Florida, It's Not All Theme Parks!

Driving through the Magnificent Fun Capital of the World at Orlando, I used to be struck by the contemplation that Florida should perhaps add to the list a planetary award for human perversity. There is something wondrously upside-down about a state to which people assemble, allegedly because of its local climate as well as normal loveliness, but where most of that beauty has been drained and covered in Rooms to Go's and Scratch and Dent Worlds, and where the majority of residents feel about air-conditioning the way astronauts feel about spaceships.

If you're one of those folks that has given up on Florida, I encourage you to venture about an hour and a half north from the Magic Kingdom, into Marion as well as Alachua Counties, everywhere Orlando's voracious grid falters and the panorama stops looking like something loaded off a van. A jade edema of hills rises over the coastal flatness. Tire dealerships give way to boiled-peanut stands. Artesian springs the color of glacial ice spill from the earth. Horses that are not on theme-park salaries track rolling acreage beside the interstate.

South of Gainesville on Route 441, my buddy and I passed McIntosh and Evinston, humble whistle-stops where Victorian clapboard homes sit alongside trailer parks underneath such dense canopies of Spanish moss that it feels like someone dragged a squeegee down the view while it had been still wet. As twilight ripened, we stopped into Micanopy, a one-boulevard town of aged brick as well as log buildings, a place so steeped in old-style charm it's tough to stand on the main drag without a faint concern that at any instant movie studio security guards are going to roust you from the set.

While Micanopy surely has one of the highest number of antique shops per capita in the nation, the town is sufficiently rust streaked and mold spangled that the place somehow pulls off the feat of not seeming twee. "This is Florida like it used to be," said Monica Beth Fowler, the owner and operator of Delectable Collectables, a shop specializing in rare cameos. "It's one of the few places in the state that hasn't been ruined yet." Past Micanopy's antiques strip sits the Herlong Mansion, a bed and breakfast of commanding elegance - Corinthian columns the size of grain silos, verandas exploding with ferns. But at my friend's suggestion we'd made plans to stay the night 20 minutes to the east, in the settlement of Cross Creek.

My buddy is an editor who lives in North Carolina but who proudly descends from Florida "cracker" stock. In north Florida, "cracker," a reverent sobriquet for the area's swamp-dwelling pioneers, is removed from an label. Cross Creek - native land of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the writer and chronicler from the Depression-era cracker monde who died in 1953 - could probably be described as the Florida Cracker Capital of the Planet. Our destination was the Yearling Restaurant ("Home of Cracker Cooking"), named after Rawlings's 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. A plain, wayside building of sun-scorched boards, the Yearling, we discovered, was particularly resolute regarding its rustic bona fides. A polished gator pelt, a Confederate banner along with a rack of historic outboard motors trimmed the restaurant's ramparts. A neighborhood blues musician presided within the dining area, crooning to his dobro, while diners tucked into a menu of customary fare. We ordered the "cracker hors d'oeuvre plate," which included fried mushrooms, fried ingots of gator tail, fried green tomatoes and fried frog legs whose girth and musculature would have put a speed skater to embarrassment.

The Yearling's owners also operate the close by Lodge that rented Cabins, where we'd booked lodgings for the night. The lodge consists of 7 humble cabins situated below a shelter of living oak limbs and echoes with the hearty belchings of bullfrogs around the nearby brook. "That's what's so groovy about it out here. This could by no means be Orlando. You could never eradicate all of the banana spiders, palmetto bugs as well as snakes." "So awesome," she said. "It's the country that time forgot!