getting Disneyfied. While in reality, I should fear letter "a" the most, I have never been a realist, so "c" is something I try to do something about. This remains an exercise in futility. Elvis's American Dream is to strike it rich through one of Buddy's alternative economic enterprises, cash out and enter some legitimate business, marry a smokin' hot huge breasted girl who made it through college with her virginity intact, take her on a Disney cruise, and buy a gargantuan house with multiple large screen televisions in a community not unlike Celebration. The dream involves endless nights of great sex, culminates in some tiny Elvises who also worship the Rat God, but after that it gets somewhat fuzzy.

Elvis's dream mystifies me as much as my obsession with steering him away from that dream. The kid also likes his literature classes, so maybe I see a glimmer of hope. Last term, he read Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," hence the road trip to Blue Spring.

We pull up to the park on a steamy, blue-skied Sunday morning. The swathe of grass above the spring run is already so packed with bodies that we have trouble finding a spot to put down our lawn chairs. I scurry Elvis and his lady friend along the boardwalk to the spring head several yards away. Surrounding the water basin is a tangle of palmetto brush, water oak, and curling vine. The basin itself forms an aquamarine circle maybe fifty feet across, filled with bubbles from the water shooting up and kids in flippers and snorkel masks, trying their best to dive into the water's source and being spit back up again. The water is so clear that one can see all the way down to where the spring caves begin and the water gushes out. The rocks look like vaginal lips. The whole thing recalls a giant vagina for me, with those caves leading back to the essence of life itself: Florida's aquifer, the source of our drinking water. Our great Floridian womb. Our mother. Our soul.

I begin to overexcite and gesticulate. "This is the Real Florida, Elvis. 45 minutes from Rat World, and you've got manatees, real animals, not consumer cartoon characters. And primeval forest, and gushing springs, and water so clear you can see into caves that go on forever. Behold! It's fucking Xanadu, right here before your very eyes!"

Coleridge is said to have based his description of Kubla Khan's Xanadu on William Bartram's description of Blue Spring. Alph, the sacred river, corresponds to the St. Johns that Blue Spring feeds into. The caverns, interconnected with the extensive aquifer system, are indeed "measureless to man." The spring itself discharges 104 million gallons of water daily – talk about your "ceaseless turmoil seething"! Bartram traveled through Florida in the mid 1770s on a natural history excursion – collecting plant specimens; drawing images; writing descriptions of the native flora, fauna, and folks; and along the way finding his soul. I can guarantee that you won't do that on a pilgrimage to the Rat God’s temple.

On an earlier Bartram trip, William's father John was less impressed with a nearby Florida spring. "Tastes like bilge-water," he observed. Elvis might as well have been John Bartram. "Where's the concession stand?" he asked, "I want a Coke."

This is point at which my story starts to go downhill fast. The point in which I have to ask myself not, "Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill," but "Why oh why didn't I stay away from all recreational drugs entirely"?

Elvis, the lady friend, and I stomped back down the boardwalk. Well, I stomped. We got the Cokes, sat in our lawn chairs, and Elvis pulled out brownies. I know better than to indulge in anything that comes from Cousin Buddy's kitchen: a) I learned that lesson when I was much younger, and b) the product is just a lot stronger these days. To reiterate: Buddy is a bad influence. But I was miffed at Elvis for thinking that the Real Florida would be better enjoyed under circumstances of Altered Reality. If I wouldn't take him to the Magic Kingdom, then by God, he would bring the Magic Kingdom to Blue Spring. While on one hand, my decision to eat the brownie makes no sense (why should I alter my reality too?). On the other hand it does. I was angry. The brownie had chocolate in it.

After a few minutes, or hours, or perhaps a week or two, I began to feel all Adrienne Rich inside. So much for Coleridge. I wanted to get some flippers and a mask, swim up the spring run, and dive into that cave. In Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into the Wreck,” she talks about getting back to the source, “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” Sometimes, not just when I’ve been eating Buddy’s brownies, I get to thinking that through those caves, beyond that aquifer, lies the source of all mystery. It’s not just Xanadu down there, but the origin of all life and the culmination of all death. I didn’t just make up this idea from drugs. Some of Florida’s native inhabitants believed that springs were sacred portals to the underworld. The difference between them and me is that they did not cut a ridiculous figure in rented snorkel gear trying repeatedly to nose-dive a cave with a bunch of ten-year-olds.

Rich talks about “a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear.” I often think that living in Florida is like reading that book. Florida history as written is all Paradise, Sunshine, and the Florida Dream. And sometimes, not just when I’ve been eating Buddy’s brownies, I get to thinking that if one could dive into the spring and explore the caves far enough one could time-travel backward to learn the names and stories that got left out.

On this excursion, however, I learned a more frightening lesson. The short version is this: Florida’s springs are growing more and more polluted. Many swimmers are coming away from the most popular springs – Ichetucknee, Wakulla, Wekiwa, Rainbow, Fanning, DeLeon, and Blue – with mysterious rashes. State officials suspect, but have not yet confirmed, a blue-green algae called Lyngbya wollei, which has multiplied because of pollution-spurred algae blooms.

Here is how I found out: I dove and dove and dove until the point of exhaustion. I wound up passing out in my lawn chair, a collapsed manatee of a nearly middle aged woman. Elvis and his lady friend (whose name I have not used because I suspect that her utter embarrassment over the entire fiasco precludes her from being part of his continued American Dream) performed manatee rescue services, depositing me safely back to my swamp, for which Elvis now swears upon the Holy Bible that I promised him a trip to – of all places – ANIMAL KINGDOM!, the most infernal of regions. My attempt to find “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth,” this time, resulted in a three-day hangover and a series of oozing, red, egg-shaped welts across my back. Still, you have not heard the last from me on a) our polluted life-source, and b) Florida’s book of myths where certain names do not appear.