I did a bit of complaining, but for Alexa the odor had an effect like Proust cracking into his doughnut. I turned on a faucet, which unleashed an aroma as though an egg-salad pipeline had ruptured in the room. Ours was a squat two-bedroom bunker of cinder block the color of Crest toothpaste, and it was, admittedly, a little less than I’d expected for the uncrackerly sum of $152. The lodge consists of seven humble cabins arrayed under a hangar of live oak limbs and echoes with the lusty belchings of bullfrogs in the nearby creek.
The Yearling’s owners also operate the nearby Secret River Lodge Cabins, where we’d booked accommodations for the night. We ordered the “cracker appetizer plate,” which included fried mushrooms, fried ingots of gator tail, fried green tomatoes and fried frog legs whose girth and musculature would have put a speed skater to shame. A local blues musician presided in the dining room, crooning to his dobro, while diners tucked into a menu of traditional fare. A varnished gator hide, a Confederate flag and a rack of historic outboard motors trimmed the restaurant’s walls. A plain, roadside building of sun-scorched boards, the Yearling, we found, was extremely serious about its rustic bona fides. Our destination was the Yearling Restaurant (“Home of Cracker Cooking”), named after Rawlings’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Cross Creek - home of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the novelist and chronicler of the Depression-era cracker monde who died in 1953 - could probably be described as the Florida Cracker Capital of the World. In north Florida, “cracker,” a reverent sobriquet for the area’s swamp-dwelling pioneers, is far from an epithet. But at Alexa’s suggestion we’d made plans to stay the night 20 minutes to the east, in the settlement of Cross Creek.Īlexa is an editor who lives in North Carolina but who proudly descends from Florida “cracker” stock. Past Micanopy’s antiques strip sits the Herlong Mansion, a bed-and-breakfast of commanding elegance - Corinthian columns the size of grain silos, verandas exploding with ferns.
“It’s one of the few places in the state that hasn’t been ruined yet.” “This is Florida like it used to be,” said Monica Beth Fowler, the owner and operator of Delectable Collectables, a shop specializing in rare cameos. And while Micanopy surely has one of the highest number of antique shops per capita in the nation, the town is sufficiently rust streaked and mold spangled that the place somehow pulls off the feat of not seeming twee. Horses that are not on theme-park salaries stalk rolling acreage beside the highway.Īs dusk ripened, we stopped in Micanopy, a one-boulevard town of aged brick and log buildings, a place so steeped in old-style charm it’s hard to stand on the main drag without a faint anxiety that at any minute movie studio security guards are going to roust you off the set. Artesian springs the color of glacial ice spill from the earth. Tire dealerships give way to boiled-peanut stands. A green edema of hills rises from the coastal flatness.
If you are one of those people who has given up on Florida, I encourage you to venture about an hour and a half north of the Magic Kingdom, into Marion and Alachua Counties, where Orlando’s ravening grid falters and the landscape stops looking like something loaded off a truck. There is something wondrously upside-down about a state to which people flock, purportedly for its climate and natural loveliness, but where most of that loveliness has been drained and covered in Rooms to Go’s and Scratch and Dent Worlds, and where most residents feel about air-conditioning the way astronauts feel about spaceships. According to assorted tourist literature, the state simultaneously contains the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World (Plant City), the Indoor Foliage Capital of the World (Apopka) and the Lightning Capital of the World (the whole state), among lots of other Capitals of the World, including the Cigar, the Nudist, the Possum, the Shark Attack, the Golf, the Phosphates, the Scientology and the Sponge.ĭriving through the Fabulous Fun Capital of the World (Orlando), I was struck by the thought that Florida should probably add to the list a planetary title for human perversity. It takes many fingers to count all of the allurements Florida claims for itself.
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