As Doctor Thomas Hallock wraps up the instructional speech I missed while trying to find the correct entrance to Lowry Park, 37-year-old graduate student Donna Self asks if I've got a canoeing partner. I didn't; now I do. A deal is struck. She will sit in the back and steer; I will sit in the front, paddle when all other options have been exhausted, and try not to move around too much.Another University of South Florida student overhears.
"You're going with her?"
Over Self's laughing protestations, it is revealed that she and Doctor Raymond Arsenault, co-director of USF's pioneering Florida Studies Program, took an unintentional dip during another recent field trip for Hallock's "Rivers of Florida" class.
I proclaim that I am not afraid. Yet another student wanders over and into the conversation.
"You're going to let her steer?"
I am only slightly less unafraid than I was a second ago.
A shiny black car pulls up to the concrete boat ramp angling downward to disappear beneath the tea-colored Hillsborough River. The shiny black car disgorges a broad-shouldered, unsmiling man in a dark suit and a badge, and Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio. She is the polar opposite of her consort, casually dressed and gregarious. She wades into the crowd of professors, pupils and press.
Hallock has scheduled a special guest for each of the several river-trips included in the new "Rivers of Florida" course. Aptly, for today's jaunt down the urban lower Hillsborough, it's Iorio, a former USF grad student herself. The press is ostensibly here to celebrate Florida Studies, an innovative master's track launched in the 2003-04 school year at USF's St. Petersburg campus. The program combines many traditionally segregated areas of education (literature, anthropology, political science, economics, etc.), and attracts graduate students from every academic discipline. Self, for instance, is in her final semester of journalism study — a native of Alabama, she's taking "Rivers of Florida" in order to better acquaint herself with her adopted home state.
Also, there are worse ways to spend a series of fall and winter Friday afternoons than canoeing down a bunch of picturesque Florida waterways.
The mayor's police escort roars off ahead, and we follow, a lackadaisical fiberglass flotilla of two-person launches. A motivated outgoing tide pulls us along past monstrous riverside homes and hurricane-ruined docks, as Arsenault, co-director Gary Mormino and others wax conversationally about the history and ecology of the Hillsborough. Lucy Jones, 39, is writing a paper for the course on the Hillsborough's many bridges, so she's the go-to expert whenever a span looms. The canoes with reporters in them immediately drop to the back of the procession; my personal rationale for hanging back is something about how if anyone gets eaten by an alligator, it'll be there in front of me so I won't miss it. But there aren't any alligators, and, aside from a few birds, no conspicuous critters.
"Finally," says Self as we cruise by a single large freshwater turtle, "some wildlife on the freakin' urban Hillsborough."
The group takes a break at the docks of a small park (which isn't so much a "park" as a waterside plot of land that somebody from the city mows every once in a while) for some discourse in the shade. The discussion is engaging and comfortably scattershot, mirroring the Florida Studies Program itself in the way it jumps from history to geography to environmental concerns.
Dr. Mormino talks about how the role of the river has changed. Once the center of everyday life, it's now almost incidental.
"I'm not sure there's ever been a building built in downtown Tampa with the river in mind," he muses.
"I wouldn't want a building overlooking the river in the 1920s," Hallock counters, playing devil's advocate. "It was dead."
When asked what she might do to make the river a more integral part of citizens' lives, Mayor Iorio speaks of the long-on-the-drawing-board plans for a riverwalk stretching from the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center down to the Channelside District.
"It's our attempt to really open the river up to people," she says.
After about a half hour of conversation, we're back on the river. The tide has slackened, forcing us to dig in with our paddles. Two kids in their early teens emerge from a hideously contemporary mansion on the north bank, a boy and a girl. They've got a bullhorn, which the boy uses to inform us that he just took "a big dookie in that water."
"It looks like an alligator," he elaborates proudly.
They're so sweet at that age.
We round a final bend, and after passing the only mudflat of the day to give off that marshy stink most often associated with Bayshore Boulevard at low tide, the downtown skyline comes majestically into view. So do a gaggle of sculls engaged in rowing practice. A coach with another bullhorn bleats and crackles, but there's a lot of boat traffic down on this end of the river, so I can't tell if he's yelling at his team, or us.
We all approach the UT rowing docks with wildly varying degrees of grace. Self and I wait for a clear shot at disembarkation, then swing alongside the floating planks. If we're going to get wet, this is our last, best chance. Arsenault steadies our canoe, however, and we both climb out dry, and far more enlightened about the Hillsborough River's relationship with the people who've lived on its banks for a century than we were when we first stepped in.
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 1, 2004.