Author's Note: A shorter, editorial version of this article was published in The Gainesville Sun.

Meeting Sanibel Bear

            On a muggy, buggy August day about dawn, a Florida black bear stood up on its hind legs on the trail between Trout Creek and Flatwoods Park north of Tampa and sniffed – well, me. The bear next did what is typical – it charged off in a straight line over everything in its path into the woods to get aw...

The Bucket Lists of Mountain Men

            They were from the “great generation” that lived through the Depression and won World War Two, but if my parents, Franklin and Zella Ohr, had a bucket list, they kept it a guarded secret.

            The only hint of something unaccomplished in their lives was when my father spoke of Europe. Being in the Army Post Office, Dad had a g...

                                                            The Great Fire of 1963

            “Did you really set fire to the band room in high...

                                    A Wastrel in the Strawberry Fields

                                                            By...

Florida’s Wildcats

One of the most astonishing things happened during on an early morning in November 1966. Each hour 150,000 meteors showered the earth in a meteor storm. As a newly inducted private at Fort Knox, Kentucky, I stood in formation in the dark and witnessed countless plummeting streaks of white raining from the sky, including brief flaming meteorites. 

Roughly 40 years later on June 30, 2006, fate granted me a sec...

                                                Remembering Mitch  

            Follows a narrative in which the author is mooned by pretty young women, ponders the meaning of life, and reme...

                                                Travels with Pete       

            Most couples spend Valentine’s Day at a fancy restaurant. In 1998, my wife an...

                                                Pig Meat’s Blues

            There are so many of us, we are like grains of sand on the beach. I like to think that sometimes we are carried off on the...

Living Proof                                                   

            It was a crime, no doubt about it. It was not pre-mediated, but spontaneous. It was regretted almost ins...

FLAMINGO IN AUGUST

                         (Or how brave adventurers faced the mosquitoes of August…)

            Sometimes nature adventures aren’t what you want them to be. Case in point is coming in the long and roundabout way.

            Once while at my vet’s...