The Citrus Place

The "Old Florida" don't get no older than this here Old Florida: you'll find The Citrus Place on Terra Ceia Island, at an intersection that is your last chance to stop and turn around before crossing the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

They're been there for almost 40 years, carrying on the noble tradition of mom-n-pop fruit vending into the era of drones and smartphones. And is their stuff any good? Man, I can't even tell you how special their fresh-squeezed orange juice is; there's nothing like it. You think you've had "genuine Florida orange juice" before but you haven't, and I hadn't. Now I have, and I'm hooked.

Fortunately, according to their business card, they will ship their wares. Woo-hoo!

The Black Drink

"The Black Drink" was a holy ritual beverage fermented and brewed by ancient tribes in the Southeastern United States, especially Florida and Georgia. Each tribe had its own special formula, but the concept seemed to coexist simultaneously amongst many different groups of Native Americans. The predominant ingredient in its mixture of herbs was roasted leaves and stems of Ilex vomitoria, or Yaupon Holly.

The Black Drink was served in large communal cups, sometimes made from whelk shells and sometimes in ornately decorated ceremonial vessels. According to ethnologists who claim to know such things, tribal councils were served the sacred drink in order of the precedence of individuals present, with important visitors getting the first taste. Some scholars say the practice was to induce ritual vomiting, while other accounts make no mention of it.

According to Wikipedia:

The yaupon leaves and branches used for the black drink were picked as close to the time of its planned consumption as possible. After picking they were lightly parched in a ceramic container over fire. The roasting makes the caffeine soluble, which is the same reason coffee is roasted. After browning, they were boiled in large containers of water until the liquid reached a dark brown or black color, giving it its name. The liquid was then strained into containers to cool, until it was cool enough to not scald the skin, and drunk while still hot. Because caffeine is 30 times more soluble in boiling water than room temperature water, this heightened its effect. It was then consumed in a ritual manner. Its physiological effects are mainly those of massive doses of caffeine. Three to six cups of strong coffee is equal to 0.5 to 1.0 grams of caffeine; the black drink could have delivered at least this much and possibly up to 3.0 to 6.0 grams of caffeine.

In 1696, Jonathan Dickinson personally witnessed the Black Drink ritual as practiced among the Ais people of Eastern Florida. According to Dickinson, lower status men, women and children were not allowed to touch or taste the beverage. The chief and his associates sat around enjoying their Black Drink, smoking cigars and pipes, and ruminating amongst themselves for most of the day. By nightfall, the bowl that had held the beverage had been covered with skin to make a drum, and they then drummed, sang and danced until the wee hours of the night.

Analysis of relics found on Terra Ceia Island indicate that the Black Drink ritual was performed here as well. The New York Times noted in 2012 that "as recently as the Civil War, Southerners were known to use the black drink as a pick-me-up", though I am having trouble finding anything to back up this assertion myself. I do think it's interesting that our modern society developed an obsession with our own Black Drink, Coca-Cola,, and that my own love for weird herbal liqueurs like Jagermeister and Zwack seem also to resonate with this ancient tradition.

Terra Ceia Island

Just over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, not far from the Bayway Islands, there's another interesting little cluster of isles. There's Ed's Key, Rattlesnake Key, the Sister Keys, the Two Brothers Islands, Skeet Key, Snead Island and more, and the largest of them all is Terra Ceia Island.

There's a lot of unusual archaeological activity going on here. Or, more precisely perhaps, there was a lot of unusual prehistoric activity going on here back in the day, and modern man has noted it with a few signs. Though much of the island is deemed an "archaeological site", I don't actually see any digging going on here. In fact, they've turned the Madira Bickel Sacred Mound into a little park with little or no seeming regard for the integrity of the site. There are signs warning tourists not to take with them any stray artifacts or human bones they happen to find. Doesn't that just warm your heart?

Apparently the Bickel mound was once the center of a thriving community of native Americans - what tribe? Well, they don't really know for sure. The mound was, so the informative signs tell us, the main temple from which the chief resided, and/or sacrifices were performed. How they know this, it isn't made clear. Archaeologists, it seems, love to extrapolate, and given enough leeway could probably extrapolate a postulated pre-Cambrian supermarket from a fragment of femur bone.

Meanwhile, there's a burial mound hidden right beside the parking lot, and an even larger one called the Johnson Mound somewhere north of here. That's not completely clear either, because the map they handily provide is atrociously rendered and has little in common with what you see on Google Maps or Flash Earth. A future expedition to the Johnson Mound will have to rely more on luck and intuition - both of which I fortunately have in spades - than the GPS.

As for the Bickel Mound, when I parked the car and wandered the lovely park's path in search of it, I was dispatched up a very steep wooden walkway up a lushly forested hill. What they don't tell you until after you get up there is that the hill is the temple mound, and congratulations, you're now standing on it. I apologized to whatever spirits were lurking around, and made my exit back down.

There's some degree of squabbling going on amongst historians whether the people here were actually Mayans, or at least influenced by them. Though the position of officialdom is that the Mayans did not make it to Florida, their illustration at the park depicts the original state of the temple mound as lookin' pretty damn Mayan to me.

According to Wikipedia, "Archaeological excavations have established that indigenous occupation reaches back 2,000 years, and across three distinct periods: Manasota, Weedon Island, and Safety Harbor cultures." But then you click through to the articles about these cultures and you find that no one really has a clue about who they were either. In fact, there seems to be much confusion about what goes where and who did what, and most deductions are based on relative similarities found in the scant historical artifacts. It's a bit like the giant radioactive intelligent cockroaches of the future deducing that Florida and Japan were the same civilization because they found a Starbucks cup in each location.

I'm going to see if I can't get the real scoop on what happened here, straight from the horse's mouth, and ask a ghost.