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Coral Castle

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Known as “America’s Stonehenge,” Coral Castle serves as the bizarre masterpiece of diminutive Latvian immigrant Ed Leedskalnin (1887-1951), who somehow managed to procure and sculpt more than 1,100 tons of coral rock over a 28-year period into a “fantasy world carved out of stone” using only homemade tools. Originally dubbed “Rock Gate Park,” Coral Castle was reportedly built by Leedskalnin, who stood just 5 feet tall and weighed 100 pounds, as a monument to lost love (he was jilted by his fiancée in Latvia before heading to the United States). Billed as “A Sculpture Garden and Tribute to Los Love,” Coral Castle is located at 28655 South Dixie Highway in Homestead. By the way, Coral Castle was featured in an episode of In Search Of … (Season 5, Episode 16) titled “The Castle of Secrets” that first aired on January 24, 1981.

Ocala Caverns

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By Rich Weidman

Also once known as “Uranium Valley and Caves,” the Ocala Caverns were located on U.S. routes 301, 27 and 441, approximately eight miles South of Ocala. According to legend, the caverns were used as a hiding place by runaway slaves during the Civil War. The Ocala Caverns were open to the public as an attraction in the 1950s and 1960s, and at one time owned by a pro wrestler known as “Man Mountain Dean Jr.” and “Mighty Jumbo” (real name: Samuel Hesser), who weighed in at nearly 650 lbs., and Violet Ray, “Women’s Lightweight Wrestling Champion.” Attractions included two caves (one dry, one wet), an underground boat ride (basically Hesser kicked the rowboat out so tourists could get a glimpse of the cave and then he pulled it back with a rope), Callaway’s Rock Display, Inca Indian Museum, Wrestling Hall of Fame and Santa Claus Land (Hesser even made the December 1966 cover of the Ocala-Marion County Visitors Guide to the Kingdom of the Sun dressed as Santa Claus). The attraction closed in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and Hesser reportedly passed away from a brain tumor at the age of 51 in Iowa in 1974. In recent years, the Florida Speleological Society has made efforts to clean up the Ocala Caverns site.

Shady Oak Restaurant & Tavern

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As a student at Stetson University during the mid-1980s, I would often join a ritual mass exodus off campus each Friday afternoon after classes to a somewhat rundown but lively fish camp overlooking the St. John’s River just off State Road 44 that we called Otis’s and the locals referred to as Sloan’s (both names derived from then-owner Otis Sloan). There we would spend hours hanging out on the dock drinking cheap beer and watching the boats slowly drift by – great memories! According to a September 2, 1998, Orlando Sentinel article, Sloan and his wife Myrtle opened the Shady Oak Fish Camp in 1957. I passed through DeLand in 2015 and took the above photos of Otis’s and it looked pretty much the same as I had remembered it. The Shady Oak Restaurant, which is located at 2984 West New York Avenue just west of downtown DeLand, reportedly suffered a fire in 2017 but has fortunately reopened.

The Wheels of Routine

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“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea … ‘cruising’ it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

‘I’ve always wanted to sail to the south seas, but I can’t afford it.’ What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of ‘security.’ And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine – and before we know it our lives are gone.

What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all – in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?” – Sterling Hayden, Wanderer (1963)

A River of Grass

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“There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them; their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of the their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.” —Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass, 1947

Caribbean Club, Key Largo

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According to its official website, the Caribbean Club was opened in 1938 by legendary automotive and real estate promoter Carl Fisher “as a poor-man’s fishing retreat.” It later became a gambling den. The bar served as a filming location for exterior shots from the classic 1948 film Key Largo, which was directed by John Huston and starred Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Edward G. Robinson. The photo above was taken by legendary commercial photographer Joseph Janney Steinmetz (1905-1985). The Caribbean Club is the oldest bar in the Upper Keys. Today, the bar offers “live music, daily happy hours, waterfront sunset views and a dog-friendly atmosphere.” Ideally located at Mile Marker 104 bayside, it is open 7 AM to 4 AM “every damn day.” Note: The Caribbean Club is a cash-only bar with an onsite ATM. The bar served as a filming location for the Netflix original series, Bloodline. According to Jimmy Buffett, “It was a bar like many others and then it wasn’t.”

 

An Inexhaustible Well

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“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” – Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)

Ham on Rye

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“I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.” According to Charles Bukowski’s fourth novel, Ham on Rye (1982), he had a miserable childhood courtesy of his father, a sadistic tyrant who regularly beat young Henry and his mother over the slightest infractions. To make matters worse, Bukowski suffered from a rare skin disorder, diagnosed as acne vulgaris, once he reached his teens. His only refuge was the local public library, where he voraciously devoured the writings of “The Lost Generation” school of American novelists such as Ernest Hemingway (whose later works he despised), Sherwood Anderson and John Dos Passos, as well as the works of European writers, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of Night. Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe once called Ham on Rye “an education in rebellion.” Who can argue with that? Pick up a copy today and enlighten yourself!