Chapter 2: Gathering Clues in Pursuit of a Legend.

Paul Hampton Crockett From

http://www.growingintothemystery.net/

Punch Bowl, 1942 ALL RIGHT, so everybody and his brother had once known where the damn thing was. So why didnt we? Beyond the "clues" to be found within these intriguing photos, there was even a map:

No matter what the clues held in hand, I somehow knew that once Id set sail on this kind of journey, there was no telling exactly what I might come across. That hunch turned out to be "right on the money," as shall be explained.

WAS it pure foolishness to set out looking for this watering hole beloved of pirates, Indians, and pioneers? Maybe. It might be something in the Florida air down this way, but stories of every kind, nuance, texture and purpose seem to flourish unreasonably here, as if nourished in the very atmosphere like air plants. In most "normal" places, people appear to tell stories about others' lives and deeds. "Real life" is not "story;" it is understood. Here, there is no such nice distinction to be made, and stories often tell people's lives and deeds. Less safe, but much more interesting. Floridians have grown accustomed to living in an atmosphere saturated so completely by the dreams, visions, and occasional nightmares of one or the other great visionary, that before long we have confused the hype and anticipated sequel with whatever nugget of truth the tale might have once held. To the extent story and meaning have become interchangeable, it's no small wonder we are always left thirsting, like curious children, for more.

George Merrick Dreamed an Outlandish Dream of a Place to be Called Coral Gables, and People Showed Up.

Label it what you will, that unique sense of Florida: lurid. Surreal. Out-RAGEOUS! "Over the top." Ridiculous. Two descriptions that cannot be omitted: Necessary, and Perpetual. Turn your back for only a moment, and you'll find that any number of stories have even then somehow reproduced, and boom! More stories! There are stories for every occasion, and then some. There are even stories of stories.

A wonderful contribution of my own German-born paternal great-grandparents to the ever-unfolding "Florida Dream." In the 1910s they envisioned and created a citrus grove/ tropical plant nursery/ tourist attraction they called "Bonita Groves," in the Redlands area, near Homestead. Consider how many stories and diverging themes are interwoven in this fanciful tableau!

Plenty of them, in fact. Some are like sparks kept alive and passed on, from one generation to the next, in each eager anticipation of a re-telling. Something within both teller and listener knows that, in a simple sharing of story, we are experiencing a direct link with those whove come before, and (hopefully) those yet to come. It is now, as it always has been, that any or all of us can hope to live forever only through story. As long as there's one person still breathing to tell and another to listen, a really good story will never die.

In Florida, why ask why? Home is where the orange is. TALES of every sort are plentiful here, and always have been. Put together a manatee and a sailor whos clearly been out at sea for way too long, and what do you have? Thats right, a mermaid! One hell of a great story, the Hell with its lack of foundation! By God, there should be mermaids, at least as much as unicorns, if the Earth in all of its mysterious dimensions is to somehow seem complete.

Ditto The Fountain of Youth, a timeless favorite with a "punch" of a concept that still knocks out a crowd! The myth is essentially re-created for a modern and more urbane (but no less hungry) audience, in the Cocoon films.

And my God! What childs imagination can possibly resist the allure of Indians and explorers, or pioneers and pirates, especially when combined all together into one factual (if vaguely mystical) place, actually somewhere on a map?

Orchid Hunters Eugene Savage

Early Cocoanut Grove pioneers pictured taking their leisure sitting in a wild fig tree, in a vast and virginal subtropical wilderness we can only try and imagine. And we really can't.

AND then there are the pirates, so persistent in our collective memory because their romantic criminal legend somehow bespeaks freedom and partakes of the sea, and the combination is irresistible. (The eternal promise of their buried treasure, on land or in broken ships, long fallen to the seas floor, doesnt hurt either):

Above and below: from the Captain Blood series, by the magnificent illustrator Dean Cornwell.

IT is easy to imagine maybe getting a little carried away in pursuit of a legend, especially when it is so local, and its promised end is literally an ancient, welcoming drinking fountain, that for millennia offered up by the salted Bay an unending flow of refreshing, sweet water. And maybe, still does even today. The legend of the perfectly round well is made whole by its exquisite and primeval setting: sheltered under the cavernous stone ledge that is part of a fantastically textured, narrow ribbon of ancient stone rising up just by the bays 6

tide. The rock bluff snaked along the bays shore as an impressive ribbon of ivory, unifying on the one hand the vast field of green hues of both subtropical jungle forest and ancient and open Everglade to the East, and the equally sensational deep blue and aqua tones of an expansive and impossibly clear bay stretching far as the eye could see, glinting golden in the sun, on the other.

WHEN MAGIC GETS PERSONAL THE allure of such adventure is undeniable, generally. But when the bay in question is named Biscayne, and the very area of the site has always, from earliest childhood, been an inseparable part of ones personal history, an element of the personal is added to the pull of the sirens song by which it is rendered wholly irresistible. I was a "goner." Consider Kleinbergs description of the site as below (1) Wainwright Park, and just above (2) Vizcaya (as numbered on the map, below), together with the relation of each to the place marked by the red dot (but actually a stab at a (3)): my one and only childhood home. We thought of and felt about the entire area figuratively, if not literally, as our "backyard." If "home is where the heart is," here is where at least part of ours most certainly was.

Wainwright Park. Vizcaya. If you tried, you could not name two places held more dear, more deeply personal, nor more part of the young lives of my siblings and myself, than either bookend, or for that matter the Bay shore connecting them. My earliest memory of the Park: a family picnic in the mid 60's, when it was much more a magical wood and less a sanitized "City park." I can still picture exactly in my minds eye the bay that day, as we sat upon a blanket by the seawall. Usually at least a little choppy, the surface that afternoon was so preternaturally smooth that the whole of it looked like a vast field of the most beautiful blue glass you can imagine. Later, through all the phases and stages of my life, my connection with the Park remained deeply heartfelt. The very first place I went, when I dared (shakily) venture out unaccompanied into a world with Scott no longer alive in it, was here. I was moving purely on instinct. My heart needed to hear everything the forests and the bay needed to tell me.

I have returned there to paint, many many times over the years:

Wainwright Park, III (Calm After the Storm). Done in the summer of 1992, in the week or so after Hurricane Andrew had made its visit.

Return to Wainwright, a happy painting captured on a couple of especially beautiful afternoons.

AS to the other endpoint on this enchanted span, my entire family also shared a special connection with James Deerings magnificent Villa Vizcaya.

Vizcaya, Entry OVER the years, we enjoyed and appreciated the place together, and independently.

Sunday Afternoon, Vizcaya FOR several years, my brothers and our friends and I enjoyed the occupancy of a most excellent tree-house immediately on the Bay, along the furthest bend of the

10

mangrove wood lining the Southern edge of the property visible from the house. My brother Greg started calling it the kingdom that nobody else wanted. I can show you very nearly its exact location, though the tree house itself has long since disappeared as mysteriously as it showed up in the first place. Below is The Bathers, a watercolor sketch done by the famed John Singer Sargent during his 1917 visit to the great home. From my time spent there, and the placement and perspective of the small bridge in the distance, I know that the sketch was done on the very outer tip of the mangrove peninsula and that the swimmers are facing open bay. We swam in this very place, often.

See the first indentation in the tree line to the Left, just about middle of painting? Just there lay the small white sandy shore that we called our private beach, with the tree-house just above.

11

It was a blessed and most wondrous place, and an excellent time to be free.

Farm Courtyard, Villa Vizcaya

I only very recently learned of another family connection to the punch bowl site. A couple of days ago, as Id finally begun to try and hammer into prose the chaos of words and images before me, I called my Dad and asked him whether hed ever heard his father speak of the Devils Punch Bowl, down along the Bay between Vizcaya and Wainwright Park. He paused for a moment, and then said, Oh, you mean the Pirates Punch Bowl! Yeah, Daddy once told me that he and your grandmother used to visit the place for romantic trysts, back when they were young, in the 1920s. 12

Howard Bruce and Annelise Petersen Crockett, newlyweds, 1920s. They are remembered, and well loved. May they rest in peace. It was apparently quite popular for that use, around that time, he told me. You know, a romantic kind of place. Wow!, I said, I can easily imagine, picturing an epic sunset over open Bay, or the magic of moon quietly ascending. So, they never called it the Devils Punch Bowl?, I asked. Never, said Dad. Didnt the homeowner mind all the comings and goings? He laughed. Paul, this was the early 20s, he said. There werent any houses there. Just Vizcaya, and then there wouldve been Villa Serena, I guess. You know, the William Jennings Bryan place. Aside from that, it was pretty much jungle. Ideal!, I exclaimed. Those would have been the days, all right. Hell, he said, even when I was a boy (which would have been in the late 30s, early 40s) there was an open sea wall or path that you could just walk along, I mean with no kind of obstacles or obstruction, all the way down to Vizcaya. And there, there were these guards. Well, they werent really guards, back in those days. Two guys, more like caretakers. Theyd generally just sit there. Course, they looked tough enough to us, being just kids," he said. "And if they saw us walking around, theyd make a commotion and loud hubbub, and threaten us with jail, and so forth. Some things never change, I noted. To Chapter 3

13