The Water Underneath

On November 19, 1915, a group of men in Winter Haven organized themselves into the Twenty Lakes Boat Course Club and began digging.

Their idea was practical. The city sat among a loose scatter of lakes connected by shallow, swampy channels — passable in high water, impassable in low. Moving citrus by horse and buggy across Florida sand was slow work. Moving it by water, lake to lake through a system of man-made canals, made commercial sense. "The first canals were built for economic reasons," said Bob Gernert, a student of Winter Haven history and former executive director of the city's chamber of commerce. "To move citrus on water instead of horse and buggy."

The club held its last meeting on April 23, 1917. Two weeks before that, they had gathered to discuss damage to the canals from speeding boats — a problem that persists today. The club had built something larger than it could afford to maintain. It went bankrupt.

Two years later, in May 1919, the Florida Legislature stepped in and created the Winter Haven Lake Region Boat Course District. The state would finish what the citrus men had started. By the early 1920s, the southern chain was navigable — sixteen lakes connected by canals from south of Winter Haven to Lake Alfred, all engineered for commerce. The Florida land boom arrived almost simultaneously, and people began buying lots on the edge of the water with no intention of shipping anything.

The lakes those buyers built beside had not always been lakes.

Ann Tihansky, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, spent years studying the geology underneath central Florida's lakes using seismic-reflection surveys — sound pulses sent into the lake bottom to map what lay beneath. What her instruments found confirmed what geologists had long suspected: "Lakes located within the mantled karst region have long been considered to be sinkhole lakes," she wrote, "originating from subsidence activity." The limestone beneath Polk County is riddled with voids. Rainwater, slightly acidified by carbon dioxide absorbed on its way through the soil, has been dissolving that rock for tens of thousands of years — slowly, invisibly, from below. When the voids grow large enough, the surface material falls in. "When water leaves the cavities within the limestone," Tihansky said, "the pressure that supported the surface material also goes. Depending on various factors, that overlying layer can give way abruptly, or gradually."

Most of Winter Haven's lakes were gradual. The land settled over centuries rather than collapsing overnight. The difference matters — for insurance, for permitting, for the question of what a lakefront homeowner is actually living on top of. In Florida, Tihansky has noted, "there's little doubt that people — and money — are confounding the delicate task of counting sinkholes." The state classifies them differently from solution lakes. The limestone does not.

By the 1930s, what the citrus men had dug to haul freight had become something else entirely. Dick Pope Sr. opened Cypress Gardens on the shore of Lake Eloise in 1936 — a botanical garden that added water ski performances, bleachers, and cameras pointed at the water. By the 1950s, world championships were being held there. Esther Williams filmed on Lake Eloise.

Water skiers performing a pyramid formation at Cypress Gardens, Florida The Cypress Gardens water ski team — the show that ran on the chain for decades. Wikimedia Commons / public domain.

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Buddy Gaines and Jettie Ann Coltharp came to Winter Haven as performers. They skied on Lake Eloise in front of crowds. They met on the water, married, and stayed.

Their son, Ambrose Gaines IV, was born February 17, 1959, on the edge of the chain. "My parents water-skied for a place called Cypress Garden," he said years later. "So I grew up on a lake, and I learned how to swim when I was nine months old."

He tried football. Baseball. Basketball. Nothing held him. He was seventeen years old, a junior at Winter Haven High School, before he entered the water with any intention of competing. Two years later he held a scholarship to Auburn University. He became an eight-time NCAA champion and seventeen-time U.S. national champion. He held world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter freestyle. In 1980, he was the best in the world at his event and was expected to go to Moscow.

Rowdy Gaines, left, congratulated by Soviet swimmer Sergey Smyryagin at the 1983 World Championships Rowdy Gaines, left, congratulated by Soviet swimmer Sergey Smyryagin at the 1983 World Championships — the year before Moscow's shadow finally lifted. Dutch National Archives / public domain.

The United States boycotted the Moscow Games to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Rowdy Gaines was twenty-one years old. He stepped away from the sport, uncertain whether what he had built could be rebuilt.

He returned. He made the 1984 team. On July 31, in Los Angeles, he touched the wall first in the men's 100-meter freestyle. His time was 49.80. He won two more gold medals on relay teams before the week was out.

Seven years after that, in August 1991, he was in Hawaii when the Guillain-Barré syndrome came on — the immune system attacking the peripheral nerves, a partial paralysis that lasted more than a month. His mother Jettie spoke to the Los Angeles Times from a Honolulu hospital. He was thirty-two.

He recovered. He did not return to competition. He became the voice of swimming for NBC, calling every Olympic Games from Barcelona in 1992 forward. When the camera finds a swimmer on a starting block, it is Rowdy Gaines who tells you what you are about to see.

The pool at the Chain O' Lakes Complex in Winter Haven carries his name. The canals that a private club dug for citrus and couldn't afford to keep still run between the lakes. The limestone dissolves, slowly, beneath all of it.