Bad news out of Levy County

Horrible...happening all over Florida.

Progress or regress only time will tell

”The word "hammock" comes from the Spanish "hamaca," meaning "a highly arable type of soil." I wanted to name my book "Golden Apples," "Hamaca," and to indicate the triumphs and defeats that different kinds of men have encountered in this hammock country, but it was believed that the name would be so strange no one would buy the book.

I like to think of the Spaniards blazing their trails through the Florida hammocks. The hammocks were the same then as now, and will be the same forever if men can be induced to leave them alone.Hammock soil is dark and rich, made up of centuries of accumulation of humus from the droppings of leaves. The hammock is marked by its type of trees, and these are the live oak, the palm, the sweet gum, the holly, the ironwood and the hickory and magnolia. We have high hammock and low hammock, and oak hammock and palm hammock, and there is likely to be a body of water nearby. The piney woods and the flat-woods are more open and therefore perhaps more hospitable, in spite of their poorer soil and dryness, but the hamaca shares with marsh and swamp the great mystery of Florida.”

-M.K.Rawlings from Cross Creek.

My grandparents of the Depression/WWII generation assumed the Florida woods would always be. Seems to have been a common mentality of the older generations that grew up close to the woods.

Left to my own imperfect and sinful devices, some of my darkest curses would be reserved for the masses that treat Florida’s environment like a whore to screw and leave bloody in the ditch when they’re done. Just as the whore was someone’s daughter or sister, so Florida was someone’s pristine paradise. And just as the whoremonger would protect his daughter or sister from the same abuse the whoremonger happily visits on the whore he doesn’t respect, so the developers here look with vigilant nostalgia for their own woods and farmlands from the places they come from. Our Florida developer who gladly destroys the woods here would rage over someone paving over the family farm and surrounding woods in upstate New York.

Might be a good thing. Better opportunities for folks isn't always a bad thing. The world is growing and people need places to live.

They were supposed to build 2 more nukes in Levy Co. My old boss is from there and I was going to move there when they built them. But the dumbasses at Crystal River kinda screwed the pooch on that for all of us.