Sentinel Staff Writer ANASTASIA STATE RECREATION AREA, St.
Augustine Thousands of years have washed over this slender
sandbar of a barrier island called Anastasia. But only recently
has man written his history on this coastline. As you stand
along the park's barren, wind-swept beach, squinting inland over
light-washed marshes held apart from the sea by heaped dunes of
sugar sand, you can feel the primal pull of the waves. It is
this great ocean -- nipping like a frothing emerald-gray wolf
against Anastasia's eastern flank -- that has shaped both the
natural and manmade history of the land on which you stand. The
Timucuas must have known the allure of the water well. The
Indians were the first inhabitants, fishing in inland lagoons,
hunting in maritime woodlands, hunkering down along the shore of
what one day would be known as the Atlantic Ocean. Then, in the
early 1500s, according to local legend, Don Juan Ponce de Leon
was delivered here on the Atlantic's rolling back. When he
sighted this land, he named it