The Florida Freshwater Squid
An Overview of History, Habits, and Human Interaction (including such related phenomena as the annual Festival of the Freshwater Squid)
After a short speech, the mayor, Scott Thomas, cuts the green-and-silver ribbons held across the parade route by two cheerleaders from nearby Highlands High School. The mayor’s brother, town sheriff Jeffrey Thomas, signals for the first parade floats to glide into position. As night begins to give way to dawn, many people surge ahead of the parade, eager to be the first to the boats that will take them to the middle of Lake Jackson and the freshwater squid’s traditional mating grounds.
Origins of the Festival
Sebring, Florida, is perhaps the perfect setting for a freshwater squid festival. Situated amid 15 kilometers of lakes that lie along the south end of the Lake Wales Ridge, Sebring is a popular location for water sports and boat trips. (34) [27] Although Lake Jackson, Sebring’s largest lake, does not contain Florida’s highest concentration of mayfly squid, it is the most accessible of the squid’s breeding grounds. (Mayfly squid are more plentiful in the boggy cypress habitat of the northern Wacissa River, but the area is off-limits to all boats except canoes.)
Sebring needs a Festival in the summer as well, since the town is otherwise moribund until the autumn racing season brings the Grand Prix Raceway alive for the American Le Mans Series.[28] In May, Panacea’s Blue Crab Festival and Fernandina Beach’s Isle of Eight Flags Shrimp Festival are the only competition. The event closest in spirit to the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, the Sea Turtle Watch held in Jensen Beach on the Atlantic coast, does not occur until June. (35)
The Festival began 12 years ago as the brainchild of local writer Jan Hines, a 46-year-old print shop manager who at first “just saw it as a good excuse for a summer party, and to sell some of my books. I never thought the town would actually sponsor it. And I never thought we’d ever see thousands of people coming down here for it.”[29]
The books, self-published through Hines’ print shop, are very popular at the Festival. They relate the adventures of a talking squid named Hellatose. “They’re for children and adults,” Hines says. “Children like the plots and pictures. Adults like the subtext. It’s all in good fun.”
As for the thousands of tourists, most of them are from in-state, brought by word-of-mouth, newspaper articles, and the guidebooks. A few, like a German family I met on the parade route-sweaty and pink and slightly dazed from all the noise and color-come out of curiosity. “We were on vacation in Orlando,” the father told me, “and wanted to see part of the real Florida.” They seem satisfied that they have.
The Parade
Despite the fact that the mayfly squid is neither endangered nor particularly edible, an entire subculture, largely unknown to the outside world and adhering to its own set of rituals, has grown up around this small invertebrate.
The parade represents the first of these rituals, a preliminary event that most locals participate in even if they don’t take to the water later. It constitutes a uniquely Floridian oxymoron of sincerity and tackiness, part of a town that, by virtue of its strip malls, old abandoned Art Deco hotels from Sebring’s boom period of the 1950s, and falsely-antique historic district, epitomizes the Florida impulse to meld pristine landscapes with facades of authentic human habitation.
The parade winds its way through the three blocks of quaint white-washed wooden houses that comprise the Historic District, past such institutions as the Inn on the Lakes, and then onto Sebring’s main drag, Roosevelt Boulevard. The path is lined with crepe paper lanterns in the mayfly squid’s most common strobing colors: vibrant shades of purple, green, and silver. The candles inside the lanterns make the crepe paper shimmer with light. The usual cavalcade of Shriners in tiny red cars, high school bands, ROTC units, and clowns is supplemented by six or seven squid floats mounted on rusting Ford pickup trucks. Most of the floats are made of crepe paper as well, although a couple have been painstakingly woven together from honeysuckle and green ivy, the pungent scent of the flowers taking the edge off the ever-present marsh smell from Lake Jackson.
Meanwhile, the parade-goers have begun to don their squid masks and take out their squid noise-makers. Any chance the high school bands had of impressing the tourists is soon lost in the clacking and croaking of the noise makers. Small boys always feel the need to set off caps and the resulting gunpowder smell gives the scene a slightly anarchic flavor. As I follow the festival crowds, the fake squid formed by the floats seem to waver and disintegrate in the early morning light.
