South Florida's Heritage

Tequesta, Calusa, Spain,.
Who was here before me?
Were there beaches here?
I walked through Eckerd College last night to hear Peter Meinke read from his books. The student center was all shiny and bright with tinted windows and pool tables. Mangrove swamp covered most of Eckerd campus before the land was filled in in the late fifties. The people who lived here before the spanish had a fish camp just up the road from my house. maybe three hundred years ago they sat out and watched Venus set as they smacked holes in head sized whelks and left the busted shells in heaps.
This place looks so barren when you go out side.
It's may and already the temperatures are in the nineties.