Scipio Creek

 

In the mid-to-late 1940s into the early 1950s when I was a boy and into my teens, I loved coming to Apalachicola, first with my father on his fish business, and later through Apalachicola on the way to summer camp, Camp Weed of our Episcopal Diocese. Sometimes singing along with Bing Crosby on the car radio, "We're on our way, to Apalachicola, F-L-A"

Sometimes, including earliest trips, we'd stop and walk around Trinity Episcopal Church, a quaint old 19th century structure that in those years was unlocked and open around the clock. 

Sometimes have dinner at one of the cafes in town. One still here that I remember because of its unusual corner situation several steps up from the street, high on the SW corner of Market Street and what in those days I think was Chestnut Street (now Avenue E), then and now the town's main intersection, was The Grill; and two or three blocks north in what locals called "The Bowery" was another corner cafe, run by the Nichols family.

Apalachicola had no traffic signals in those days, and even today there are only two traffic lights in town, one flashing caution.

Second only to St Andrews, this is the place of my heart, loved from 1946 or 1947, more than seventy-five years of my life!  

As a boy, when we were in town I'd imagine living here, and being a member of Trinity Church. I'd know the Trinity Church priest because summers he'd be taking his turn on staff at Camp Weed. One such priest, Barnum McCarty, I'd known since summer 1946, when he was my cabin leader my first year at Camp, when I was ten years old and he was fifteen or sixteen. Years later, when we were away in the Navy, Barnum was rector at St Andrew's Episcopal Church, Panama City (which started about 1909 as Christ Church, St Andrews); and still later, I counted him my predecessor when I was the priest at Trinity, Apalachicola. Barnum, who died recently in his early nineties, was an extraordinary person in the Episcopal Church. 

Linda and I were reminiscing that it was exactly twenty-five years ago this week that I retired from parish priesthood and we left Apalachicola and moved home to St Andrews. 

When we moved here in 1984, Apalachicola still had the exact same feel and character that I remembered from my childhood and teenage years. It has changed from that fishing village I knew, and is changing, which is the way with creation. 

On the water side of the hotel, a screen porch where we have supper and breakfast, and watch shrimpers and other commercial and pleasure fishing boats come and go. Some visits here, on very early mornings I've watched a man in a small boat on the far side of the creek, pausing his boat at little white markers to empty his crab traps. 

We love coming back a Time or two a year, a mini-vacation for two people long retired in the place of our dreams; but for whom Apalachicola is still and always a place of the heart.

Boat pics snapped as we had a bit of supper out here on our screen porch last evening, and a couple of sunrise shots just now. And mullet are jumping all over the place on the creek in front of us this morning.

RSF&PTL

T88&c