One can forget the passage of time with this landscape, and imagine instead being in the Carboniferous swamp, in a febrile caldron of primordial activity where elementary life forms seem to ignite and extinguish themselves simultaneously. The turquoise water of the headsprings becomes air clear in the spring runs, and later changes to the color of port wine in the rivers, tinted russet by the tannic acid of the cypress tress on the banks. Other times it is wedgewood blue or emerald, coming from deep cavern networks or bubbling out of sand boils. These emanations of the Florida Aquifer appear like iridescent jewels in tangled woods, often in deserted and inaccessible areas, at the end of limerock roads. From the outside of a spring, the lens-like quality of the water distorts everything beneath the surface.
Figures swimming on the surface seem infinitely far away.
Sometimes the water comes from a sand boil, and it seems impossible to tell if they are tiny boils, an arms-length away, or if there are enormous underwater volcanoes, far distant, with billowing sand that obscures the opening. It's another planet embedded without our own, with its own rocks, light and atmosphere. We can stand on the edge of the rocks and glimpse this different world, but it is only when we enter that we experience it.