It takes 20 years for rainwater to filter through the winding crevices of the aquifer before emerging from a spring. Twenty years after riding in her dad’s glass-bottom boat, Tarryn Nichols returns to Silver Springs to reflect on how Florida’s physical and historical landscape has changed.
Editor’s Note: Dispatches from a Sinking State is a contributor series from The Marjorie featuring first-person accounts of the environmental changes Floridians are witnessing across the state. This essay was funded by the Schooner Foundation.
There is a picture of me on my dad’s glass bottom boat, back when he was Captain Steve. It’s May 2006, and I am 3 years old. I’m wearing a white button-down shirt someone must have tucked me into that morning. My clothes match the white pressed, collared short-sleeve my dad is wearing, except for the epaulets on his shoulders.
We are at the head of Silver Springs, in view of the loading dock behind us, and I’m pointing at something out of frame. I don’t remember what it was I was pointing at now. All I can remember is the color of the water.
Now at 23, having just graduated from college, I keep the photo as a bookmark in Gary Monroe’s “Silver Springs,” a compilation of gorgeous underwater photography used to advertise the park through its golden age.
The book is tucked into my satchel as I shuffle down a rickety metal ramp into the belly of a glass bottom boat.
Our tour guide at the end of April happens to be another Captain Steve — Steve Davis. He introduces himself as I slide onto the varnished wooden bench, wrapped in the faint green glow of the walls as the cabin fills to max capacity. As we start our tour, Captain Steve tells us that he first came to Silver Springs when he was 8. Back then, he believed that the underwater statues at the head spring were really Poseidon, Zeus, and Hades. It wasn’t until later that he found out they were made of fiberglass.
The water is so beautiful it makes my eyes burn.
That jewel-like blue, with rolling patterns of light tattooing the quartz sand. Looking down through the glass, with my back to the sun, I imagine some deity spilling a kaleidoscope into the basin.
The eggshell bottom is emptier than I expected. Around us, it seems as if there are more kayakers than fish in the water this Mother’s Day.
Every time the boat putters to a stop and we lose the breeze, beads of sweat form beneath my bangs. I wear the humidity like a suit. People whip their heads from window to floor at Captain Steve’s heedings, snapping iPhone pictures of cormorants basking in the cloudy sun. The swimming birds look like they have their wings open in worship.
When I look back into the boat, my gaze lands on a penny resting in the glass trough. I wonder if a child had mistaken Silver Springs for a giant wishing well.
All of Florida used to be underwater.
As climates changed, aquatic creatures died, and their bodies transformed into the limestone rock that cradles our freshwater reserves. Hundreds of cubic tons of water surged out of the 1,000-foot thick aquifer through wide chasms that opened in this limestone, forming first-magnitude springs such as Silver Springs.
The Silver River Museum displays a cross-section visualization of the Floridan Aquifer next to a massive mastodon fossil and historical exhibits showcasing canoes and wares of the Seminole peoples.
I sat down in the library next door with Scott Mitchell, the museum’s director, as he shared some of the state’s lore with me. As we spoke, a regal turkey with a bright red beard bobbed past the building.
“Hey, Dennis, come look at this gobbler,” Mitchell said, beckoning a fellow employee over to the picture window.
I commented on its boldness, which surprised me as much as the two squirrels who locked eyes with me when I stepped out of my Kia Soul a few minutes earlier.
“They know that they’re safe because they’re in a state park,” Mitchell said.
Wooly mammoths and mastodons roamed the area during the Ice Age, evidenced by the bones, teeth, and spear points divers have found embedded in the riverbed. The waterways and surrounding land were a lush prehistoric hunting ground treasured by the Timucuan trade-based chiefdom. After the Second Seminole War in the 1800s, colonial settlers poured into the region and forced out Indigenous peoples, and transformed Silver Springs into a new transportation hub.
When I visited Silver Springs this April, I spent the whole afternoon there, really looking at it. The last time I’d been was a kayaking trip in the winter of my freshman year of high school. It’s just 15 minutes from my home near City Hall, but I never liked coming to this side of town.
Silver Springs is magic, and now I have the eyes to see it.
The signs for the Silver Springs Pawn & Gun and Silver Springs Restaurant already looked like junkyard relics. Traffic along East Silver Springs Boulevard seemed to flow mostly to Walmart, Circle K, and Burger King. I winced when my car hit a pothole.
While turning past the brick-paved pyramid of the state park’s entrance, I noticed some were blackened with mold. It reminded me of a landmark fire I learned about in school that charred five square blocks of downtown Ocala in 1883, leading residents to rebuild the agrarian town as “Brick City.”
Once parked, I longboarded through the vacant overflow lot, dodging spiky sweetgum pods and cracks in the concrete. When I reached the wooden boardwalk, I stopped, mouth agape like a cartoon character.
Giant cypress trees rose on either side of the entrance like columns of the Pantheon.
The boardwalk planks were carefully cut, as if with an X-acto knife, around the trunk of a cypress. It made me wistful. I thought about how stepping around the lives of other beings is something humans are uniquely suited to do.
I pushed past the glass bottom boat docks, keeping the glistening water on my right. Every time I spotted an informative marker, I dragged my hiking boots to a halt in front of the display. One read “Silver Springs’ First People” with text briefly summarizing the 12,000 years of Timucuan and Seminole life in the area. No villages had been discovered near the spring, but the place was teeming with evidence of ancient people cherishing the vital source of water. A ruler stretched across the bottom of the plaque with a “History Fun Fact: If the state’s history of human occupation was represented by a 12-inch ruler, Indigenous people by themselves would cover the first 11 ½ inches!”
In 1924, Carl Ray and W.M. Davidson signed a 50-year lease to develop the sacred land and waters into a theme park.
They wrung the full tourism potential from Silver Springs Nature Theme Park in its golden age: Hollywood blockbusters used the spring as a striking set, Ross Allen wrestled alligators at his Reptile Institute, a jungle cruise speedboat sliced through the Silver River, and a replica Seminole village was built, staffed by Seminoles who sold handicrafts and traditional souvenirs to visitors.
The opening of Walt Disney World in May 1969 overshadowed the allure of the clear waters like a scourge of algae as tourists sailed past the attraction on southbound Interstate 75, bypassing Ocala entirely.
This drastic drop-off in tourism likely protected the fragile ecosystem of the spring, Mitchell said. But growing up, I never heard the end of it. When the twentieth century dawned, Silver Springs was “Florida’s Original Tourist Attraction,” but by the time I was in elementary school, its sun-faded signs and massive, empty parking lots had been seared into my memory.
After my dad left his job as a boat captain, we never went back there as a family. I feel a sense of grief when I think of how a place teeming with life and history was reduced into a scar of what once was.
Silver Springs is magic, and now I have the eyes to see it.
About a week later, I’m again on a boat in the springs, now with the man whose wildlife shots are plastered across the park’s gift shop windows.
Mark Emery, a filmmaker behind “Out of the Mist: the Silver River Story,” grew up so close to the landmark he called it his “backyard.”
“Cap, potato up ahead,” said our boat driver into his microphone, stalling the engine. I looked over the edge to see a pale blob floating through short forests of green sedge, their tresses waving gently in the current. It was a manatee.
“When we did our trips in the 60s and 70s and 80s,” Emery said, scanning the water, “there weren’t any manatees in here.”
The first time he saw one at night, he mistook it for a beluga whale.
Like the mangroves and snook and pythons, manatees are venturing farther north as waterways warm with every pass around the sun. Pods navigate past the Ocklawaha River’s dam through the Buckman Lock to access the eelgrass-rich habitat of Silver Springs.
The freshwater that sustains this aquatic ecosystem once seemed infinite, but Silver Springs has lost at least 32% of its groundwater flow in the past century. Powerful pumps at the local bottling facility, acquired by Niagara Bottling this year, siphon thousands of gallons of the spring’s lifeblood daily.
“They shouldn’t have any permit to do that right next to the most important spring in the world,” Emery said. “If you go down there with us underwater, that main spring is 85 feet long. And you can’t hardly swim into it. Right now, you can because there’s no flow.”
Silver Springs had a millenia of uninterrupted flow to nourish its vast web of ecology. After losing a third of its capacity from drought and overuse, the river no longer overflows with fish, and the forest is no longer overrun with game, as early travelers described the “earthly paradise.” The whole food chain changes to adapt, said Emery, but it’s never the same.
With the spring’s beauty dimmed, the park cut costs over time by trimming glass bottom boat tours from a 1 hour adventure, to 45 minutes, to the current half hour ride.
Emery moved to Ocala back when the place was all cow farms and orange groves. He and his childhood friends would jump into the spring on hot summer days, watching out for the passing jungle cruise. It wasn’t yet illegal to feed the monkeys, or for the glass bottom boat captains to throw balls of bread into the water so patrons could cheer and bet on brawling catfish like a football game.
“This was Disney World for this part of Florida for a long, long time,” Emery said.
The captain stalled the engine once more as we drifted by a large brood of ducklings, freshly hatched with their mother in tow. They paddled ahead with unrestrained glee, bobbing on the ripples created by their fuzzy siblings.
I suddenly remembered how it felt to ride my beat-up bike through a wooded area behind the railroad tracks, racing kids from down the block. Green spaces, so wild-seeming at the time, have since sprouted six-story apartment complexes. I wonder if mastodons had once roamed my neighborhood long before I moved in. If enormous flocks of cranes blacked out the sky like a solar eclipse as they soared past. If other kids had lived and played where I did, when Ocala was still Ocali, meaning “Big Hammock” in Timucuan.
At the age of 5, I was bored of watching wildlife.
Before we moved to Ocala, we lived an hour away in Fort McCoy. I would spend many afternoons splayed out on my belly in a slanted patch of sun, reading fantasy as flocks of sandhill cranes stoically nodded past my window. I dreamed of shooting out of the code-violating metal slides of Wild Waters, a now demolished water park at Silver Springs, like a pinball. I had spent my life up until that point gazing into a languid pond of lilypads and catfish, waiting for something to happen. It was an exciting event when a helicopter tried to siphon our pond water to put out a wildfire in the neighboring Ocala National Forest. I felt let down when it hovered away to find a larger body of water.
I was a kid with a gloomy view of Florida shaped by my parents’ complaints. My mother struggled with culture shock, missing the tightknit apartments of Shanghai as we grew up walled in by towering pines. My father spun tales about an unspoiled Florida I had never experienced as he cursed at bad drivers on Highway 315. I thought there might not be anything good left about this world.
We moved to the core of Ocala a couple years later, to be closer to the hospital where my mother worked the night shift. Somehow, the sleepy town seemed as uneventful as the forest. I could still see stars from my backyard, even though the night air was punctuated by police sirens and the soft trill of passing trains.
It’s a relief to drive to Silver Springs on my own.
To walk past the sun-faded signs, onto the new boardwalk where a Rhesus monkey clambers through the treetops and drops a half-bitten, unripe mulberry at my feet. Legend says the monkeys were brought in for a 1939 Tarzan movie, but the truth is that a boat operator released them to entertain tourists, not expecting their numbers to thrive.
I sit between strangers on a glass bottom boat ride as we drift over the ruins of a dugout canoe. As the boat glides back to rest at the loading dock, my eyes fall upon the penny again, then drift down to the silhouette of my face and hunched shoulders. Soon, there won’t be any more pennies to wish upon, I realize, as the magic well of Silver Springs fades.
“Something folks don’t know is that a glass bottom boat is the largest tip jar in the world,” Captain Steve tells us, beckoning to the trough as fistfuls of change and dollar bills clattered against the glass.
It takes 20 years for rainwater to be filtered through the winding crevices of the aquifer before being pumped out of a spring. It has been 20 years since I was on my dad’s boat in May of 2006, and now I have returned to the head spring, in sight of the loading dock growing closer.
In the photo from my childhood, I wonder what caught my attention that day.
Tarryn Nichols is a writer based in central Florida who is passionate about telling stories that close the gap between humans and the environment. She joined the UF Health Communications team shortly after studying journalism and landscape architecture at the University of Florida. Before stepping into her current role, Tarryn produced and edited content for GATOR Magazine, Atrium Magazine, and the Florida Student News Watch. She loves spending time in nature with her rescued Australian Shepherd, Aki.
Cover: Postcard featuring people feeding the black bass at Silver Springs, Florida. Image courtesy Curt Teich & Co.
