Kids Approve of Florida Without Theme Parks

I don’t know whether they should pin medals on us or run us out of town. One thing is sure: Parents of grade-school kids who survive a trip to Central Florida without hitting Disney World, Epcot Center, Universal Studios, Magic Kingdom, the Glass Bottom Boats or any other theme park deserve something.

That’s right, four days with an 8- and a 10-year-old, no creampuff diversions to show for it and not a single child-abuse complaint. “Dad,” they even said as we headed for the airport, “can we come here again?”

“Here” was Gillis Lake in Hawthorne, an unheralded 80-acre freshwater pothole in the lush, sunwashed Florida lake country, where the bass, bluegills and crappies do not jump in the boat, cartoon characters don’t pop out from palm trees and where the nearest thing to a roller coaster was the emotional one my son endured the first night there.

He’d been told not to walk barefoot outdoors out of respect for rattlesnakes and water moccasins. That was no problem until the sun went down, the lights went out and snake-strewn scenarios began playing in his head.

About 9:30 p.m., he slipped into the bedroom of the sister he lives to terrorize and inquired meekly, “Can I sleep here?” Ah, reality, humbler of us all.

We never did see a poisonous snake, although we kept an eye out. Nor did we glimpse any armadillos, which neighbor Art Stephenson set traps for in our yard, or alligators, though three reside at Gillis Lake, or giant largemouth bass, although Stephenson’s wife, Ginny, landed a four-pounder one evening.

But there was much to watch. At sunset, bats flew low over the water gathering mosquitoes while bass boiled the surface slurping bait. A great blue heron stalked the shallows, piercing minnows with its rapier beak. An osprey wheeled overhead, shrieking as it hunted for fish.

Across the lake, a heavyset guy in a tippy johnboat paddled out each evening to a nest of dead trees he’d sunk off the end of his pier, snapped the pop-top on a 16-ounce Coors Light and began dunking minnows with a cane pole, hoping for a big crappie or two to bite.

“Speckled perch, we call ‘em here,” said Ginny Stephenson of the crappies. “They have real soft mouths. You can’t jerk them out or you’ll lose them every time.”

That was a lesson learned the hard way when we putt-putted over to try our luck. The heavyset guy welcomed us and we enjoyed almost immediate success when Willie’s bobber went under with a vigorous tug.

He worked the fish out of the branches and brought it alongside the boat. It was a monster crappie all right, more than a pound, which got me excited enough that I forgot all about the landing net and tried to horse it over the rail by hand. The line went “snap!”, of course, and the big fish was gone.

Each morning, Ginny Stephenson padded out to the end of her dock to feed the bluegills, which reach prodigious size, big as dinner plates, in Florida’s year-round growing season. We did the same off our dock, peppering the shallows with bread chunks until the big, slabsided ‘gillies roiled the water in a surface-feeding frenzy.

We had treachery in our hearts, though, and squeezed bits of bread onto tiny hooks and tossed them out amid this morning meal. The kids had a ball reeling in bluegills that way and turning them loose, until the fish got smart and went off to feed somewhere else.

The grown-ups went back in the house then, but the kids stayed at it. We’d almost forgotten them when Madeleine came running in an hour later, face flushed, shouting: “I got one! All by myself! I got one!”

Now, I don’t want to be the grinch who stole Christmas, and I’m sure theme parks have their virtues. But a few years ago, we took these same kids to the granddaddy of them all, Disneyland.

I remember the dazed look on their faces as we trudged from one palace of sensory overkill to the next: down the Matterhorn, up in the space shuttle and over the hills to the poorhouse, squired along by Mickey and Minnie and Goofy and Pluto.

We stood in line the longest for a pseudo-underwater voyage that went nowhere, featuring papier-mache visions of man-eating sharks, piranhas, treasure chests spewing gold, divers in the grip of huge octopuses, giant squid galumphing along the bottom, etc.

The whole scene--the whole place, it seemed--screamed “Fake!” and we left footsore, weary and uninspired. The kids did not ask if we’d be going back.

Put the youngsters in a rowboat on a lake with a cane pole and a bucket of minnows, with real, live alligators and snakes and quicksand to worry about, with ospreys, bats and herons on the prowl, a hot February sun beating down, Spanish moss swaying in the live oaks, palm fronds clattering in the breeze, with fish to catch and fry and eat, and you’ve shown them something.

“See the real Florida from a glass-bottom boat,” said the ads for Silver Springs at Ocala.

We drove by the place on the way to the airport. By then the kids were fast asleep, visions of the “real Florida” still dancing merrily in their heads.