Local Date

24 December 2024

Local Time

10:34

Location

Gainesville, Florida

Country or Territory

United States

Name

Automatic Ground Station 3 Florida

Satellite

NOAA-19

Archive ID

ow920

After a few hours at Florida's coast, one begins to see beyond the obvious signs of damage from Hurricane Helene to houses and infrastructure, and other more subtle signals become visible. At the edge of the marshes in Suwannee, a town at the mouth of the Suwanneee river, the land had subsided significantly. We spotted a red life jacket caught in top of a stand of high reeds near the waterline. Near the Cedar Keys museum, a bleached log had been lifted into the upper branches of a Cedar or Juniper. "Have a good time on the island- or what's left of it" said a Cedar Keys resident named Tom as we left the community garden he had set up and repaired from storm damage. We noticed how local mud clams grow in clumps, clustering on each other, rather than on rocks, like the clams and mussels of California and the UK. In the mud, the footsteps of boots traced a path to a dense outcrop of clams, presumably for a local clam harvest. Raccoon feet looked like tiny hands sunk deep in the mud. "When I was young we all used to go clam stomping" said a woman we spoke to in Cedar Keys. "You would stand in the mud and stomp your feet down over the clam. They were huge" she made a sign with her hands, fingers arranged in a large diamond shape, "nothing like what we eat today", she added.

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