Reflections: Things that Go Bump in the Water

When we see nothing, we see black. We get to wondering what’s in nothing. When Old Sol calls it a day, revealing the scary neighborhood where we really live, we wonder and maybe fear what’s out there in space; and to what’s out there looking our way, we’re part of a black mystery. Closer to home we have blackwater lakes and rivers. We can’t see their occupants and likewise, without breaking the water line, those denizens of the dark have no idea about us and our place in the solar system.

From a land of muddy streams and lakes we enter Florida, where the clean water is either clear or black, as if this had determined the Georgia-Alabama border. Each day our clear water turns black as the inside of a congressman, like the rest of the unlit world. Night snorkeling in a crystal clear lake is worth doing. Dive a ways and it will feel so like suspension in outer space that you may forget which way is up. Just a little bit scary. But even at night clear water holds no secrets from one with a Q­-Beam.

Spring-fed rivers and sinkholes are transparent but Florida also holds water so pitch black that a school of mermaids might be right there and you won’t know it, night or day. Tannin provides the darkness, leaching from shoreline leaves and trees into waterbodies fed directly by rainwater. Parts of the Santa Fe River, upper reaches of the Suwannee, the Sopchoppy River, Blue Cypress Lake to name a few. Unless it jumps out or gets caught, everything in these blackwater mansions is hidden from us. You might say that what lives in opaque water also occupies the transparent; but based on a particular blackwater lake I know of, little visited by eye or light, I would beg to differ.

With no boat ramps, no human habitations and invisibile from any road, the enigmatic lake I have in mind is the primal and the darkest one in a group that once flowed into the St. Johns River. Most bass fishermen finding their way there don’t linger beyond one circumnavigation because this is an ecosystem very different from most lakes. Figuring it out requires many visits. A county fishery biologist found no invertebrate life and declared it dead. This is how such a lake of darkness confounds even the experts, although no fisherman, as fishermen are optimists, would have leaped to such a conclusion.

From swiping a net through shoreline weeds, I already knew this lake lacked invertebrate life; no grass shrimp, no crayfish. But Mother Nature had found a way here that eschews the traditional building blocks of a fish population. Far from barren, it had a vast population of extra-large bluegills, carloads of crappies, buttloads of catfish and bullheads and a thirty-seventy split between bass and bowfin. The shallows are all concrete-hard sand and I never have seen a bass bed in that lake. I would guess they do it on the rare muddy bottom where water seeps or flows in.

Like many dark tannic lakes, it lacks submerged aquatic plants, algae, shad, and shiners. More peculiar to this lake tilapias, shellcrackers, stumpknockers, and redbreasts also are absent. It has gar and pickerel only in times of strong flow; and no otters and no mussels. This lake also hid for years a puzzle that kept me coming back, akin to the Lock Ness monster.

In a tannic lake or stream, vision must play a diminished role in predation. Swimming in there, you can’t see your hand in front of your eyes. And I admit it is a little unnerving to jump out of the boat in the middle into forty feet of molten midnight, especially when you’ve seen clues to what I’ve never quite seen in there. So it must be all lateral lines sensing vibrations, perhaps why the catfish so thrive, little reliant on vision anyway; and why Mr. and Mrs. Bowfin keep up so well with the more visually oriented and modern Bass family. With no forage fish, it is a pure predators eating each other system.

You can’t see what lives in blackwater unless you pull something out. No one can. Not never. For years the unexplainable was happening in this lake. In the low water of the 1980s motorboats couldn’t make it in there so my jonboat and I had it all to ourselves. On a windless summer day it is an illusory world. The tree and cloud images set off by such reflective water are richer in color and detail and seem more authentic than the world we occupy, cypress trunks reaching a hundred feet down through inches of water while remaining on the surface with the clouds like the fourth dimension. The continuous rim of trees resounds with echoes to rival any canyon wall should an angler care to declare his presence. The random gator floats by, a riparian tree fills with bright white storks and in the glorious silence one gets the fine feeling that human time does not apply here. A T-rex on the shore bending down for a drink would not seem out of place.

Without shad in the relatively sterile water no schools of bass feed on the surface. There was, however, something far more interesting. Every day it would happen—enormous splashes in mid-lake. By enormous I mean concussions that could be produced only by something that had no business living there. More like what might indicate dolphin feeding in Mosquito Lagoon, water rising a good eight feet into the air. Not alligators, it seemed to be some sort of feeding fish. Hundreds of pounds alligator gar, the most likely suspect, never have been known to inhabit this part of the state.

Always I rowed speedily toward the scene and arrived too late, only the mute testimony of bubble islands in the aftermath. I then would cast a rattle trap or diver all around to no avail.

This puzzle came with clues. For years every bass caught there appeared to have had a close brush with digestion. Without exception they were wounded; some healed, some fresh gashes. One day I caught the same bass twice, I could tell by the wound. Neither I nor my buddies ever caught a clean bass. If a bass survived in there, it always was just barely. Clearly something was feeding on them. All those years we never caught one over five pounds.

One day I had strung a two-pound bass, tying it off to my jonboat. Like every bass, it sported the gash or two testifying to a close call. After a period of just hanging there like bass usually do on a stringer, it shot out and continued leaping frantically high into the air apparently desperate to be anywhere but in the water. Just as suddenly it was floating, stone dead, I presume of a heart attack. What had it sensed coming, I’ve often wondered, that may have slid along right under me? Had the bass lasted longer, I may have found out in spectacular fashion.

A couple years ago it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the giant splashes in a while. Then I realized that all the bass now are clean, no wounds, just like in any other lake. Bass outnumber bowfin two to one and we’re catching bigger bass, recently a nine-pounder. The interloper is there no longer. Maybe it or they escaped during a period of high water. Did it reach the sea or does it swim in one of the between lakes now? Or maybe it just died, the only trace of its existence in the memories of a few fishermen.

I remind skeptics of the coelacanth, fish known only in fossils, assumed by scientists to have caught the Extinction Express out of Dodge about 66 million years ago. Then these big fish turned up unchanged off the coasts of Africa and Indonesia, giggle-bubbling about the elaborate joke they’d played on humans, accidentally caught occasionally by local fishermen.

With the exception of the Ridge, cutting down the middle around Hwy. 27, Florida itself was under water a couple million years ago. During that submersion strange plants evolved on the Ridge that live nowhere else on Earth, like a carnivorous plant that lives entirely underground. All manner of large sea life was swimming over most of Florida like pelicans and airliners fly over it now. As the peninsula emerged into the air, no telling what may have nestled into rivers or water-filled depressions. I suspect that’s how the landlocked gizzard shad developed.

When first I learned of this particular blackwater lake, I met a man who had escaped from Hungary and who came to rest on a lake farther up the chain. He had made journeys to my lake and loved it as I do now, for its feral isolation. I recall him speaking excitedly of the “giant pikes” in there. “No telling what he actually means,” I thought. Yes, no telling. No telling what might be swimming under your boat in the black water you think you know so well.  

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Tom Levine lives in Orlando, Florida. His books, including Bass Fishing in Outer Space, Bite Me!, and Paradise Interrupted, are available at defiantworm.weebly.com and Amazon Kindle.

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