Weeki Wachee

In an excerpt from his new book, author Dave Barry travels back in time to a Florida tourist mainstay of manatees, mullet, and mermaids

- Dave Barry

On a bright fall Florida day

I find myself driving north from the Tampa airport, across the Pithlachascotee River, to the place where Route 50 meets Route 19. This is the town of Weeki Wachee, which has a population of four (really), and is known as the “City of Mermaids.” It is the home of Weeki Wachee Springs, which, of all the classic Florida roadside tourist attractions, is one of the Florida-est.

It began as the dream of a man named Newton “Newt” Perry, who was raised in nearby Ocala. Perry was a gifted swimmer—sometimes called “The Human Fish”—who could hold his breath for as long as eight minutes. He put on swimming exhibitions in which he performed tricks such as eating bananas underwater, which is a handy skill because, as you can imagine, after several minutes of being submerged a person gets hungry. Perry was a consultant on movies involving underwater scenes, including Creature from the Black Lagoon, the classic horror film about a scientific expedition to the Amazon that is terrorized by a man wearing an uncomfortable rubber suit.

In the mid-’40s, Perry had the idea of building an underwater theater at Weeki Wachee, the deepest natural spring in the United States, producing 117 million gallons of freshwater every single day. It’s almost impossible to imagine that much water gushing up out of the earth unless you have lived in a house I once owned in Pennsylvania, which had a basement that was susceptible to flooding. It was a nightmare. I could hear whales calling to each other down there. One difference between Newt Perry and me, aside from our relative breath-holding abilities, is that when I looked at my basement, I never thought, “Hey, that could be a tourist attraction!”