For any of you who read Marjorie Rawlings' "Cross Creek," this book will be covering familiar ground. The author, J.T. Glisson grew up less than 200 yrd from Mrs. Rawlings' home on Cross creek. I've always had a keen interest in "old Florida" and this book more than sated my appetite. There is no shortage of gators, snakes and skeeters along the creek that links Lake Orange with Lake Lochloosa. The author paints a vivid picture of the palmetto's, the live oak and a myriad of other flora between the lakes. The book begins in the 1920's when this part of North Central Florida was wild and isolated. While some of the people along the "Creek" had small herds of cattle or cultivated a few acres of orange trees, fishing was the main source of income and the major source of fun. A big part of the fun was the cat and mouse games played between the fishermen and the game wardens. The colorful characters are both funny and tragic. If you yearn for the days when life was simple, when you knew and trusted your neighbors, when the oustide world ie, the government (other than the game wardens), did not interfere in your daily existence, then read this book and be taken back to that time.
"I had met only two or three of the neighboring crackers when I realized that the isolation had done something to these people...They had a primal quality against a background of jungle hammock moss hung against the tremendous silence of the scrub country. The only ingredient of their lives are the elemental things". Marjorie Rawlings