In Marjorie's Wake
In Marjorie's Wake, a film from Equinox Documentaries, Inc. and co-produced and written by Bill Belleville, was broadcast on Public Broadcasting Service stations nationally.
The film examines the many ways in which the St. Johns River of Florida has shaped culture — literature, art and music — over time. It does so by re-creating a historic 1933 trip that Pulitzer-prize winning author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling) made on the river.
Rawlings, encouraged and joined by her Cracker neighbor Dessie Smith, launched a small boat just south of the aptly-named "Puzzle Lake" southeast of Orlando. The pair spent the next ten days navigating downstream on the river, camping on the shores or on mud flats, and catching fish or shooting game for food.
Rawlings, a careful, precise writer, was a Northern intellectual who was learning to trust her instincts in the backwoods of Florida. The river trip, chronicled as the "Hyacinth Drift" chapter in her book Cross Creek, symbolized her willingness to more closely pay attention to the clues found in nature.
The film revisits the historic Rawlings and Smith voyage. But it also reveals the challenges and contrasts found in the modern trip that the makers' own journey on the St. Johns.
One of the sojourners was Winter Park resident Leslie Kemp Poole, a writer, a teacher in the Environmental Studies Program at Rollins College and a Ph.D. candidate in environmental history at the University of Florida. The other was Jennifer Chase, a musician, song writer, playwright and educator who teaches at Florida Community College in Jacksonville.
In planning for this trip, Poole talked at length with Dessie Smith before Smith passed away at the age of 96. During the conversations, Dessie reflected on her own time on the St. Johns and offered some inimitable advice on how to make a modern voyage on the St. Johns and the Ocklawaha Rivers.
The filmmakers' trip shadowed the route taken by Rawlings and Smith, from south of Puzzle Lake north on the St. Johns to the Ocklawaha River, and finally back to the original Rawlings home, now preserved as a State Historic Park at Cross Creek. Along the way, the women camped in the wilderness of conservation land in the watershed, and stayed at overnight riverfront lodging at fish camps and marinas. Both not only explored the river, but more closely examined their own connections to it through their respective art and craft.
Although much has changed since the original Rawlings trip in the 1930's, much of the natural world has remained. Others who felt the tug of Florida and the St. Johns on their hearts were closely considered — from naturalist William Bartram to artist Winslow Homer. During the trip, the filmmakers met modern residents of the watershed whose own literature and art have been inspired by the river, including landscape painter Jim Draper and author and Timucua historian Fred Hitt.
