I grew up about 10 years before and 100 miles south of Jeff Klinkenberg to a family who had originally arrived in Key West on a China clipper. Plus, I’ve spent most of my adult life looking forward to Klink’s columns in the Tampa Bay Times.
Given that background, Klink’s new book, “Son of Real Florida,” should be old news, not something I’ve been keenly waiting for since “Alligators in B-Flat,” was published in 2013.
Sometimes I just wallow in words I remember – like the stories on Solomon’s Castle, the Dry Tortugas and even Frog Girl, who was a columnist for Bay Soundings – but I learn something new every time.
Columns I somehow missed – like the yucky things “industrial” tomatoes have become vs. the big incredible fruit we remember well – teach the intricacies of farming through the eyes of the people who have committed their lives to doing it well. I teared up a little bit reading about his father for the first time, and cried again reading about his friend Keith who died in an incredibly horrible accident.
If you wonder whether this book is worth the investment of time and money, stop and think how many people think the best of Florida is long gone and that only the crazies remain. “When I was a kid, alligators and crocodiles were rare due to hunting,” he writes. “Now they are more numerous than at any time in a century. Panthers and bears face problems, but their populations are more robust than when I was young. Nobody, legally at least, scrambles turtle eggs into omelets anymore; in a recent year, loggerheads set nesting records on east Florida beaches.”
Not that the challenge is over by any means. People like Robert Moehling, of the legendary “Robert Is Here” fruit stand in Homestead, are fewer and further between – certainly in the urbanized Tampa Bay region. Clyde Butcher still takes spectacular images but he’s even more of an outlier photographer than when he first started taking large-format photos of the Everglades. But every story in this book inspires people to make a difference, whether they’re protecting rattlesnakes or collecting frogs.
And I do have to admit, I haven’t read the whole book. I do own everything he’s ever published in hardback and I rotate them through my life, savoring them rather than devouring them. They’re the only things that make me glad when doctors run late or I have to spend an hour somewhere waiting for a flat tire to be fixed. With nearly 40 years of work written at the Times, I just hope he doesn’t wait another five years before publishing another book.
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