Monday: The Seaside Desert

We have moved down the coast to St Andrew’s. I have mentioned before that USA seems surrounded by and barriers and spits, but as we have travelled along Forida’s Northern Gulf Coast this has made mre and more of an impression. We have travelled 150 miles along a coast road (98), which is entirely built on sand barrier or islands, with some fairly long bridges in between. These coastal barriers may be up to a mile wide, but are often only a few hundred yards and in many places less than a hundred yards wide. It is difficult to imagine these barriers almost enclosing many hundreds of square miles of salt water bays. St George is an island which is probably 16 miles long, but only a few hundred yards wide. (St Joe’s round ‘The Big Bend’ as it is called, is probably nearer 30 miles long) There is a complete town on the island, serviced by a single bridge, 5 miles long. It is literally just sand dunes which are is some places covered by slash pine trees and other low cover, but a lot of it is just dune grass (spartina) and nowhere is more than 50 feet high. Almost all the houses are built on stilts, many perilously close to the sea, when we had the storm on Tuesday the waves were crashing on the shore only feet away from some of them, with no barrier apart from the sand! The sand beaches are stunningly beautiful white sand.
Although these barrier islands are surrounded by water they do not have much fresh water as any rain just soaks deep into the dunes and disappears, there is also a high salt content. This situation was brought home to me when the Park Ranger was describing the campground. The State Park is at the other end of the island to the bridge. On passing through the entrance and registering he told us that the campground was just another 4 miles down the road. He told us to watch out for the one large alligator which is ‘still hanging in there’ and lives in the 2 fresh water pools, one either side of the road, just at the gate of the campground – these are the only permanent fresh water pools on the island. When this worked its way through my tiny brain it means that the lone alligator is about 7 miles from the next bit of fresh water, and unlikely to ever leave that little bit of island, even worse, it is even more unlikely that any other alligator will join it. So eventually alligator will die out on the island. It is then that I realised that these barrier islands are seaside deserts.