The trail beyond the saw palmetto leads to a secret skate spot we frequented as kids called the “Indy Wall.”

It’s an old concrete drainage ditch with seven foot banks and a tight four feet of flat bottom.

Now long faded, the first piece of graffiti was a large Independent Truck Company symbol on the far wall.

With two skateparks in the county, once treasured spots like these are now mostly neglected.

Crooked River State Park

I knew a girl who spent the first few years of her life on Cumberland Island among the dunes and mangle of maritime forest.  On our first visit to the island together, she showed me how to eat saw palmetto.  Grab ahold of the center-most spike of a young plant and give it a tug.  The soft, lower few inches taste a bit like heart of palm.

The USS George Bancroft is a decommissioned nuclear submarine now half-submerged in front of the main (Franklin) gate of Kings Bay Naval Base.  At the age of eleven, I begged my dad one day to let me join a raucous group of Greenpeace activists and Hare Krishnas in the same spot.  Today children climb on the US monument to mass murder.