Thursday, June 20, 2002

Eternal Nature Boy

Jeff Klinkenberg combines his love of nature with his love for writing as a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times.

By Kristin Davis
Points South Staff Writer

Overgrown spiders, ambushing alligators, one-eyed kitten-snatching owls, fanged snakes, cannibal lizards and projectile vomiting vultures. It’s Boyd Hill Nature Park, and it’s all in a day’s work for Jeff Klinkenberg.

In his Panama hat, multi-pocketed khaki shorts, black T-shirt displaying a skull and the word "evolution," Klinkenberg, 53, looks something like a nature boy.

His eyes light up. The tone of his voice changes. He starts to gesture. This is home, his boyhood all over again. The dimly lit, creature-infested jungle is some people’s hell. But it is Klinkenberg’s ultimate paradise.

Klinkenberg grew up tromping through the Everglades with his brother, walking for miles in the untamed land of Florida. It was there that his love affair with all that was wild and all that was truly Florida began. This is the real deal, this tangle of trees and creatures tucked inside the city of St. Petersburg, he says.

As his youth passed, Klinkenberg went off to the University of Florida and graduated with a journalism degree. He found work as a sportswriter and a general assignment reporter for the St. Petersburg Times. In the journalism profession, there must have been some of the same feelings of adrenaline-feeding uncertainty that come from a walk through the forest. Such as the time he ran straight into a web, the spider attaching itself squarely on his shirt like a shiny police badge.

But the Tarzan within him would eventually find its way out again, and the two worlds would collide. Now he writes about the nature he loves. He gives people glimpses into the heart of Florida, past the 7-Elevens and McDonald’s and souvenir shops. He shows them the alligators.

Klinkenberg came to Boyd Hill 25 years ago. He found a sad park with animals stuffed in cages--and nothing really natural about nature. Today it is different.

The shelled path crunches as he walks. The giant oaks drip with Spanish moss, cattails spring up over the marsh, dew lies in the folds of leaves, pines and wax myrtles clamber to the sky. Patches of sunlight flutter on the damp ground. But lurking somewhere in the 300-acre island of heaven are defensive mother alligators and their snapping babies, and giant golden orb weaver spiders. Lurking in the brush is a story--where the eternal nature boy finds his lost youth.