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Florida farm is "Yearling" author's "small place of enchantment" .. Nancy Bartley

CROSS CREEK, Fla. — The citrus trees, heavy with pale green globes of grapefruit, tangerines and oranges, mingled with palms and moss-draped oaks. In a pen, tawny ducks drowsed in straw nests, their heads tucked beneath wings. The afternoon was warm. On the screened veranda was a small table with a typewriter as if at any moment now the home's owner would return, reacquainted once again with her muse, and she would write:

"I do not know how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to."

Cross Creek — the region in Central Florida's Alachua County where Lochloosa and Orange lakes meet — was Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' place of enchantment.

Nearest airport: Gainesville, 30 minutes to the north.

Rawlings won the Pulitzer for "The Yearling," first published in 1938 and today regarded as one of the best-loved books of the 20th century. The setting was Alachua County.

In keeping with Rawlings' wishes upon her death in 1953, the farm was given to the University of Florida, not to be a museum, but to remain a working farm. It is now managed by the Florida State Parks Departments and open for tours four days a week.

For women like me, Cross Creek is a pilgrimage, a place to slip into the skin and experience the world of a woman who struck out alone on a farm in the 1930s in a land of insects and snakes, high heat and harsh cold; a woman who was not defeated by the land, but learned from it and, against all odds, thrived.

In notes written to park staff, women who visit tell of feeling a presence and kinship as they stand next to Rawlings' white lace bed cover, the simple dresses in the closet, her books and the blue Wedgwood as if they too had suddenly stepped "inside the rusty gate out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another."

Nothing about Cross Creek is for the timid. Living there or visiting there, it's a place to celebrate the life of a woman who took challenges in stride, transforming her gift for living into her art.

Unlike in Rawlings' day, Interstate 441 passes within 10 miles, separating Cross Creek and the oak-shaded town of Micanopy. Yet, it is still tranquil here. It is time travel to the 1930s Cracker country — so named for the crack of the bullwhips used by the early cattle drivers to come to Florida in the 1800s — but now a word that defines a style of food (gator, turtle and frog legs) and architecture (simple one-story houses with detached rooms to facilitate the breeze).

Even though tourists pop in and out, the farm — where carrots, mustard and collard greens grow in neat rows in the fenced-in garden — still retains a quiet mystery, an invitation to be still, to listen and learn from the land, to step beyond the picture frame and become part of a bygone day.

It was one admittedly better for Rawlings because she was white and enjoyed the privileges of race and rank not enjoyed by her darker-skinned neighbors. When visitors of color do visit the farm, they linger at the tenant house at the back of the property where Rawlings' maids lived, park Ranger Gail Rowley said.

As Cross Creek changed Rawlings, Rawlings unintentionally changed Cross Creek. She published a memoir, simply called "Cross Creek," in 1942, and afterward, tourists began arriving at the farm. Rawlings and her neighbors suddenly found themselves in the spotlight, and one of them, a Micanopy resident who had been Rawlings' friend, successfully sued her for invasion of privacy.

WHAT .. WOW!

Rawlings eventually moved away from Cross Creek as visitors only increased over the years.

Many years after Rawlings' death from a stroke in 1953, people like four-generation Micanopy resident John Thrasher still remember her.

Rawlings often came into Micanopy, where the only long-distance telephone exchange was, to make telephone calls, order kerosene and to visit her friend — the census taker who later sued her.

Wherever Rawlings went, she managed to set tongues clacking in disapproval for her unconventional ways — going hunting in Ocala with the local men and drinking the local corn whiskey moonshine with them.

"This is the Bible Belt

TSK ..TST .. RISKY ..

down here. People like my mother didn't think much of her at all, but my dad was crazy about her," Thrasher said.

"I was in high school in 1946 at the time of the (invasion-of-privacy) trial. They let us out of school to go down to Gainesville."

J.T. Glisson, a young neighbor of Rawlings, went on to write a play about Rawlings' lawyer for the trial. "Sigsbee" opened in Ocala five years ago, and Glisson published his own memoir, "The Creek."

In 1992 and 1999, Rawlings' former maid, Idella Parker, wrote two books about her life as the author's cook, housekeeper and companion. And a Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society, which Parker belongs to and keeps alive Cross Creek lore with Internet quizzes.

These days, cyclists glide along the country road on the way to Ocala, where "The Yearling" was filmed. Hikers walk the trails through watery Payne Prairie — a nature preserve. Locals tell you to take a stick in case you have to nudge a gator off the trail.

Like they always have, people here adapt and slow down to the pace of an Everglade State native speaker's drawl.

"We at the Creek need ... a certain remoteness from urban confusion," Rawlings wrote in the memoir, "... no other place seems possible to us, just as when truly in love none other offers the comfort of the beloved."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/travel/2003630794_crosscreek250.html?syndication=rss

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