It is an interesting name: Tate’s Hell, a swamp in north Florida. I’ve been there once. The place wasn’t a state forest then. I don’t know who owned it, which was the case with a lot of places I wandered around in my youth, a practice which could best be described at trespassing.
I saw a lot of scenery using this method. And I did some stupid things to see most of it.
At the time, Tate’s Hell was a rough attempt to stir up a massive pine plantation off Highway 98. That effort required roads and ditches and nitrogen fertilizer, which resulted in runoff into the Apalachicola Bay and concern about pollution in a place where a lot of Florida’s shellfish grow. Of course, this was long before oil balls were washing onto beaches and into swamplands on the Gulf Coast.
Hell consisted of everything from forests to swamps, populated by eagles, black bears, alligators, hunters and fishermen. I cannot pretend to have fit into any of those categories. I just went in to see what I could see.
Locals tell the story of Cebe Tate who strayed into the swamp in 1875 looking for a panther that had been killing his livestock. He wandered, lost for seven days, drank the chocolate water, got bit by a snake, straggled out to a place called Carrabelle and mumbled these words just before dying, “My name is Cebe Tate, and I have just come from Hell.”
Naturally, after hearing that, I had to check out Hell. Turns out, it was not far from where I lived. Hell was hot as hell back in those roads built like Beelzebub’s maze. Even if Cebe had been driving a Hummer with a Garmin, he’d still have gotten lost. The humidity in the swamps was like trying to breathe through a steaming wet towel. The pines smelled of turpentine, sweat and soured ferns. Perhaps the sweat was my own, but the soured ferns filled the heat with a thick, pungent aroma that pinched inside my nose and watered my eyes. In hindsight, the ferns may have been just fine, but something was dead up in there.
I imagined timber rattlers eyeing me, cottonmouth water moccasins following me, and alligators planning dinner around my next step. In a place like Hell, you never know what form your pain may come in. Mine never came. After unloading a gallon of saline into my clothes, I left without much of a story. I went to Hell, and all I got was a salty t-shirt to show for it.
Since then, I’ve been through hell backwards, in places with names that wrongly sounded quite pleasant. Now Tate’s Hell is a beautiful State Forest. Hell, they should change the name.