The North Atlantic low-pressure troughs form annually somewhere offshore east of Rhode Island and the Massachusetts sound. The troughs are fed by polar air out of Canada travelling down through the Mid-Atlantic region and, as explained in 1971 by meteorologist George Winterling on WJXT, create pending collisions with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream that had meandered uncomfortably close to the choppy deep waters off Hatteras that year.
This would bring the storm to us before temperatures would finally drop on Jan. 20th to a numbing 19 degrees.
For a young PV beachcomber interested in holding history in the palm of my hand, these were the perfect conditions for fossil hunting between chilly tides along a unique stretch of the beach from just above where Solana Road meets the Boulevard down to about where the Jefferies lived in the mid-550s, a mile or so south of the Club. This was the rich vein, and the convergence of a number of natural histories that were all in play to consistently produce specimens of note. The prize, of course, was the elusive mastodon molar, and that year I found one the size of a baseball.
This trophy wasn’t the only find. The deep grey sand with black veins surfaced mammoth milk teeth, and the ivory tusk parts that could easily be identified by their surf-polished layered breaks running the length of the fossil.
None of it was ever without a hunt. It is the enamel cusps of the teeth that are the stand outs to eager eyes. The big ones are found upper to mid-beach. The shark teeth were at three quarters beach, and the small-to-medium horse teeth would tumble in the receding surf or lay still in the shallow slews at low beach.
To the casual stroller, this science and natural history was an enigma. Their eyes were on the horizon, and sometimes we all need the stability of that line of those box-car waves running south about 200 miles out. Each January, under the right conditions, wintering in Ponte Vedra Beach with the other full-time residents became an exercise in solitude.
The popularity of fossil hunting swelled in Ponte Vedra in the early 1970s. In 1968, amateur collector M. C. Thomas released his primer, “Fossil Vertebrates,” with a note of gratitude to the Department of Natural Sciences at the Florida State Museum in Gainesville. The booklet had become a near-instant success with copies being sold at the Pineapple Post and at the Surf Shop. It was the unofficial welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift to families arriving on the Boulevard being given to them by families living on the Boulevard. Ours came from Jennie and John Veal and our mother Nancy embraced the hobby wholeheartedly.
A lowering post-storm tide is always the right time to begin a fossil hunt. There is never the need to rush. Just keep moving along the beach, scanning the ground about 10 feet ahead and three to four feet on either side. Don’t expect to pick up more that you can easily carry with one hand. That hand is usually the left, held flat, palm up. There is an etiquette to this type of thing. Never be ostentatious. If the fossils aren’t there today, they will be there tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. Slow and easy wins the race.
In January, there’s absolutely no need to go out during the storm itself. The sand and sea spray have their own agenda. For some souls, these elements aren’t punishment at all but a type of physical contrition used to build character. We are never fully alone on any beach and our footprints tell that story.
January 1971 was a chilly month and as February approached, it was downright cold. This meant corduroys and keeping our shoes dry. Even when bundled up, the wind would draw out our tears and chap our lips and redden our cheeks. It was a time to contemplate wonders greater than ourselves while calculating the odds of discovering a unique find.
It was also the time to drip the outdoor faucets to prevent them from freezing, and we’d wear sweaters in the house. Normally we were barefoot, but now we were all wearing socks indoors and slipping on floors. If we were lucky, dads along the Boulevard would set out a sprinkler and leave them on overnight when the forecast called for a freeze, turning clumps of palmettos and ligustrums into the closest thing to ice castles that North Florida could produce. Mrs. Mickler would slow the bus to a crawl in front of the displays so we could all get a good look at the ice spikes on the way to school.
The house was cold. The beach was cold. There was talk of a national energy crisis. We were wintering down. But the news of a storm approaching from the northeast meant something different to us kids than it did the adults.
Black sand that stretched down from the high tide mark to the waterline was always the best indicator of a fossil bed. These were the areas to watch. The rule was simple, look for anything black. With patience and perseverance, our eyes would be trained to recognize the small bits and eventually our findings would make their contributed to the fossil tray our family kept on the credenza in our entry way.
“Nor’easters are the patterns to watch,” Mrs. Young would tell us. We were her third graders that year. She knew the beach well and was always eager to share her tips on combing it. Her stature and kindness matched the character of her army-green house on the south corner of Solana Road at the Boulevard. The house Alice grew up in. Mrs. Young had an artesian well just off the back steps that predated nearly all the surrounding houses by over four decades, maybe even five or more.
In 1971, it was common to discover extant vestiges of what had come before Ponte Vedra was Ponte Vedra, whether it was in customs, manners, artifacts, pipes, timbers or railroad spikes that would occasionally surface unexpectedly.
Mrs. Young’s artesian well had pressures that rivaled our kitchen tap. It was a pipe coming up out of the ground with a very old bronze spigot attached. The water smelled like spent gunpowder and heavy mineral mountain water. No one else admitted drinking from it, and Mrs. Young said it was only to be used to water the garden. But I had a sip or two. There was no pump, no mechanism needed, it was pressurized by a force of nature and in the minds of her young students, this was indeed Ponce de Leon’s fountain, or more specifically, the one he searched for so passionately centuries earlier but never found.
Mrs. Young gave each of her students the impression that two things were vital for success in her class: developing good reading skills and learning the natural history of our community. Kindergarten, first grade and second grade at Ponte Vedra/Palm Valley Elementary School were the preamble for Mrs. Young’s teachable moments. It was in her class that things began to get real. It wouldn’t be until Mrs. Metz’s fifth grade class, though, that cultural history would be fully introduced with dioramas, tabletop displays and poster contests. “Don’t forget the Spring Fling.”
In between third and fifth was Mrs. Tuesdale’s fourth grade class where she emphasized vocabulary and math skills in preparation for Mr. Crouse later in the sixth grade. As principal, Mrs. Purcell had fine-tuned the matriculation at PVPV for over a decade, and now, each student moving through the programs from teacher to teacher became a depository of traditions passed down from class to class, and from one generation to the next.
Adding to this formal curriculum, Mrs. Young stressed above all else the ideas of continuity and character, and she would introduce us to subjects we’d later unpack more fully with Mr. McLatchey in his eighth-grade class.
As odd as it might seem, the fundamentals of weather and its impact on our lives were areas of great interest at the time. The storms of the type Mrs. Young described with her “red sky in morning, sailor take warning” would last three, maybe four days, and jumble up the ocean floor from northeast of Cumberland Island south, pushing sediment down across the mouth of the St. Johns, along the beaches and depositing the consequences on shore beginning just north of the Club at above the Duval County line running south. It was a process that had repeated itself for tens of thousands of years at least, remembering of course that it takes that amount of time for the tooth of a shark to fossilize black in heavy mineralized sand. That’s longer than a young mind can comprehend.
The stretch of PV from the upper end down to the inlet was the basket recipient of these these storm anomalies, and at least twice in the ’70s, the process uncovered the gooey tar-ish-like remains of the furnace oil that originated in storage compartments of the torpedoed steam tanker SS Gulfamerica sunk off Jacksonville by U-123 in 1942. Only turpentine and a rag would successfully clean that black off our feet.
One of the most interesting natural effects, however, and one I’ve only experienced in one other place, near Dungeness on the lower end of Cumberland Island while on a camping trip with Mr. Harrison and other boys from the PV camping club, as Troop 277 was loosely referred to before Dick Hostrup’s arrival, was the intoxicating ambergris-like fragrance of the beach immediately following a passing nor’easter. It lingers only a day or so and is an aroma as alluring to a beachcomber as the rich soil of Nebraska might be to a farmer living there. Its source is near-impossible to pinpoint because the fragrance blankets the entire beach and sticks to your skin. It’s sweet, with top, middle and base notes of cedary mummy after many thousands of years or so of maturation; the scent of an exhibition hall in a museum of art and archeology. If you happen to smell it while you are sitting, it will make you stand. Only on Cumberland Island have I ever been so near that exact aroma, one that Lucy Ferguson, other Carnegies, James Oglethorpe, and those before them undoubtedly experienced as well.
It was the fragrance of heaven.
Mrs. Young taught us it was a combination of fresh water flowing up from springs below Palatka out past Jacksonville through the mouth of the St. Johns at Mayport mixing to create the brackish water when it found the sea. While normally the water was drawn out and north by the Gulf Stream influence, nourishing the Georgia and Carolina estuaries all the way up to Kitty Hawk, during a nor’easter, a type of current inversion happens keeping brine-water close, south along the beaches, mixing and swirling the microscopic critters, the dinoflagellates, of each of the two environments, salt and fresh, that rapidly succumbed to the elements of the other resulting in enormous mounds of seafoam blowing up toward and above the high water mark to be caught in the grasses and sea oats where it would be exposed to air.
From these microscopic remains stuck to every surface like sandspurs, a fragrance would emerge with base notes so powerful the human brain is triggered to release an abundance of endorphins and dopamine filling receptors to overload and generating an overall feeling of general well-being. It wasn’t something that could be captured and is rarely ever adequately described in words. It was something that could only be experienced as it moved up and down the beach like a will-o'-the-wisp. It was storm wake. Sillage.
For fossil hunters, most anything black was a potential treasure. The more interesting finds were the glyptodon scutes, the bison material, the sloth material and the occasional mouth plates of spotted rays, all these are still found regularly on Ponte Vedra Beach and probably will be for many more thousands of years.
This is what Mrs. Young instilled in us, the long view and our place in it. It was the smartly casual way this place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach, has always told its story. One fossil at a time.
