I love Florida; or, How I came to love Texas.
I might have been born in Texas but it took leaving and coming back to really begin to see and understand the state from an ecological perspective.
A few newsletters ago I said I would do a bio post. After starting one essay and deciding it was too navel gaze-y, I have opted for something a little bit different. I hope you’ll stick with me!
My parents first took my brother and me on vacation to SW Florida when I was 9 or 10 years old. We drove the nearly 19 hours from our house in Tarrant County to Fort Myers Beach over the course of two days, my dad “putting pedal to the metal”, as he would say. From that very first trip I was hooked on Florida. I wanted to live there. I wanted my whole life to revolve around living near the beach in Florida.
We made several more trips to Florida throughout my tween and teen years, back to Fort Myers and Sanibel Island, and I am pretty sure we made another trip when I was in college but my memory is fuzzy on that right now. Eventually I did make it to Florida to live, in 2002. I’d freshly graduated from Texas A&M-Galveston with a marine biology degree and got married to my husband Chris, who had already been living in Florida for the five months prior to our wedding while attending grad school at the Florida Institute of Technology. We settled in to live on the Space Coast and I was in love—with my husband of course, but Florida as well. I had made that childhood dream come true!
It wasn’t long before we were snorkeling in Sebastian Inlet and scuba diving along the Treasure Coast and the Florida Keys during lobster season. We took up geocaching which led us to so many parks and natural areas we hadn’t been aware of. Eventually geocaching faded into just hiking and exploring for the sake of hiking and exploring. After Chris graduated, life took us to Miami where I began working for a tribe in their environmental department in the heart of the Everglades. The Everglades!
In the Everglades, I learned to drive an airboat and swamp buggy, tromped through sawgrass, and for a short bit, conducted radio telemetry tracking of a Florida panther. It was a perfect mix of field work and office work, though the drive to get there, depending on where we were living at the time, ranged from 30 minutes to an hour and five minutes. South Florida had ample public lands to explore, from the South Florida Water Management District lands in the Water Conservation Areas (aka: northern/central Everglades), to Big Cypress National Preserve, and Everglades National Park. The upper Keys were about an hour away and we could drive down for a long day or weekend to snorkel, camp, and explore there.
In between all of those larger public lands, there were various city, county, and state parks scattered about, little plots of conservation areas amidst all of the encroaching development that was south Florida. You didn’t feel like making the trek out to Big Cypress that day? No problem, there was likely a great park or natural area nearby you could spend an hour or two at to fill your outdoors needs. On more adventurous weekends we would trek across to the Gulf Coast or on even longer weekends we’d drive to north-central Florida or the Panhandle to explore. There was always somewhere new to see or a favorite haunt to revisit.
In 2009 I got the wild hair to hike the Appalachian Trail. I’d read about in a Backpacker magazine article and thought it sounded amazing. The AT was busy and gaining popularity but it hadn’t hit the massive peak of attention it would get a few year later once social media hit the mainstream. I was also feeling a bit homesick, not for Texas itself but for the people living in it, my family. My brother was starting to have kids and I wanted to be a part of their lives, if possible. And the housing market in Florida was insane compared to what I knew Texas was like (of course, that’s changed drastically now). We rented the entire time we lived in Florida and tiny 2-bedroom, former retiree homes from the 60s and 70s were going for 300-400K or more. And did we want to raise kids in south Florida, should we ever have them? These were all questions and thoughts that passed through my mind as I continued to fall deeper in love with the nature of Florida. We’d spent the summer of 2007 documenting a new population of ghost orchids, for fun, so was I really willing to give up swamp hiking, orchids, and tropical hardwood hammocks? Was I willing to give up an hour’s drive away from a Keys weekend?
Possibly.
Which is why we took 2009 to plan and save up for a 2010 thru-hike, which we completed between March and August that year. 2,179 miles from Georgia to Maine on foot, in five months! We packed everything up into a storage container and had it purposely stored in Florida in case we changed our minds. Easier to just move it within the state instead of halfway across country if for some reason we decided to return to Florida.
We only had about a month in Texas between moving our cats and some basic belongings to my parent’s house, while also doing some pre-trail planning, before we left for the southern terminus of the AT. It was the back half of February and front half of March, not exactly the best times to enjoy the outdoors in North Texas. In fact, I wondered why in the hell I had left Florida. Ok, truthfully, I still ask myself this every November-February.
We set off on the AT, accomplished our thru-hike and returned to the heat of summer in Texas. While we waited to find out if resumes and job applications would pan out, Chris and I took a small road trip through the state after our hike, to see some areas we’d never been to before. Growing up, my parents had taken my brother and me on coastal trips to Rockport and Port Aransas (when we weren’t going to Florida), and we’d gone camping at various state parks within an easy drive from DFW, but I hadn’t seen the state. There had been a trip to San Antonio and the Alamo—and if I recall this was tied into a trip to Port A—and a day trip down to Austin to visit with a great-aunt. I had seen the Capitol! However, I did not know Texas like I knew Florida, though I had lived in Texas for nearly 22 years and only 8 in Florida at that time. On our road trip we saw many beautiful places but I didn’t know this state and it didn’t feel like home.
Eventually we found a temporary field job in deep east Texas and spent a couple of months getting to know the habitats of Sabine National Forest. Afterwards, we still hadn’t lined up a permanent job and so we had more time on our hands. That led us back to Florida, this time to thru-hike the 1,100 mile Florida Trail. We’d hiked most of the southern section already through short section hikes and had visited other sections during day hikes. We were fairly prepared with what to expect and only had about a month between deciding we were going to hike the trail and leaving for Florida to start our hike.
It was the perfect goodbye to our time in Florida. We had visited so much of the state when we lived there but walking it on foot? Now, I knew it intimately.
More field work followed back in Texas and then a permanent position which led us to the Houston area, a place that hadn’t been at the top of our list of places to live in Texas. Chris and I started putting down roots and began exploring more of the greater Houston region and reconnecting with friends who lived here. We worked in the Big Thicket, which scratched that itch for swamp explorations. The Hill Country opened our eyes to places like Westcave Preserve and Pedernales Falls State Park. I started learning more of the plants here, understanding the ecosystems, and the environmental aspects of the state. We climbed the tallest mountain in Texas, Guadalupe Peak, and enjoyed a Thanksgiving sunrise shining down across the Lone Star State.
I still yearned for Florida, though. I thought about it often. I wrote about it on my blog. I kept in touch with Florida friends and environmental issues pertaining to the Everglades and beyond. I missed the hell out of that state for years.
Since leaving Florida in 2010 and thru-hiking the FT in 2011, I’ve been back three separate times: 2014 to south/southwest Florida, January 2020 to central Florida to attend an FT event, and in 2022 to the Apalachicola area for a Spring Break trip. It was finally during that trip that I realized I’d made peace with my decision to leave Florida. The desire to still live there didn’t carry the stranglehold it had in the years previously. Don’t get me wrong, I did imagine myself driving the backroads of Apalachicola National Forest on weekends and spending the summer exploring the Forgotten Coast by boat. But the feeling of immense sadness that would burst to the surface when I returned to Texas after trips to Florida…that was gone. Or at least simmering in the background.
I realize I’ve written many paragraphs here waxing poetic about Florida and you are probably wondering, what is the point? The point is I want to feel about Texas like I feel about Florida. I want Texas to have the abundance of public lands available to its citizens, to cultivate an ethic for conservation. I want people to come to Texas for its ecotourism and leave with a sense that the state actually cares about the land its borders surround. Sure, the Texas legislature recently passed $1 billion in legislation for adding more TPWD lands that we will get to vote on in the November election. It’s a step in the right direction but it doesn’t wipe away the better part of three decades or more of underfunding and casual neglect. Texas faces a lot of issues in the coming decades as we continue to increase our population and expand our cities, consuming up once rural lands. We face water shortages and increasing droughts. It can’t be just TPWD bearing the brunt of land conservation. It should include cities, counties, and the federal government making an effort to find target areas to set aside for conservation. Once the land is paved over and homes are built on it, you can’t get it back. And contrary to what most Texans might think, there’s some incredibly rare species and habitat worth protecting.
And so that’s why I started On Texas Nature. I’ve been writing for years on my blog, sharing trip reports from camping or hiking excursions or whatever side trips we’ve taken throughout the state, but this is supposed to be a place I could focus on learning more for myself and sharing that knowledge with others. In Florida, Marjory Stoneman Douglas is a household name. Do Texans know who Ned Fritz, Geraldine Watson, or Lance Rosier are? How many know the name John Graves? And the many more hidden in local histories of cities and counties throughout the state?
This is as much of an education for me as I hope it is for you. It’s why I write here, why I’ve spent far too much mental and emotional energy trying to save a state park, and why I pour through internet archives looking for tidbits of information to learn about and share here.
Texans deserve to know how interesting and varied their ecological resources are and we owe it to the flora and fauna to conserve as much of it as possible.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
Loved reading your story and learning more about the areas you live and your passion for the land❤️