11
LAKE NOKOBEE WAS at that time one of the least developed bodies of water on the Gulf of Mexico coastal plain. Middling in size at twelve hundred acres, remote in location, it was surrounded by privately owned land still protected from suburban creep and several lakeside cottages on the eastern shore. Its waters, fed by small tributary streams and breakout seepage of groundwater, were unpolluted and clear. In sunlight it was possible to catch glimpses of gar and spiny soft-shell turtles as they glided past schools of bream hidden in submerged stands of eelgrass. Five medium-sized alligators, their territories well spaced out along Lake Nokobee's shores, sunned themselves on the banks. Because their kind had learned well from centuries of persecution, even just the distant approach of a human was enough to send them crashing into the water and out of sight. At night following heavy rains, congo eels, a kind of giant aquatic salamander, prowled through the overflow waters in search of crayfish. Six kinds of water snakes, including the poisonous cottonmouth moccasin, hunted through the shoreline vegetation and shallows for frogs and small fish. Lake Nokobee was an unspoiled aquatic ecosystem, unchanged from what it might have been at this spot five thousand years before.
At the northern tip of Lake Nokobee a narrow creek flowed out through a thicket of broadleaf cattails and primrosewillow. The unnamed stream traveled onward in the shade of a dozen species of scrub hardwood along its banks and the interlacing canopies of hardwood trees higher above. Its waters meandered thence north to join the Chicobee River, a tributary of the Perdido River, whose broad strong waters then flowed straight south to define the Alabama-Florida border all the way to Perdido Bay.
The shoreline of Lake Nokobee bulged outward into a dozen small inlets. Each was lined with aquatic grasses and sedges and thin strips of hardwood thickets. The largest, located at the lake's southern edge, was Dead Owl Cove--or Dead Owl Slough, as some old-timers still called it. The name of the cove, which, granted, is peculiar even by Southern standards, was widely believed to be just a mapmaker's whimsy--or just as likely an early cartographic misprint of Dale Arle, or even Dale Errol. There had been both Arles and Errols in nearby Jepson County, Alabama, since before what often was still elliptically called The War. Dale Arle (or Errol) himself was a somewhat shadowy figure, who in the late 1700s explored northward by skiff from the Gulf Coast along the floodplain forest of the Blackwater River, running down east of the Escambia and parallel to it. According to oral tradition--any possible written documents were destroyed in the Jepson County Courthouse fire of 1883--he camped for a while at the southern edge of Lake Nokobee. No one knows why he went there, if he really did, or what he hoped to find.
Dead Owl Cove--too late to call it anything else now--was at the end of a dirt road that led out of cornfields into one of the last remaining tracts of old-growth longleaf pine.
One of the most prominent forms of wildlife at the cove, if I may stretch that loose zoological term a bit, was a kind of ant species whose colonies built conspicuous mound nests along the banks of the lake. The species was and remains widespread but very locally distributed across the Gulf Coastal Plain. It could be found associated with longleaf pine in sites all around Lake Nokobee, with the highest concentration at Dead Owl Cove. The lakeside soil, a well-aerated mix of sand, clay, and humus, was ideal for native plant and insect life. The exposure of the nests to the sun's warmth in its open spaces gave the ants an early start in the season and each morning on warm, dry days.
These anthills are special to the history I have chosen to record. They were to play a principal role in the life of Raphael Semmes Cody, and, even more remarkably, in the ultimate survival or destruction of the Nokobee environment itself.
The relative openness of the Dead Owl Cove shore was not due to frequent human activity. It was both ancient and natural. The tract around the cove was a tongue of the much larger stretch of longleaf pine habitat that stretched west from the lake all the way into the William Ziebach National Forest. The grassy high pine woodland was more savanna than forest, with scattered pines of varying girth, the older ones with flat tops and the youngest forming clusters on the landscape. The space between the pines was filled with bunches of wire grass and a veritable garden of ground plants--croton, bluestem, dogfennel, threeawn, beargrass, Florida dogwood, and many more, all bestowed delightful names by English-speaking settlers. Pond pine, myrtle-leaved holly, titi, tall gallberry, and pond cypress clumped together to form occasional low-bottomed, seasonally flooded hardwood islands called domes. Sparse it may seem on casual examination, the longleaf pine savanna is nevertheless biologically one of the richest botanical environments of North America. As many as 150 kinds of plants, almost all located in the ground-level cover, can be found in a single hectare. Many of these species are endemic to this habitat. That is, they are found in no other place on earth.
The Nokobee tract harbored in full array the signature animal species of the longleaf pine savanna. There were the bobwhite quail, beloved of hunters with retrievers and shotguns. Their numbers were declining, ironically not from overkill but by the assault of increasing numbers of coyotes and other predators that flourish around human populations. Also on the list were spadefoot toads, nocturnal cat-eyed ambushers of ground-dwelling insects. They gathered in rain pools to breed during a short season, summoning one another with wailing calls that sounded like a chorus of the damned. Gopher tortoises dug long burrows that were miniature ecosystems all on their own, and were the preferred home of indigo snakes, gopher frogs, and strange creatures such as a kind of ant that feeds on the eggs of subterranean spiders.
Among the inhabitants of the Nokobee tract were species that were rare, even endangered. The most famous was the red-cockaded woodpecker, which built its nests within cavities high in large longleaf pines. The most impressive in size and appearance, aside from the occasional bear that might wander through, was the heavily muscled indigo snake, its length reaching seven feet, its body blackish gunmetal blue. The indigos emerged from the tortoise burrows and consumed a variety of prey that included smaller members of their own species. At the opposite extreme among the reptiles in size and appearance was the mole skink, a subterranean lizard with vestigial legs, reaching a maximum length of six inches, and resembling an armored earthworm. So secretive was the species that it was almost never seen except by expert naturalists.
To this distinctive part of the longleaf pine fauna can be added three kinds of ants: the spider-egg eater of the tortoise burrows; a species that lived in pine trunks and canopy and served as a major source of food for the red-cockaded woodpeckers; and finally, the mound-building ants, whose colonies lived on the shores of Lake Nokobee.
The exquisitely beautiful and biologically rich pine flatland at Lake Nokobee was only a tiny remnant of what was once the dominant habitat of the Gulf of Mexico coastal region. For thousands of years it covered sixty percent of the plain from the Carolinas to Texas. Its rolling expanse was interrupted only by hardwood forest strongholds, principally the tributary ravines of rivers, streams, steepheads cut deep in sand by outbreaks of groundwater, and the cypress-dominated floodplains of the principal watercourses. There were also the countless domes growing in and around moist depressions that filled with rainwater in the winter and dried out by late spring. Stumpholes, the last decaying remnants of fallen pines, were homes to a small fauna all of their own.
For Indian tribes the longleaf pine savanna was a source of life. They could hunt the buffalo and white-tailed deer that teemed within it. For the first Spanish explorers it was a highway through the Florida Panhandle along which they thrust their way with horse and armor into unknown lands north and west. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the flatland yielded much of its space to the early English and American farmers. Then, following the Civil War and on through the next half century, the magnificent tree species that formed its centerpiece and helped sustain its integrity was almost all cut down. Longleaf pine has the misfortune of being both easily harvested and ranked with redwood, cypress, and white pine as one of the finest of North American timber species. Great fortunes were made by land and mill owners from its destruction. The timber barons enriched investors in both the Southern and the Northern cities. They built plantation-style mansions and helped lift the South from its deep poverty. When they were done, however, they left behind a wasteland of stumps overgrown by weedy stands of slash and loblolly pine, among which grew up an often impenetrable hardwood brush. Such was the secondary growth that surrounded the pristine longleaf pine area at Dead Owl Cove and most of the eastern perimeter of Lake Nokobee. But to the west of the lake on the Nokobee tract and into the Ziebach National Forest for almost two miles, the longleaf pine grassland remained close to its original state.
Odd as it may seem, fire was and remains the friend of the ancient longleaf savanna. Without human interference, lightning strikes set off fires at frequent intervals, which then spread slowly through the surface detritus. The richly diverse natural ground vegetation not only survived the low-intensity burn-offs, it needed them every several years to sustain growth and a dominant presence. This was the phenomenon that I and Alicia, my wife--and an experienced ecologist herself--studied for so many years on the Nokobee tract. We were able to confirm with detailed records that when natural fires are suppressed, the invading trees and shrubs set seed and start to overgrow the original flatland ground vegetation. Within a decade, the dense scrub takes over, dominated by slash and loblolly pine, water and laurel oak, sweetgum, and a host of other shrub and small tree species. The new woodland builds up a thick litter of fallen leaves and tree branches. Much of the layer is suspended high enough off the ground to be well aerated and easily dried out. It becomes superb tinder, so that when a fire is started it can flare into a wildfire, raging outward, clawing up to the canopies of the smaller trees, and leaping roads and streams to bring biological destruction to a vast area.
The longleaf pine savanna, renewed almost continuously by lightning-sparked ground fires, has existed as an ecosystem for thousands, possibly millions of years. Its stability and equitable conditions have allowed the evolution of an abundance of ground flora and animals closely adapted to it. Once the cycle of ground fires and regrowth is broken, however, it is lost and cannot be easily restored. It is fragile, and the last of it might easily be wiped away.