‘The Ichetucknee is my muse’

Photographer and watercolorist Steve Earl can pinpoint the exact moment he felt moved to express himself artistically: It was the first time he laid eyes on the crystalline blue headwaters of the Ichetucknee River in 1983.

“Seeing the Ichetucknee was a pivotal moment in my life,” says Earl, 51, who lives and works as a park ranger at Mike Roess Gold Head Branch State Park just north of Keystone Heights. Earl, who was born and raised outside of Atlanta, had never encountered a spring-fed river system like the Ichetucknee. He immediately recorded the experience in his journal:

Here I sit on the bench at Blue Hole, shivering, stunned and in awe, after swimming out over the boil and peering down into the eye of the spring. …This is all totally miraculous. I have found the center of the world.

In 1989, Earl made the Ichetucknee River the center of his world by moving into a 100-year-old log cabin a short distance from the river’s headwaters. He spent 12 years there, raising a family, meditating on the springs, painting them, photographing them and writing about them. Now his musings — embodied in poetry, prose, photography and watercolor landscapes — have culminated in a coffee table book, “Ichetucknee: Sacred Waters,” just published by University Press of Florida.

“It [the book] started as an inspiration from the very beginning, probably from the first roll of film I shot,” Earl says. “Nobody had ever published a book on the Ichetucknee. And I always thought somebody was going to beat me to it,” he says with a laugh, “because from the time I had the inspiration to do a book on the river to the time I had the book in hand, it’s been at least 23 years.”

Early influences

Earl describes himself as a self-taught artist, but he had plenty of mentors along the way, beginning with his parents. For instance, Earl’s mother, Leonora, meditated every day.

“She spent probably the second half of her life practicing daily meditation, taking 20 minutes to an hour to sit with eyes closed and turn all of her attention and focus inward, discovering the inner universe,” Earl says. Earl regularly uses a form of meditation in his own creative process: When he paints, he often spends several hours outdoors in open-eyed meditation, reflecting on a particular scene before heading off to his watercolors and brushes, where he lets the scene he’s internalized flow out onto the paper.

Earl’s father, John, was a jazz musician who took up photography in midlife.

“He met a man named Jim Valentine, who’s now a prominent Florida photographer,” Earl says of his father’s career change. “My father traded him a 1937 Packard for [Valentine’s] first old press view camera and so many lessons.”

Valentine was so impressed with John’s progress that he invited John to help photograph a book Valentine was working on: “Guale: The Golden Coast of Georgia.” Earl’s father published 12 photos in Valentine’s book, and later published photos in Sierra Club and Audubon Society calendars. He also published a few books of his own, including “John Muir’s Longest Walk,” before moving to southern Georgia to teach at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

First photos

Soon after his encounter with the Ichetucknee River, Steven Earl bought his first camera from a friend who worked in a camera store in Houston — a used Nikon 35 millimeter, along with a few lenses. Earl used the same film that his father and Valentine had shot when they photographed the Georgia coastline: Ektachrome 25.

“It’s really, really slow film, so you have to shoot on a tripod — which I do anyway — and at slow speed, because the slower speeds tend to produce sharper photos with less grain,” Earl says. Some of the first photos he shot were of his favorite spring in the park, Millpond. He shot the tributary of the spring from a limestone outcropping along the bank.

“When I processed the roll and got the film back, I was really pleased. It was at that moment that I said, ‘Wow. I think I can produce at the level my father produced at all those years.”

While living in the log cabin from 1989 to 1996, Earl spent a great deal of his time studying nature.

“I would devote half a day every day going into the park and finding beautiful spots to sit, observe, photograph, think, and write music and poetry,” he says. But he also was inspired by the bounty of rich vegetation and wildlife in the park, which is reflected by many of the photos in his book of insects, colorful lichens, leaves, dewdrop-covered berries and the towering tree canopy of the hardwood hammock.

Earl met his other mentor — nature photographer John Moran — while living at the river.

“He’d show me little tricks of the trade whenever he’d come out to the river to do his own photographing,” Earl says. “He’d often pick me up and we’d go on shoots together. He had more equipment than I did, and he’d always offer the use of his equipment, so I got to use things that weren’t in my little bag of tricks.”

Golden years

Earl’s career with the park service began as a volunteer at the Ichetucknee State Park. He spent so much time volunteering at the park that when one of the permanent park rangers had to take an extended leave of absence, Earl was hired as his temporary replacement. The following summer he was hired again to help out during the park’s peak summer season.

“They really wanted to hire me full time, but there were no full-time positions available,” Earl says. When a full-time residential position opened up at Gold Head Branch State Park in 1996, Earl decided to apply for it.

“I wanted to continue on with the park service,” he says. He’s been at Gold Head ever since.

“As much as the Ichetucknee meant — and means — to me, my 12 years spent at Gold Head are equally powerful,” Earl says. Gold Head’s natural beauty is a little more subtle than the Ichetucknee, he says. The park’s ecosystem is sandhill, which is made up predominantly of long leaf pine, turkey oaks and wiregrass. Earl describes the sandhill ecosystem as “the ancient sand dunes from when this area was beachfront property.

“I’ve really come to appreciate and love the sandhill ecosystem. It’s amazing. For a good majority of the time I was living at the Ichetucknee, I spent so much time in the hardwood hammock and live oaks and the river system — which is a completely different ecosystem — I was completely oblivious to the pine ecosystem.” And yet, Earl eventually discovered that the major ecosystem of the 2,400-acre Ichetucknee State Park is also sandhill.

“Most people go to see the river, which is a very narrow corridor of hardwood hammock river ecosystem and floodplain. But that’s just a narrow corridor that bisects 2,400 acres of sandhill,” he says.

A call to conservation

Many of Earl’s photographs were taken when the Ichetucknee was a healthy river and its waters were still crystalline blue. Unfortunately Earl says, the Ichetucknee is no longer a blue river.

“All the beautiful green, undulating, swaying grass that used to be this wonderful contrast of emerald green and turquoise blue … now it’s just brown gook swaying in this pea green water.”

Like so many of North Central Florida’s spring-fed rivers, the Ichetucknee is recharged by rainwater that falls in a 300-square-mile watershed. The rainwater trickles down through a sand and limestone filter into the Florida aquifer, feeding this vast underground river system before bubbling up to the surface at the springhead.

Now, when the rainwater falls over developed areas, it takes with it hundreds of tons of nitrates from fertilizer and other pollutants that have begun to contaminate the spring waters. The nitrates trigger algae blooms, which choke off the river’s eelgrass and other native plants.

“I have to believe in my heart that it can be reversed,” Earl says of the contamination that’s occurring now. “Otherwise it’s too depressing.”

Earl sees his book as a way to help save the river.

“I approach environmental conservation from two perspectives: teaching people about being careful about pollutants and teaching people to slow down when they’re in nature,” he says. “Because it’s only when you have a deep personal connection with the environment that you’re going to be a steward of it. You’re not going to take care of the environment if you don’t care about it at a deep level. That’s what I’m trying to teach people through this book: Appreciation. Connection. That’s really my mission.”