Hidden Spring

It was July in the Florida heat when I found a hidden spring off of the Weeki Wachee River, one of many tributaries feeding into the Gulf of Mexico. I wasn’t more than eleven years old but I felt like a conquistador. I crept carefully through the overgrowth that hid the spring so as to not leave a path to my treasure. A solitary boulder jutted out of the crystal clear pool, tempting me to swim to it.

The water, on the other hand, stayed sixty-eight degrees year round. On a hundred degree day that was enough to turn my lips blue and cause my teeth to keep rhythm to some tune I couldn’t hear. But I was a wise eleven; I knew I could take on the water’s frigidity and make it to the rock. There I was rewarded with soft moss-covered warmth as I climbed. The boulder was my very own mountain, I ruled this land. I sat and waited for the water to calm back to its picture perfect reflection.

It was from this elevated position I noticed a gray mass in a part of the spring I rarely ventured. I sat, more scared than interested, and watched the manatee’s nose break the surface. She swam ever closer to my water-locked fortress. My anxiety subsided when I realized that she hadn’t seen me. I could make out her plump body through the transparent water as she rose to the surface and then fell gently back to the rich, seaweed-covered bottom. I tried to look elsewhere, but my gaze was fixed on this solitary wild thing. While the sun and the breeze dried my hair, I wondered if she had come to the deep pool looking for others. I had learned in school they usually traveled together. But besides the occasional reflection of a minnow, I saw only the darkness of her scarred hide.

She came to the surface again and stayed longer this time, the whiskers protruding from her nose moving rapidly as her breaths intensified. I stood up on my throne and looked around, but for what I wasn’t sure. Had an alligator found its way into my secret lagoon? Without warning she returned to the depths of the pool as if something had pulled her under. Only her grey mass against the greens and sands of the bottom was visible. The azure water quickly turned crimson. I began to cry, something was in there with her and I was stranded in my castle, surrounded by the moat that held them both. I couldn’t see any alligators; I had gotten good at spotting them underwater and along the banks. I didn’t want to die here where no one would ever find me and stood on tiptoe on the rock’s highest peak.

When the crimson faded to pink enough for my eyes to focus on the bottom, her gray mass was still there and moving, but not alone. The sea cow returned to the surface to take a breath and I felt myself inhaling along with her. When a second, slightly smaller, nose broke the surface I gasped. Pink gave way to translucence and then I saw it, a baby had been born. I sat there crying, baking in the sun awhile longer until the two had made their way back to a part of the spring I rarely ventured to. Then I swam as if my life depended on it back to the mainland. At home, my parents shrugged off the story as a child’s exaggeration.

As the oil in the Gulf encroaches on the shores of Florida, I can’t help but think about that manatee and her calf. When the blackness reaches that pool, where will she have left to go to bear more young, and where will her calf go to make her a grandmother? I wonder too where my children will be able to sneak off to where they can witness something as extraordinary without having to pay an admission price. I have that same feeling now as when that manatee sank to the bottom of the pool, and can only hope that this time those waters will clear again.

—Mandie Rainwater, contributing writer to UnspOILed

Mandie Rainwater is a non-traditional student at Florida Gulf Coast University, and is married with two kids. She is a secondary education major and active volunteer with C.A.R.E.S. Suicide Prevention. She writes for the FGCU student paper, Eagle News, and was more recently a contributing writer to UnspOILed.

Photographs by Mandie Rainwater.

[Read more A Tribute to the Gulf Coast]