THE CITIZEN OF NOKOBEE
2
IN ALL MY years at Florida State University I never met a student more devoted to nature than Raphael Semmes Cody. When he arrived there as an eighteen-year-old freshman, he was already a practiced naturalist. In spite of our generational difference in age, we became fast friends. I had known Raff, as he was usually called, almost all his life. We met at the unspoiled environment of Lake Nokobee, located in central South Alabama close to the border of the Florida Panhandle. It was a world few knew existed and fewer still could speak of with any understanding, a world that we shared and loved. I was the scientist and historian of this place, Raff the boy who in a sense grew up there. His intimacy with Nokobee provided the moral compass that was to guide his remarkable life. I was his mentor, yet in many ways he knew Nokobee far better than I or anyone else, and he cherished it the more.
My name is Frederick Norville. I am a professor of ecology at Florida State University, though now emeritus. For thirty summers my wife, Alicia, and I traveled up from Tallahassee to Nokobee for relaxation and research. My scientific interest in the place was not the lake itself but the old-growth tract of longleaf pine savanna that stretched from its shore over a mile westward to the edge of the William Ziebach National Forest. Nokobee was a private reserve, one of the few in pristine condition remaining on the Gulf of Mexico coastal plain.
It was there we met Ainesley Cody and his wife, Marcia, who came up from nearby Clayville with their little son Raphael for weekend picnics. Whenever my work and weather allowed, we sat together on folding chairs around a card table and shared sandwiches, potato chips, and MoonPies, and sipped cold beer. In time we came to know one another like family.
It was on these occasions that Raphael, while little more than a toddler, developed a fascination for the wildlife of Nokobee. Without playmates and deprived of television and the other encumbrances--one could more sagely say freed from them--he turned to the mysteries of Nokobee's natural environment. His parents allowed him to explore freely and to bring me whatever creatures he could capture to find out what they were. They warned him to stay strictly away from the water and from snakes. That covered almost all the risks a child might take.
Among the treasures Raphael collected were several kinds of salamanders, boldly striped, spotted, or banded; chorus frogs, whose mating calls sounded like a fingernail scraped along the teeth of a comb; metallic-blue damselflies that bobbed through the air at the sunlit water's edge like flying gems on a string; and giant lubber grasshoppers that could be tamed to sit on your hand.
Once Raphael entered grammar school, he began to venture farther along the Nokobee Trail, and fearlessly. He brought me spiders of various kinds, small and harmless, plucked from their webs and transported in his cupped hands. Once he returned with a Nephila silk spider nearly the size of his hand, partly wrapped in the web from which it had been seized, its legs waving and fangs gnashing. He held the monster by its long abdomen between thumb and finger--aware that he should not allow the fangs to touch his skin, the same instinct that keeps the hand away from the mouth of a snarling dog. I didn't tell his parents about the incident. Perhaps that was wrong, but I was afraid they would cancel his expeditions altogether. Instead, I showed him how to scoop spiders and centipedes into glass jars without touching them at all.
I thoroughly enjoyed teaching Raphael. He was a good kid, and he grew quickly in knowledge and enthusiasm. I cannot say, however, that he was a born naturalist. Perhaps no one really ever is. I know I wasn't. But of one thing I am certain: whatever predisposition he had to become a naturalist was richly nurtured by the wild environment of the Lake Nokobee tract. All children have a bug period, unless they are frightened or otherwise discouraged by adults. I exited my bug period to become a botanist. Raphael never left. He stayed and simply widened his attention to become an all-around naturalist, with an interest in plants and animals both, in insects and invertebrates especially, and in Nokobee as a whole.
Because Alicia and I had no children of our own, Raff became a surrogate son to us. To our delight his parents encouraged him to call us Uncle Fred and Aunt Alicia, a gesture of exceptional friendship and trust in this part of the country. From one summer to the next, with each period between when I was away teaching at Florida State University, I watched his mind opening like the flowering of a plant seen in a time-lapse movie.
From the beginning I also sensed a strangeness in Raphael. He had a calmness of temperament unusual for a boy. He combined it with the ability to focus intently on a single subject for long stretches of time.
Raphael came to regard the Nokobee tract as a part of his home, and his personal space. By the time of his graduation from high school, he had become an amateur expert on scores of species in the local fauna and flora. He achieved a remarkable store of experience for someone his age. I thought that he would surely become a scientist, perhaps a great one.
But Raphael Semmes Cody, as it turned out, was to set upon a very different course. You may say it is impossible to predict the outcome of any person's life, including even one's own. Yet it seems to me that Raphael was bound for a life of achievement at a high level, if not in science then in some other field, but either way connected to the environment. I believe that, had I more logically pieced together all I learned of the influences acting upon him, I might have guessed correctly what he was to become, and why he ended up that way. I admit that this is probably just a conceit of hindsight. In any case, what really happened is important at several levels, and I think well worth the telling.