JULIUS CAESAR IN GAINESVILLE

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Boulware Springs

A sign at Boulware Springs announces that Boulware is Gainesville’s only artesion (sic) spring.  Boulware isn’t for swimming.  It used to be for drinking, until the city built a water treatment plant in 1948.

Had it not been for Boulware Springs, the University of Florida would have been located forty miles north,  in Lake City.   Gainesville was able to entice UF by promising free water in perpetuity, a promise on which it continues to make good.  If it weren’t for the spring, Gainesville would never have known Tim Tebow and two national football championships.  There would be no temporary RV cities on game days and there would be no such thing as Butler Plaza.  Butler Plaza, too, would have been in Lake City, as would all the college bars that attract coeds in shorts so short they look like panties.  Without Boulware Springs, life in Gainesville wouldn’t be quite so rewarding. No springs, no ball game. You can mull this interesting fact while staring down into Boulware’s pool, or you can close your eyes and imagine the springs as a Roman waterworks and yourself as Julius Caesar.

Boulware is at the head of the sixteen-mile Gainesville-Hawthorne Trail.  I tried a bit of the trail last year, but I overheated quickly and had to retreat to my car.  I have recently bought a fishing cap in an attempt to remedy this situation. I had a hard time deciding what kind of hat to buy.  Originally, I bought a wide-brimmed straw hat.   But the hat’s designer had taken a cue from antebellum millinery and the hat didn’t really work with shorts and t-shirts.  It made me feel like a split personality; from the neck up I was Scarlett O’Hara and from the neck down, especially when wearing khaki shorts, I was a Boy Scout.

Eventually I found something unisex and completely lacking in fashionable detail.  I have decided I like the no-nonsense hat.  It doesn’t look ridiculous when paired with my other hiking accessory, a hickory walking stick. When I modeled the Scarlett hat with the stick, it made me worry about finding my picture in a hiking magazine under “Hiking’s Fashion Idiots.”   I tossed the stick into the back of my car and I put the hat aside for the day that I might decide to become a Civil War reenactor.

THEY WALK AMONG US

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Biven's Arm, Gainesville Florida parks, gainesville florida tourism

Although I didn’t see any wild American alligators at Biven’s Arm Nature Park, I did see that The City of Gainesville has finished installing a spiffy new boardwalk and viewing platform.  This is an enormous improvement over the last time I was there, when the rotting platform was closed to the public.

Biven’s Arm Nature Park is not the most exciting park I’ve visited in Florida.  It’s small and its trails tend to be overgrown.  The major trail takes you by the rear of an apartment complex where you can easily see the plastic playground equipment for the complex’s youngest residents.  This is about where the trail narrows into a scribble of a path and where I did my infamous turn-tail last summer, before I had the sense to buy hiking boots.  The narrower the trail became, the more uncomfortable I got, until I rushed back to the sagging boardwalk and waited.

I recall feeling both guilty and relieved.

Biven’s Arm is a poor third or fourth cousin to the La Chua Trail, which is several miles down the road and is home to the best alligator viewing in Northern Florida.  But since I was not equipped to go hiking on Payne’s Prairie and since there were no parking spaces, I turned around and went to Biven’s Arm instead.  There was no one at Biven’s except a woman in a car who was yelling into a cell phone and gesticulating wildly.  She glared at me when I pulled my car right next to hers and she glared at me again when I left, although by this point she seemed to have calmed down and was now only giving the finger to me.

I was hoping that the viewing platform would be thrilling, but it simply turned out to be a nice place to sit in the sun.  There was a new (to me) sign warning about feeding the alligators, but try as I might, I didn’t see any.  There was only this reminder that they walk among us. Even in the absence of alligators, I didn’t see any reason not to just sit there and stare off into space.

It did occur to me that Biven’s Arm Nature Park might be a great place to ponder life’s imponderables.  For instance, why is it that when you are installing a piece of software, the default license-agreement choice is always “No, I do not agree.” Isn’t this unnecessary negativity?  If you are like I am and you whip through installations and never read instructions, then you end up with this default choice and no download. It makes you look like a troublemaker.  I believe that software manufacturers keep an IP address book of such subversives and turn their names over to the government.

Wouldn’t it be much nicer to have the enthusiastic “Yes, I agree” selected, perhaps with an exclamation point for solidarity?  Isn’t that a much more pleasant outlook?

Maybe they think that if they took this positive route, they’d be accused of forcing their agenda.  We can’t all agree on everything.  We might think that Adobe was trying to rob us of our freedom of choice. We haven’t traditionally liked this and we have a long history of rebelling against being told what to do.  Yes!  The negative is the better opfion.

With this thought in my head, I went back to my car and elected to drive out of Biven’s Arm Nature Park through the one-way entrance.

Biven’s Arm Nature Park:  **