REL 3938 Assignment 2: Mapping Rawlings Sites

REL 3938 Assignment 2: Mapping Rawlings Sites

            Today, the Ocala National Forest is the preservation of the “world’s largest contiguous sand pine scrub forest” and “high, dry, central scrub ridges” according to the United States Department of Agriculture.  However, before government and commercial people entered the land, the inhabitants of the land adapted and lived with the land.  Such inhabitants are the very people whom Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wanted the world to remember through her writings. 

            This area is not the most welcoming place.  According to a YouTube video by Deborah Hendrix (www.youtube.com/watch?=mW496175MYs), the forest can be described as “desert-like.” After watching the video of the forest, I believe that some may consider this landscape to be beautiful, however since everyone holds a different definition of beauty, some may not consider scrubs and trees to be as beautiful in comparison to something like the Rocky Mountains or Glacier Park (once again everyone is different, so beauty and love for this forest cannot be accurately measured since the two are quite subjective).  On the contrary, I do believe that a century ago this land would be difficult to live in.  If I were living in the late 1800s or early 1900s, perhaps I would go to this part of Florida every once in a while in order to find some peace from regular, stable life – but if this forest were my regular life I do not think life would be stable or pleasant since the area would have been so undeveloped and necessities such as food would have been hard to come by.

Nevertheless, those who were made for such conditions were able to live off the land.  One of the places where people lived in the forest was a place called Pat’s Island.  The name is somewhat deceiving since Pat’s Island is “surrounded by sandy soil and scrub” and not water (also mentioned in the same YouTube video).  The reason Pat’s Island is significant to Rawlings’ is because a boy named Calvin Long lived there and adopted a deer.  This duo later inspired Rawlings to write her Pulitzer Prize – winning novel “The Yearling,” according to floridahikes.com/yearling.  Subsequently, there is a trail near Pat’s Island that is named “The Yearling Trail.”  This section of the forest was the site of many scenes of the movie “The Yearling.”  Rawlings was actually quite particular about which areas to shoot the film because she could actually imagine herself in these spots along with the characters from her book and the events that took place, according to one of the curator’s at the Smathers Library.  Rawlings also wanted these exact sites to be used because she knew that those who saw the movie would more accurately experience what she thought.  In other words, instead of bring the audience to the places she wrote about, she brought the places she wrote about to the audience. 

Even though Rawlings did her best to have her readers experience what she thought (through literature and films), seeing and feeling these locations from first hand experience is still a completely different experience as opposed to simply looking at them (through literature of films).  A perfect example is in the NPR interview with one of the actors of “The Yearling”:  the actor elaborated on how the bear scene was first shot with city dogs (which were not fit for the scene) and then shot with more local, rough dogs.  Even though these days the scene would have been “blocked by animal rights activists,” at the time it was a peek into the lives of those who used these dogs in such a hardcore manner like the inhabitants of the local forest (for the record I watched this scene on YouTube and it is very violent: the bear would viciously bite down on the dogs’ necks and throw them around the site. I would imagine seeing something with this much animal violence on Animal Planet, but not a movie site about a young boy and a dawn). 

At this point we can conclude that not only did Rawlings live in a place that was not the most delightful, but it also containing a very unique set of local people and lifestyles.  Though at the time these people may have seemed free from laws and other bounds, that all changed when commercial people and government found reasons to interfere.  The changes that were brought about in the early 1900s began to label certain qualities of the local people as “illegal” and “lawless.”  However, from the point of view of the inhabitants (and most likely Rawlings), “everything [the inhabitants] do is necessary to sustain life in that place” (as quoted from Selected Letters of Majorie Kinnan Rawlings). The interesting thing about considering what these people do to be illegal is that just because their actions are labeled “illegal” doesn’t mean they are bad people - Rawlings continues to elaborate by saying how “old clearings have been farmed out” and “big timber is gone,” leaving the production of moonshine their only source of income. Since the prohibition of alcohol at the time mandated that production of alcohol was illegal, and the people continued to produce moonshine in order to make money, this would mean that the local people might have been committing this illegal act simply to continue to make money and live.  In essence, Rawlings did not mean illegal as a negative connotation towards the people, but rather as a fact that what the people have always done in order to make money is now against the law written by outsiders. 

So at this point I can understand how not being able to produce moonshine will inhibit the inhabitants’ income, by why didn’t they just move to a place with a better chance of making money in a different, more “legal” way?  In the same quote by Rawlings, this question was answered at the end when Rawlings confirms that the local people “would be unwilling to leave” their home.  Rawlings knew that the locals considered this land their home and to leave their home just because some outsiders said their lifestyle was bad was not going to be taken lightly.  So if one is to ask, “Is this an easy landscape to love?” obvious answer is no, however the exception to this response can be found in this time and place in history where the inhabitants of this mid-Floridian forest refused to easily leave their home and continued to break the laws all because they loved their home.