THE VERY RICH HOURS
Travels by houseboat in the Everglades
Emily Hiestand

First published in Southwest Review and The Very Rich Hours (Beacon Press, 1992), revised 2024
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At dawn, we awaken to a sound like a delicate drum in the boat, a houseboat anchored in a mangrove swamp in the southernmost part of the Florida everglades. A heavy condensation of dew is spilling over the flat metal roof of the boat, the drops coming down like a bright bead curtain of rain around the cabin, each string glistening and splashing onto the deck. Clouds recede over the swamp in the deep perspective of dioramas. The blast of tropical sun is not yet fully released in the cool of the morning, and the creatures of the swamp are just rustling awake. 

Out of the hush, a flurry of fish cracks the water-mirror, a surface suddenly ruffled with choppy, wedge–shaped patches. A school of green-striped fish are leaping, jumping to an urgent rhythm, each one a shimmer in the large wedge that shifts like a gust of wind over the cove on out into the larger channel of Whitewater Bay. At the cove's edge, a snaky cormorant neck pops up near a dark shape floating under a branch, the kind of fingery branch that canoeists call a strainer. The dark floating shape looks to be a rotting log, or possibly a winkling reflection of the root tangle growing into the water.  

The cormorant is motionless, stock-still in the water, as by imperceptible degrees, the shape begins to move, to emerge from the strainer, evolving slowly from a winkling reflection, to woody flotsom, to a reptile who is gliding, now gathering speed, swishing its tail in an elegant, horrifying motion, a long S–shaped movement that powers the animal effortlessly through the water. The alligator is swimming in a beeline for our boat, its head slightly elevated, the snout skimming the water’s surface, gliding closer, stopping four feet from the pontoon hulls. The houseboat is incomparably bigger than the creature.  Just how at home and fearless this alligator is can be known from the long, even, unblinking, unworried glare it gives our boat. For ten minutes, it looks headlong into our pod of civilization, never flinching. The eyes do not shine with our kind of intelligence; they are merely ancient, brown–black marbles. From behind the strong metal railing around the boat, we can choose to return the gaze of this confident emissary.   

 
The animal opens its mouth. You'll want the word primal  even before an alligator open its mouth. When its does, the word describes the involuntary recoil you feel, and the innards of the saw-toothed jaw whose pale butter–yellow gums resemble the lumpy molded extrusions of some industrial plastic waste. One yellow tooth is longer than the others, and not sharp but rounded from age and use. That would be the fourth, enlarged tooth of the underjaw, a tooth that fits perfectly into a pit formed for it within the jaw. When the jaw snaps shut, we can see the famous wry line of its mouth. The sinuous slit that first dips, then rises and extends well past the wrinkled eye, coaxes us to see a smile, the boundless smile, the unguarded, unmediated joyful smile of the very old and the very young.

“See him sweating o'er his bread Before he eats it. — ‘Tis the primal curse, but soften'd into mercy.” So says the poet William Cowper about the origins of our own species. The alligator comes from a different order, and among its many virtues, including scrupulous tending, a keeping, of the everglades, the alligator gives us a chance to grow in mercy: the old monster's good works, while not performed by our terms of altruism, have a very benevolent effect on the chain of life in the swamp. 

In the marshy grasslands of the Everglades, which begin slightly north of our position in Whitewater Bay, alligators use their feet and snouts to clear vegetation out of the largest water holes, making more comfortable and commodious pools for themselves and their young. During the dry spells that come regularly to the Everglades, these pocket lagoons are also oases for a toothsome concentrate of life — including sunfish, gambusia, snails, soft-shelled turtles, and Spider Lilies — all water–dependents who cohabit with alligators in their cleared water-holes until the rains return and refill the river of grass.  Inevitably, some of these creatures become the alligator's winter food, but in the glades lack of water is more deadly than the happy jaw, and enough of the co-habitants survive to renew their kind when the rains return. In the weeded holes, fish can freely swim and grow, and the discarded, decaying flora flung up by the alligator surrounds the hole with a mucky land that is ideal for emergent cattails and arrowleafs. 

In time, these plants combine with marl to form a soil that can support ferns and tree seedlings; when the latter appear, the ‘gator hole is well on the way to becoming a tree island — one of the willow heads, cypress heads, and bayheads that rise up from the sawgrass marshes. Taken together, the luxuriant worlds framed by wax myrtle, cocoplum, gumbo limbo, swamp holly, slash pine, cypress, saw palmetto and willow trees succor a wealth of life: frogs, lizards, otters, and spiders, the Liguus tree snails that breed in fifty–two colors and resemble turbans wrapped to the pointiest logical extreme, the ever more rare Florida panther, the soaring Everglade kite and its only food, the pinkish Pomacea snail. From the sides of many trees grow the air plants who produce the last word in hothouse blooms, the orchids. Evenings in the tree islands are heady with the scent of the night–blooming epidendrum whose sweetness radiates from a spidery white flower, yielded by the plant but one at a time. In a very real sense, the formula of this perfume includes the mucking–out labours of a reptile species, a member of which now stares at our boat.    

It is January, just after the new year, the season when the glade keepers are in their winter torpor, eating but rarely. After a long assessment of our houseboat, the enormous tail muscle ripples, and the waffle-iron-plated body slides underwater in one of its fluid, immensely graceful motions. Instantly, the water surface begins again to ruffle into wedge–shaped patterns as a froth of fish commence leaping out of harm's way. To riverboat pilots and wading birds, who know how to read the water, it will not be news that water shows tracks, if fleetingly: this particular patchy wedge could be called  feeding–alligator–water. Seconds later, traces of the hunt have disappeared, and the swamp surface is again smooth and glassy, a cool pewter-grey, tinged with the first infant pinks and corals of the prolonged upwelling of color that is sunrise.   

A floating house

Our houseboat is modest, rectangular craft, a small hut welded onto a robust, double–pontoon hull. The vessel is named Cobia, in honor of a popular, good–tasting Florida fish. My husband Peter and I rented it from the Flamingo Marina on the Bay of Florida at Buttonwood Canal. Forty feet long, with a narrow walkway around the cabin, this floating house is the most perfectly compact house I have known since the microcosms I made at age five from cardboard refrigerator boxes. This house has a tiny sink, a tiny shower, and a tiny cooking range. It has regular sized cups and saucers, a drawerful of linens, and three dented cooking pots. My notion had been that Peter and I would board this idyll with sacks of rice and beans, our field glasses and a bag of books, and commence bucolic drifting through the mangrove waterways. 

Only after Peter had spent several weeks studying a bulky blue book titled Chapman's Piloting, and insisted that we purchase a marine chart detailing the bays and rivers over which we proposed to float, did I grasp that we would need to navigate, that we would be doing such things as plotting a course, taking stock of water depths, weighing and setting anchor, and sometimes signaling other vessels with a certain number of horn toots to mean “passing on your left.” I mean port, for on the boat there was to be no left and right, but port and starboard. Many things had new names: a map would be a chart, closet stowage, dashboard helm, front would be fore, and back aft. In fact we had new names too. At the same marine supply store where we bought the waterproof chart for Lostman's River to Whitewater Bay, I found Peter shyly fondling a dark blue cotton hat with a brim. The appeal of the cap lies in the fact that it is a Chinese Mao cap, retrofitted for the capitalist yacht trade with a gold and blue cotton patch on the front that reads: CAPTAIN. 

The Maoist workers' cap, the waterproof chart, and Peter's few weeks of studying Chapman's completed our nautical lore, and we wondered at the judgment of a marina that would rent a forty foot houseboat to new salts like us and release us into the mangrove wilderness. But the sheaf of rental and insurance documents at the marina clearly said, “Prior boating experience useful, but not required,” and the marina is an operation run by the National Park Service. That's our government. Surely Uncle Sam wouldn't rent out hundred thousand dollar boats and send them off into the wilds if citizens routinely destroyed the boats on submerged rocks or disappeared without a trace. And too, the friendly young national park ranger at the marina said he would give us “a thorough orientation” before we launched the vessel. 

This is what took place during the thorough orientation: the ranger pointed out the location of skillets and spatulas, showed us how to relight the water heater if it blew out in a stiff wind, and how to use the marine radio. All good stuff. When we reached the instrument panel at the helm, which I gathered is where we would do something to make the boat go, the ranger said casually, “As for the throttle, you just throttle her like you would your own powerboat at home.” Peter and I glanced at each other and exchanged a look for "let’s don’t say anything now.” We did not remind the ranger that we had no powerboat at home, that, in fact, we had never handled even a small skiff. That intuitive, perhaps questionable decision meant that we would be picking up a few more nautical tips on our own, such as how to actually make the boat go forwards and backwards. 

As to how the Cobia  was actually powered out of the marina slip by two greenhorns in full view of several rangers and a crowd of tourists waiting for the noon tour boat, I can only report that it, that is she, was backed out, and was also turned around in the very slim channel between rows of elegant motor yachts, and that she missed ramming two pylons and a handsome sailboat by mere inches when the Captain practiced a maneuver he had read about in Chapman's Piloting: swiveling the stern around smartly by thrusting the throttle forward very fast. At that, the waters in the channel churned, and blessedly the marina, the waving ranger, the flocks of tourists and turkey vultures on the dock began to grow small and faded away as we entered the calm, green waters of Buttonwood Canal. Signs flanking the side of the canal instruct marine craft to creep along at no-wake speed so as not to harm, or even disturb, the slow–moving manatees who browse and graze on the underwater vegetation. Creeping is also the proper speed for catching one's breath and entering the swamp.
 

A night for hunting

The spiders aboard our boat turn out to be allies. Though diminished in winter, mosquitoes are an ever–present whinein the glades. But in almost no time, spiders had made the whole houseboat into a hunting platform and eradicated nearly every mosquito from the Cobia.

We marvel at the silence. Over this first day we have seen one canoe tied to the stilts of a camping platform, a thin plume from the fire of two souls in red bandanas. By dusk one kingfisher has shown itself, a small flock of storks, a lone ibis.  Otherwise, we seem to be alone inside three simple bands of color over which plays a net of constantly changing light. The temperature drops at sunset and a mass of mackerel clouds materializes. We tuck for the night into a small divet on the map, a protected cove nipped into the north shore of the river. What little wind there has been dies down, and by dark the houseboat rides at anchor on a sheet of black glass. So smooth and dark is the glass that it sparkles with Orion's belt, the Dippers, and Columba the Dove. In the cove's fluid skymap, clear as a planetarium, even the faint sword of the hunter is clear, the little blade that holds Nebula M42. Shining in the pool of anchor light is a swirl of water bugs; skimming the surface of the reflected winter stars, they might as well be the Pleaides. 

Stargazing the double heaven, we come upon the spiders weaving in a space between the cosmos and the cove. In the brief hour between sundown and the ink-dark night, a coven of shaggy night–hunters have set up shop and now under each corner of the roof eave, they are loosening large, dense webs from their unerring bellies of design, each web attached to railings and struts by long silken lines. The spiders turn out to be allies. Though diminished in winter, mosquitoes are an ever–present whine in the glades. But in almost no time, spiders had made the whole houseboat into a hunting platform and eradicated nearly every mosquito from the Cobia. The stars and spiders spin; from the mangrove comes a chirrup of insects; a pontoon creaks. Far off, to the south, off the bow and just grazing the hulking silhouette of trees, a tiny red light pulses on and off. That would be the light atop the ranger station tower miles to the south, a weak, comforting signal. At two o'clock in the morning, an orange–gold boat of a moon lifts from the swamp, spawning its perfect duplicate in the cove as the white–bellied spiders quickstep across their webs. 

“The Spider has a bad name,” says Jean Henri Fabre, the great French entomologist.[i] Heretofore, the only good ones of which I have knowledge are Charlotte, the writer, and the very French spider who descended nights from the ceiling of Colette's mother's bedroom to sip from the chocolate bowl that simmered on the bedside lamp. By night, watching the swamp spiders spin and stalk, by day, consulting field guides, I glean the most basic facts about these homely, patient creatures. By their large roundish webs, we know that the spiders aboard our houseboat are aerial orb–weavers (rather than funnel–weavers, cobweb–weavers, or wolf, crab, or jumping spiders) which puts them in the family Araneidae. The white abdomens suggest that they are an ubiquitous American spider named Araniella displicata. 

In any case, our two–inch spiders are handsome ones, with chalk–white bellies, brown carapaces and medium long black legs. They are dapper and smart, like a man wearing spats, or a woman in a polka–dotted dress. By night, they step out to hunt, wrapping the hapless moths and insects that bumble onto their webs in bands of silk before stunning the creatures with a toxic bite, then releasing a powerful digestive juice. Some spiders slurp only the soft innards of their prey, but our spiders like to eat everything.

They spend their sated daylight hours in a small spun nest called a retreat, located at a remove from the web deep under the eaves. The retreat is connected to the hunting web with a signal line that allows the spider to know in a flash if anything is stirring on its threads. The web is essentially “an extension of the spider's sensorium.”[ii] By keeping the tip of one leg on the signal thread, the spider perceives the least vibration of the web, and can distinguish between such things as the struggles of prey, a ruffling by wind, and the touch of a courting male who gingerly taps the edge of the web — to tell the female that he is not prey. But night–hunting is so good in the mangrove swamp that we never once see our spiders until the hour before sundown, when they emerge to repair their lines.  

Weaving and gossamer

After a week floating in the mangrove swamp, hoping all the while that dark forms in the water and trees will prove to be alligators or astonishing birds rather than floating branches, my preference for the flashy animal genus begins to seem crude. Mangroves are handsome trees that come in three varieties: red; black or honey; and white, the buttonwood. All three share a similar structure: as their trunks near the water, they splay (much as the heron's foot splays in stalking) into a swirling tangle and thicket of roots and shadowy interstices. The mangrove roots, stained dark by water, present a daunting shoreline. Walking over the jungle-gym maze of roots looks impossible for humans, but tiny footed birds and otters can scamper effortlessly over the thicket. 

Each night in the hour before sundown, our snappy spiders dart from their retreats and survey their hunting webs. Always, the webs are mildly to horribly torn from the struggles of the previous night, and each spider spends time repairing its net. Twice a spider reweaves its web entirely and, with nothing nautical to do, I watch the entire process unfold. Of this activity Fabre has rightly said: “To appoint one's self, in this way, an inspector of Spider's webs... means joining a not overcrowded profession.... No matter: the meditative mind returns from that school fully satisfied.”[iii]  

First the spider delineates the area for her web by framing it with several silken moorings, foundation lines attached in this case to the houseboat eave, the rope from the sun tarp, and the metal deck railings. These form a three–dimensional, asymmetrical triangle in space. One of these foundations is the bridge–line, on which the whole web will rest.[iv] In about the middle of the bridge–line is a thick white point that marks the core of the web. From this center, the spider begins to spins the radial threads, the spokes of the web — first one on the left sector of the web, then one on the right sector, one on the bottom, and one on the top, alternating the way a painter does when stretching a canvas. Her web follows the plane of the bridge–line, not precisely vertical, but cast on a slight angle. After some twenty radii are spun into place, the spider goes to the center and spins a mesh of lines called the hub. Next, she moves outward from the hub, laying down a spiral thread that will hold the radial lines in place temporarily. It is like a basting stitch in sewing that holds a seam together until the finish stitch is made, and although it is called a scaffolding spiral, nothing in the spider's repertoire is curved; only straight lines and combinations of these are employed. 

The web now consists of the framework, and it has taken some five minutes of spider time to spin, the creature darting in a fast, jerky fashion. Up to this point, all the threads have been dry. Now the spider begins to lay down the viscid spirals over the framework. The viscid spirals are the short, sticky, catching lines that connect the radial threads and make the web into a trap. These appear to be much harder for the spider to spin. Slowly and deliberately, over some twenty minutes, she lays them down, moving from the periphery of the web inwards toward her hub in a to and fro course. Simultaneously, the spider is eating away her temporary spiral scaffolding thread. Just before she reaches the center, she stops spinning, leaving an un-webbed area called the free zone. Lastly, she strengthens the hub area with a mass of lines called the stabilimento. The web has taken just under a half hour to weave, and when it is completed, near sundown, the spider takes up her hunting stance in the hub, on the underside of her web, head down toward the deck. Her weaving has been done entirely with her sense of touch; even in pitch–black light, or if she was blinded, her web would be perfect. 

Wondrous material, spider's silk. In the biologist's vocabulary, it is an albuminoid protein. At its finest, it is spun from the spider's silk glands at 0.03 microns wide, one–millionth of an inch, the width of a single molecule and a measurement that causes Peter to whistle between his teeth. It is a high compliment from a man who writes, among other things, about wafer–steppers, the ultra–precise machine that makes the silicon chips that make our electronic culture go. At one time, this thinnest spider's silk was itself a feature in high–tech instrumentation, used for sighting marks and in laboratory instruments, in levels and astronomical telescopes. Its other properties are equally impressive:  enormously elastic, the material would have to be nearly fifty miles long before it would break under its own weight; its tensile strength is second only to that of fused quartz fibers. 

For its entire life, a spider is connected to its silk thread, constantly playing out a “dragline” that can be used for a sudden drop to the ground, or climbed again to a bedroom ceiling in Saint–Sauveur. The dragline comes from silk glands inside the spider's abdomen and flows out any of eight flexible, fingerlike appendages along the lower belly, called spinnerets. For the spider, its silk is as all–functional as, say, caribou is for the old Netsilik Eskimo culture: not only is silk used for the dragline, but for hibernating chambers, egg sacs and nursery webs, sperm webs, courtship and mating bowers, and of course the hunting web and the bands with which larger prey are bound prior to dining.[v]  And one more thing, most pleasing for a traveler to contemplate: it is likely our houseboat spiders were already lurking under the Cobia's eaves when we plied Buttonwood Canal, but they might have boarded by air from one of the nearby mangrove thickets. By releasing a bit of silk, gossamer it is called, into the slightest wind, newborn spiderlings and smaller adults as well can be lifted up to fly on the wind, a form of travel called ballooning. 

By such ingenious and daring flight, spiders can migrate long distances on gossamer threads, and sometimes at very high altitudes, arriving in new geographies. No one believes that spiders can cross whole oceans on gossamer wings, but in The Voyage of the Beagle , the reputable Darwin records that “some thousands” of tiny, dusky red spiders were blown, with their “flocculent” silk lines, into the rigging of the Beagle sixty miles off the coast of South America.[vi] The gossamer threads themselves, released by the thousands as young spiders try and try again to fly away from their cannibalistic siblings to more promising lands, can sometimes, especially in autumn, fall to Earth as a shower, draping meadows and marshes in a thick white matt of shed silk.


Not fully explored

“There are no other Everglades in the world.” Since the late nineteen–forties when Marjory Stoneman Douglas began her praise–poem and political drumbeat on behalf of the glades with a simple declarative sentence, this watery plot of the earth has been named a bioregion of international significance. Its existence arises not least from the fact that the lower Florida peninsula slopes south at an incline of two to three inches a miles. Beginning along the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee, the glades are a lazy, shimmering sheet of water — fifty miles wide, inches deep — trickling down the imperceptible tilt of the peninsula through a time–worn longitudinal valley. The film creeps for one hundred miles through knife–edged sawgrass and sloughs, slowly nosing south-southeast over peat and muck to the Florida Bay. Grasping its nature precisely, the native turtle islanders named the great watery plain Pa–hay–okee, which translates into English as "Grassy water"  or "River of Grass."

It is a first–rate act of the imagination to have seen the unifying topographical logic of this vast alliance of water and land. Radically diverging from the shapes of conventional rivers, this one forms itself from an expanse of freshwater marsh woven with mangrove islands, pine hammocks, marl prairies, and salt–invaded marshes. It is safe to say that the everglades will never be fully charted. Near Florida Bay, the southward creeping Pa–hay–okee  meets the tidal estuaries and, mingling there with salty waters, gives rise to a swamp. This is a region laden with quasi–solid islands of salt–tolerant, water–loving trees all loosely, collectively called mangrove. Mangrove swamp rims the point of the peninsula, and sways up its western coast, a swath commonly said to be impenetrable save by boat. In truth, there are many other time–honored ways to enter this world, among them: on heron wings, by gator tail, via shrimp larvae. It is into this southern–most feature of the peninsula that we are headed, lacking wings or tails, on the pontoons of the Cobia. 

Close by the helm, the big waterproof chart is unfurled on a table and weighted on four corners against the wind with field guides and a pocket knife. The chart is peppered with tiny black soundings (in feet) and puns such as Snake Bight and First National Bank. It is a beautiful map, water–coloured in pale green for mangroves, periwinkle for shoals, paler blues and whites for deeper waters, sand and mustard tones for marshes — all tinctures that blend with the swamp the map tries to picture. Save for the flanking glamours of sunrise and sunset, the palette of the southern glades is muted: greens, greys, blues and browns, and silvers in endless combinations. Here and there are large, unmarked areas in whose expanses ant lines of typography read “not fully explored.” 

Printed about the perimeter are firm caveats concerning shifting realities of the shores. The line where land and water meet is a lace of form, each element reaching toward the other in a complex filigree. Through these rococo shapes, for five–hundred map miles through the pale and numbered expanse — through bays and a maze of creeks, snaking north through The Nightmare into the Broad River, runs one thin, red line: the Wilderness Waterway winding from Flamingo north to Everglades City.In the way of worlds and maps, the idea of the line exists continuously on paper, and in the swamp, not at all — a discrepancy that opens the space for both creativity and disaster. To respond to this situation, he idea of line is imported to the waterways and noted on a series of numbered posts topped with Christmas-green squares and cherry-red triangles — shapes and colors like nothing else in the swamp.

Within the hour, Whitewater Bay appears: a brilliant expanse of water surrounded and studded with shiny, green mangrove thickets, each oblong leaf of which shines separately: a glinting green tribe with pocket mirrors. Upon entering the shining bay, Pete and I have the same thought: to swerve off the platonic line that leads dully through the center of the chart and cruise instead up the winding Joe River to the west. We speculate that the channel through mangrove and marsh will be a congenial home for wading waterbirds and other swamp creatures. Planning for the journey, it had occurred to me that alligators or crocodiles might clamber aboard the houseboat at night while we slept and...  The qualm was interrupted by an account we read of  “Mary Kingsley: naturalist, ethnologist, sailor, scholar, guest of cannibals and champion of lost causes. Or, as she refers to herself: ‘the voyager.’” 

In A Long Desire, Evan Connell reports that Mary, who left England for Africa in a gloom following her parents' deaths,“liked mangrove swamps. She would paddle around for hours examining everything, stung by flies and threatened by crocodiles.” Reflecting on her outings, Mary left this note in her journal, “On one occasion, a mighty Silurian, as the Daily Telegraph would call him, chose to get his front paws over the stern of my canoe and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance. I had to retire to the bows to keep the balance upright, and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle.” Well. The voyager Kingsley set the standard for resilience and put things in perspective. 


No more than a hint

Mornings are a prolonged upwelling of color and light: from the earliest cool blue–grays, through infant pinks, until the sky / water / mangrove triptych flares red for a quarter–hour, and the vault of clouds recedes as into the Pleistocene. When the sun ebbs into a yellow–white ball, the trance of sunrise breaks: the working day begins with the romance of weighing anchor. It is a delicate operation. One person stands on the bow runner, a little galvanized platform inches above the water, and slowly drags the clanking anchor chain aboard; the other inches the boat toward the set anchor; when the bow is directly over anchor, the helms mate brings the boat to a smooth stop, and the bow mate heaves the plough–anchor aboard. The houseboat throttle has proven to be a sticky, clumsy affair with a gaping six–inch segment in the middle of its arc where nothing much happens, and a one–half inch zone at either end of the arc where each millimeter of movement hurtles the boat forward or backwards. In a fixed position for cruising, the throttle is harmless, but for weighing anchor one wants a precise and fluid action. A sudden jolt telegraphs to the boat, and promptly to one's companion who — holding taut the anchor chain, poised on the tip of the bow — would tumble into the water, properly regarded as alligator–infested. Peter has the muscle to pull the plough–anchor from mud–bottoms and heave it on board, so it has been my task to gain a light touch at the throttle.

Upriver into Oyster Bay, distinctive shapes appear in the water, circular patches smoother than the lightly ruffled surround. Something, not an alligator, is underwater. A hummock swells, then subsides. In time, just ahead of the boat, the creature reveals itself leaping off the bow of the boat. This animal is sleek and fast, much faster than a squat cabin on pontoons. When we throttle back to better admire the dolphin, it arrows toward the bay, circles back, then races ahead again, repeating the gesture until we get the message. At the Cobia's full-forward speed, the dolphins stays with us, contentedly diving alongside. 

As we slow down to enter a manatee zone, the dolphin glides on the wide pressure wake of the bow, swivels the unfused vertebrae of its neck and makes fleeting eye contact. Elsewhere, we have come face to face underwater with dolphins. They like to look directly into human eyes, and their own large eyes are full of intelligent scrutiny, windows into a brain with more computing power than ours. A moaning sound from their nose (properly, the rostrum), is the scanning signal of echo–location, an neurological ability by which they “see” three–dimensional patterns of marine doings. This ability is so precise and acute that dolphins can perceive the fetus inside a pregnant female. They will also surround her gently, competing with each other to protect her. As Cobia leaves the river, the brainy, playful creature veers away and we last see its dorsal fin cresting in the shallows.  

We can never know when some other face — flushed, drawn, or repelled by the boat — will rise up to meet us and the unpredictability of the swamp schools us in a quiet watchfulness. We discover that this estuary, a cleansing for the peninsula ecosystem, is refreshing for minds too. Our preoccupations are filtered in the play of light, the timing of dolphins, the constancy of mangrove. The change occurs so lightly that we do not know that it has happened until later, when we are driving again through the commercial strips and malls of southern Florida. We feel like stunned Oakies in Times Square for the first time. It is not so much the bray of traffic, the scream of primary color — but that each pancake house, shop, and gas station makes a kind of sense on its own, but not in aggregate. In the swamp, we felt what it is to be immersed in something whole, a complex ecology that comprehends many parts, all interwoven and moving in interrelated cycles.

Watersheds

As we know, the whole of the everglades is grappling with a recent insubordination — the unbalancing of the water membrane which, along with the sun, supports the ecosystem. Throughout the peninsula now, the everglades wetlands are battered in a harsh ecological see–saw. Sometimes they have too little water because rivers have been diverted to supply water for the balmy cities and citrus groves, or because the glades have been drained to reclaim land for same:  one thousand four hundred miles of canals cleave the limestone and marl of the glades, changing the historic drainage pattern. From the point of view of agriculture and amusement parks, these operations have been successful; at this time of year, trucks migrate daylong out of southern Florida, their beds carrying half the winter vegetables marketed in the country. 

But the river of grass itself, at the bottom of a watershed turned Rube Goldberg apparatus, is last in line for water. Then, in a perverse irony, a wall of fresh water is occasionally released — for agricultural irrigation — from Lake Okeechobee in the north where it rushes into the slow-moving sloughs, brusquely mangling the balance of salt and sweet in which the marshes flourish. Often the water that reaches the everglades is a too–rich toxin because Big Sugar interests release phosphorous run–off from four hundred thirty-three thousand acres of fields south of Okeechobee into adjacent glades, starting explosive algae and cattail blooms that suffocate the ecosystem; at the height of the hot, fertile growing season, they choke four acres a day. 

At another magnification, the unbalancing of the everglades is the same story that Miss Stewart told our seventh–grade class about genetic mutations. Miss Stewart said that, while offering a source of novelty and change to an organism, virtually all mutations will prove harmful to it. This is so, she explained, because any lifeform existing today has taken millions of years to arrange itself in a genetic configuration that serves it well. She said this theory applied to us, too. In Miss Stewart’s view, it was unlikely that any fundamental change in the basic organization of a being would prove useful. 

The problem can be deciphered. Earlier human cultures, including peoples with benign and worshipful Earth philosophies, also degraded their waters and lands, but not with industrial and radioactive toxins, and not with the bulky wastes of a massive population. We could probably create a sustainable human presence on Earth in one of two ways: as a polluting, industrial culture with a tiny population; or, as technologically benign culture with a far larger population. For the moment, the intersection of toxins and scale has unraveled such Earth-wisdom as our species achieved in earlier eras, and the new circumstances are analogous to a dangerous mutation.

Nuptial feathers

For most of the nineteenth century, this hushed swamp also rang with the chuckling calls of egrets and the whooping trumpet notes of cranes. Before the Victorian plume craze, two million five hundred thousand wading birds lived on the southern Florida peninsula.

Some of the silence of the mangrove swamp is simply the relative quiet beyond the human hubs. Compared to the sounds generated by a city, the swamp has always been hushed. But accounts of the nineteenth-century swamp reliably mention a sound now entirely missing — the throaty hissing and bellowing that arose from congregations of alligators when a bull issued a challenge and one after another alligator answered, their clamor resounding for miles. “Roiling” is the word settlers often chose to describe the animals' abundant, thrashing presence in the waterways. By the late nineteenth century, alligator hides were fetching a nice price and Marjory Douglas writes that all the young boys along mangrove rivers knew how to “grunt–up” an alligator, imitating its sound by making a “quick squeal deep in the throat with the mouth closed.” At the turn of the century, it was possible for a young boy named Lopez to "take ten thousand alligators in one month of night fire–hunting from a lake near Shark River and sell the skins for fifty cents apiece." [viii] 

For most of the nineteenth century, this hushed swamp also rang with the chuckling calls of egrets and the whooping trumpet notes of cranes. Before the Victorian plume craze, two million five hundred thousand wading birds lived on the southern Florida peninsula. When a flock took to the air, the sky could grow suddenly dark, and when, at sunset, the flocks returned to their rookeries, they poured from the sky like a rustling river of wings. "Clothe yourself in them: they are your riches... / your treasury of birds' plumes black and yellow, / the red feathers of the macaw / beat your drums about the world:  / deck yourself out in them:  they are your riches ."[ix]  That is William Carlos Williams's working of a song of feather–loving people to the south, the Nahuatl Aztec, who made not only hats and headdresses but whole ceremonial cloaks from feathers. As that example shows, it was not feather–gathering per se, but lack of moderation that unhinged an old ceremonial fashion.

The most ravishing plumes, the lovely white nuptial feathers of the American egret and the snowy egret came from the Florida rookeries. These “aigrettes” brought seventy–five cents each in the millinery center of Paris, and during the height of the frenzy one New York wholesaler bought two hundred thousand dollars' worth of aigrettes. Such markets made for irresistible temptation in the peninsula;  each night, a few men in canoes could kill hundreds of birds. In four years, the rookeries of Okeechobee had vanished, and as ladies were now wearing whole dead birds on their heads, hunters followed the escaping flocks into the southern reaches of the glades. The first bird warden, sponsored in 1910 by the Audubon Society in an attempt to stop the slaughter, was found dead, drifting in blood among the mangroves.[x]  

Ravaged by fashion, the birds suffer even more from the remote engineering of modern water managers. The best guess: that a whispery population of two hundred fifty thousand remains, a line of decline that continues inverse to the swell of washing machines, irrigation pipes, tumblers of ice and amusement parks — the human needs and artifacts that have brought the everglades to what park superintendent, Robert Chandler, simply, starkly names “biological collapse.”xi  Without the storks and spoonbills and the gregarious ibis (whose gently curving beaks informed ancient Egyptian aesthetics), the swamp is now a hush. We encountered this same eerie silence once before, when — a week before we boarded the houseboat Cobia  — we hiked through a swath of the forest that bounds the northwest side of the everglades proper, the Big Cypress Swamp of Collier County.  


Cypress swamp

In winter, a cypress swamp is silvery with sunlight through the scrim of canopy: the bald cypress called bald for the deciduous habit of dropping needles. Thirteen years ago, just at this time of year, my Mum first traveled to Big Cypress Swamp. She says that she will never forget the sight and sound of the wood storks, our only native stork, nesting in the tall cypress stands. She heard them first, deep in the forest, raising a din as loud, she said, as the steel mills of Birmingham when she was a girl. When the flock came into view, it was raucous, smelly, and jubilant, a colony of thousands flapping huge wings, gliding on thermals over the swamp, mingling in air with swarms of roseate spoonbills — an empyrean of pink wings and stork anvils. Following my mother’s footsteps, we arrived in the cypress swamp this year at fledging time, approaching the forest across a prairie of sawgrass and maiden cane, bleached tawny and dry from drought. 

As we entered the forest and came under the canopy, the air grew suddenly cool, dropping perhaps eight degrees in seconds. Dark high–water stains rung each trunk some twenty inches above the ground, a dipstick of the drought. It was so quiet that a rustle startled us: a dark rope oozing around the base of a trunk, a black racer in the dry brush. So as not to overwhelm the delicate sounds, we whispered. What nesting pairs of storks survive have gone north near Lake Okechobee where water is marginally more reliable. 

Still, the cypress swamp is rich with life: red–shouldered hawks, strangler figs, luminous lizards, bright green-legged spiders dancing across four foot webs, and herons who stalk for crayfish near torporous dark reptiles. Finding the woodland where one played as a child turned into split–levels with aluminum siding feels like eviction from the Garden. Yet to those who come after, will the new reality also serve? There are many sound arguments for preserving birds and beasts — some based on anthropocentric, utilitarian principles, some on the ecological catechism that each thing serves the whole. But the human notion of useful fluctuates, and the earth itself embodies change, making itself up as it goes. Our Earth is a radically creative being, and creativity relies on the risky companions: uncertainty, destruction, and flux. In truth, the Earth offers no proving ground, no ecological script, no absolute argument in favor of saving wood storks, or manatees, or ice ages, or any of us. Where is the place of fixity, a time when the Earth was more or less authentic than now, when it should, or could, have been cast in ecological amber?   

How similar we are to our source: containing its impulse for novelty, for destruction, its whirl of polarities and harmonies, its search for form, and tolerance of formlessness. How like meteor bombardments and volcanic eruptions — other strong forces that have catalyzed new forms of Earth— we have proved to be. We seem distinctive only for the fact of conscious choice: a change–force unleashed, by the Earth system itself, from the temperance of instinctual, more scripted forms of intelligence. Some limits — the sun's heat — profoundly define our choices, but we are part of a planet that has produced hundreds of versions of itself, some boiling hot, some cold and white, of late one green and blue. That nature, the earth, would risk something as creative and destructive as humankind confirms what a daring force it is. “A venturing,” Hölderlin said.  

This is also Spinoza's view of nature — natura naturans  — an open–ended process neither rule–bound, nor chaotic, but creative within evolving forms. To rely on the Earth principles as a guide for human morality, technology, and aesthetics is to reference an open–ended and constantly evolving ground of being. This is different from the vision of an harmonious Earth. In a creative Earth, human artifacts — jetports, say — seem as natural  as bobcats and snail kites, which leads to the recognition that in the special case of humans, natural is not the same as good. Goodness and authenticity arrive, in human artifacts, in alliances between the human and more–than–human elements of the Earth: of Spinoza's idea of natura naturans, Ernst Bloch says that it "presupposes... a notion from the Cabala, of natura abscondita, a nature pressing for its own revelation. Thus ‘nature in its final manifestation’ lies within the horizon of the future of those alliances mediated through humanity and [the rest of] nature” xii   

It may be that, as microbiologist Lynn Margulis has said (not in jest, I think) that the human species' primary contribution to the planet is methane gas. Another possibility: that Earth is evolving — via conscious ethical choice — towards a sustainable planetary community. The gas theory is perhaps more sensible. As we know, to be capable of ethical choice does not a guarantee that a culture or individual will achieve morality. To define and choose the sustaining alliances, we can neither turn to the pre–human Earth for a precise script, nor sanction all possible human activities: the interplay is neither rule–bound, nor chaotic. Natura naturans resembles the creative discipline of an artist as well described by Coleridge: “If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata , what idle rivalry! ... Believe me, you must master the essence, the natura naturans , which presupposes a bond between nature in the highest sense and the soul of [a human being].”  

At the root of every formed thing lies an immensely fragile reality: a moment when some grain of sand clusters in the leeward side of a shell, when one of the world's logics slants across a room like a light. It is such a delicate base for the premises by which we live. En route from the cypress swamp to our houseboat in the mangrove waterway, Peter and I pass a single wood stork wading in a roadside culvert. Excited to see a wood stock, we stop our car, and sit on nearby knoll for a while, watching the great bird splash, very happily, in the puddle.    


The Calusa culture

At Ponce de Leon Bay we poke the houseboat into the Gulf, rock a while on the rougher, saltier waters, before withdrawing to a sheltered part of the bay for the night. Thinking back, it's clear why the Fountain of Youth story persists in popular history, linked with the name of Juan Ponce, the penniless grandee of Leon who became the Governor of Cuba. From the houseboat deck, we watch the red spectacle of tropical sunset over his namesake waters, the Ponce de Leon Bay. Save for the likes of Juan Ponce we would be in these waters, if at all, at the pleasure of the Calusa, a fishing people who traveled and traded via extensive canoe routes. We now call them the Calusa after the Spanish corruption of the name they called themselves, one that has leached from memory. They moved by canoe highways through coastal waters and savannas, building ceremonial centers on likely keys. One of these, the settlement at San Marco Key just north of this bay, was typical. There, a seawall of shells was built to protect the central court where the temple, flanked by garden courts, was situated. Straight canals were built radiating from the temple to the sea, allowing canoes to travel freely into the central court. It was a kind of subtropical Venetian world. Like all other Amerindian habitations, the Calusa dwellings contradict the European notion that the continent was a wilderness. True, the land looked unexploited, the forests and streams were pristine. But the forests were woodland parks used and tended for millennia, carefully produced by tribal philosophies and practices.

The sophisticated Calusa artifacts also point to artisan specialists in a culture with a highly developed ceremonial life, a culture based on leisure time made possible by an abundant food supply. Great shell piles and middens reveal that favored foods were roasted oysters and shellfish, turtles, birds, and root truffles. These were a superb fishing people whose tackle included hooks, harpoon points, and gourd floats for their nets. Clearly, the canoe was all; even the toys they made for their children were canoes, and many cooking bowls ended up carved with prow–like ends. Naturally, the canoes were cypress, probably fire–hollowed using pitch to facilitate burning, roughly shaped with conch chisels, finely shaped with sawfish-tooth adzes, pared on the sides to uniform thickness with hafted barracuda jaws, and finished so smoothly by sand polishing that no trace of a tool remains. The tools themselves are clever things that use every possible jawbone and fiber; even the spine of a sting ray could be an arrow point. From the metapodial bones of deer, they made pins, points, beads, and spatulas. From Busycon perversa shells they made dippers and spoons; from the Venus  shell, anvils and hoes.xv The Calusa community was a strong alliance of tribute–paying members who maintained exchange routes over which foods could be rapidly redistributed: should fishing be poor some week at one village, dried palm berries or a smoked fish would come via canoe from another settlement up the Caloosahatchee River. xvi 

By this night in the everglades, more than ten large hunting webs are slicing across the decks of our boat, filling the railings and corners of each roof and all the spaces between the tarp lines. It is impossible to walk the decks without passing through one, tangling our hair in the silk, shredding their work. We broom away four of the webs that are most poorly located from our point of view. A few hours later, two of the shaken hunters have crept back up the metal railing, and are clinging to the side of the boat, ready to start new webs.

We have entered this bay in part to remember one of the stories America rarely tells. It was already well underway in the Easter season of 1513 when Juan Ponce, only thirty, sailed to the land he named after Pascua Florida, flowery Easter. The Calusa arrow that ended his path likely arose from the news the peninsula tribes had learned from the south. The conquerors' idea for the Caribbean had been slaves for cattle operations, canefields, and gold and silver mines. But the peoples died easily — collapsed from lashes and starvation, from toil, from new diseases. xvii Merely begun by the Spanish, the blunder continued.  We can envision a bit about the Calusa’s worldview: they found that each person “has three souls; one is the pupil of the eye, another one the shadow that each one makes, and the other one is the image one sees in a mirror or in clear water, and when a person dies ... two of the souls leave the body, and the third one, which is the pupil of the eye, always remains in the body; and thus [we] go to speak with the dead...and to ask them advice about things that have to be done.”xviii They made an alliance with their territory and the sea that endured ten thousand years. 


Piloting

We swivel the boat 180–degrees in the slender creek; I throttle the engine forward and run the Cobia smack into a deep shoal of marl. The outboard dies and will not restart. An eel slithers past the boat.

Meticulously, we plot our progress through the glades, monitoring the homogeneous mangrove shoreline, compass and clock, the tidal variations in the shallow waters. The ranger had said, “You can get turned around up there real fast.” When passing a numbered marker or positively matching a patch of shoreline with its map image, we sing out “mark,” remembering Twain. The chart is covered with penciled marks recording times we made a positive identity entering some river, or passing a distinctive island bend. The slow laze down the Little Shark River in late afternoon should be one of the easy stretches, a time to watch Anhingas spreading their wings to dry on crones of branches. Lacking oil glands with which to preen, the birds assume their characteristic, motionless pose, three-foot wings stretched and bent like scarecrow arms at elbows, the front feathers dangling down, exposing the soaked feathers to a warm afternoon sun. As we glide, the radio faintly crackles with a garbled question from some faraway boat: something something oysters in the something river edible?  The marina's reply is also broken up: something something if I was you crackle have heard something could crackle."

On this smooth passage, we only need find a junction with the channel that leads southeast to an evening anchor in Cormorant Pass. At the junction we twist through a puzzle of islands and nose serenely down a narrowing channel towards the pass. The mud along the banks is still glistening in the day's last heat; the channel winds upon itself, threading the mangrove islands, lovely as anything in the swamp, overhung with trees, surrounded in bright greens of leaves and the ochre waters. Lulled by the beautiful passage, we gradually realize that nothing on the map corresponds to such a long and sinuous passage to the bay. The channel has now shrunk to little more than the width of the boat. We swivel the boat 180–degrees in the slender creek; I throttle the engine forward and run the Cobia smack into a deep shoal of marl. The boat’s pontoons slide some, like skies, then nestle into the slurry. The big boat comes to a halt, fast aground. The outboard, still whirling under the muck, churns up a pungent sulfurous geyser, then dies and will not restart. An eel slithers past the boat.

Marl is a deposit of carbonate of lime, limestone. and clay, and peat is a layer of partly decayed plant matter that accumulates in bogs and swamps to depths of seven to fourteen feet. In this little, out–of–the–way creek, passable only by canoe, the peat and marl bottom have surely been undisturbed for decades, possibly for centuries. The aroma given off by the slurry–plume — now tinging the whole immobile situation — suggests why, since Milton, poets have turned to marl to symbolize the torments of hell. “It seems the unjoyous dissipation of demons, seeking diversion on the burning marl of perdition,” said George Eliot. Before settling in to perdition, we assess the new state of reality. Evening is coming on quickly; the propeller is caked and clogged with decaying muck and grass; the tidetable says hightide. 

We find that the hollow aluminum curtain rod lacks strength for pushing the boat, but prove ideal for taking a sample of marl. The rod slides down and down, fills up with a core of marl, and never touches bottom. On the map, the creek is an obscure hairline that dwindles into nothing; the nearest camping platform is ten miles through mangrove. Lacking jungle boots and gear, a trek through the mangrove labyrinth is futile, and intuition deters us from casting anchors off stern and bow and trying to haul the boat — from the boat — into the deeper side of the channel. If there was a reachable bottom, we could push the boat, but there isn't and we have both seen The African Queen.  

Had we better remembered cub pilot Sam Clemens learning to read the Mississippi from Horace Bixby, the scroll up the creek should have been an italicized, capitalized passage “with a string of shouting exclamation points.”xx To our embarrassment, we must radio the rangers for advice. To our surprise, the rangers do not answer. After some forty five minutes of hailings — followed by silence — we inch a few notches up the marine code of distress, making an All–Vessels call, then an Any–Channel hail, stopping well short of the call MAYDAY that Chapman's  warns “should not be used for situations such as being out of fuel, running aground, or engine failure under conditions of no immediate danger.” The hush of the radio, matched only by the shoal's, is itself a signal that we gradually decipher.

Cruising the outer perimeter of the houseboat's territory, we have gone out of range of radio contact with the marina station and are now among low–lying thickets that deflect and trap our radio signal. The shoal, simply by being in place, has shown us another face of the swamp. The grand solitude hums. We are close by a marshy bank, a slew of rushes, flags, and vines draped with ball–mosses; the root–tangle is caked with oysters, a scraggly limb overhangs the back of the boat. The trees shimmer in the reddening sun. Months will pass before a canoe or other vessel comes spontaneously up this hairline creek. Tilted up out of the shoal, the engine slowly drains; in the morning, it may be dry enough to clean. Tonight, we have an up-close look at the mud banks and mangrove thickets.

Along the shoal, a white heron is hunting hypnotically. Against the greens and ochres, these birds are surreal swatches of dazzling white: how does a creature remain immaculate plucking through a world of muck and decay? The heron's hunting dance is a sway then a lunge: crayfish in pincer bill, the bird crunches down and swallows whole. The bird composes itself along the shore and each step is a slow–motion marvel: three finger–like toes slowly retract, pulling up and together; the leg bends; step; the toes spread stealthily over a mat of leaves. A luminous green skink is sitting in a green bush. The little lizard straddles a limb and holds in its mouth the furry body of a large moth. At sundown, the creek is suffused with reverberating calls that sound like monkeys hooting and laughing; these are the courtship calls of a pair of barred owls. Overarching all other phenomena is the pungent marl shoal in which we are lodged for the night. 

Bogie and Hepburn are awakened by the salvation of torrential rains that lift the African Queen from the mud into navigable channels. Our morning is dry and bright, the pontoons settled slightly deeper. After we clear away marl from the Johnson SeaHorse, the propeller blades look intact. At the turn of the key, a new plume of bursts into the air, but the engine turns. Alternately gunning the throttle in reverse, then into neutral, Peter attempts to rock the boat — transplanting to a subtropical shoal the northern technique of rocking a car out of icy snow. Big and sunken as the Cobia is, the boat pulls ahead maybe an inch with each motion as blue smoke gushes from a straining transmission. An eon age passes in metallic screams from the engine, but we move forward a foot or so. I am keeping a close eye on the engine, making sure it is releasing a steady stream of cooling water, when suddenly the Cobia glides free of the shoal and we are once again afloat. Our log reads: "7:45am: Cobia steered upstream toward the Little Shark River.” The gratitude and joy of returning that day to the hymn of ordinary motion has never entirely faded in our memories.

The arc of each day

As our days in the swamp go by, we begin to think that even in the time of the great flocks of birds, when the mangrove swamp and glades were thronged with creatures — the greatest movement must always have been the circadian arc of each day, during which the water flickers with braids of light and color, the air with a portmanteau of scents and temperatures. This daily theater is at once calming and stimulating. In my book of hours, the pleasant times have been the hope of morning, the shimmering mid-day verve, and the peace of evening. These hours of the day surround the mid-afternoon hours of drift and formlessness. But while we are spending each day under the entire arc of the sun, the indeterminate mid-afternoon hours also seem distinguished, a time of clearing between the peak of sun and twilight. During the turn to twilight in the mangrove swamp, a hundred shades of slate–blue-grey gradate across the water. A wedge of ducks comes flying inland from the Gulf, passing low overhead with a sharp, rustling whir. As the sun sets, a last, thin grey light lingers over the mangroves, now turned from a green speckled with sun to a dark fringe. A light rain begins to patter on the water and Peter steps out onto the deck to inquire after the spiders. In the beam from his light, the big weavers are back from their daytime retreats, each one poised at the center of its world. 

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-a-Glance

Collected Reviews of The Very Rich Hours (Beacon Press, 1992)

NOTES

[i] Jean Henri Fabre, The Life of the Spider, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Dodd, Mead and co., 1912).

[ii]  Rainer F. Foelix, Biology of Spiders  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). p. 138.

[iii]Jean Henri Fabre, The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre, trans. Alexander Teixeria de Mattos (1949; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p.298.

[iv]  The terms used to identify parts of the orb–weavers' webs are from Foelix, Biology of Spiders, and from B.J. and Elizabeth Kaston, How To Know The Spiders  (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm.C. Brown Company, 1953).

[v]  Willis J. Gertsch, American Spiders , (Toronto and New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, Toronto, 1949), pp. 54 - 56 passim. 

[vi]  Charles Darwin, The Voyage Of The Beagle , The Natural History Library (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, New York, 1962), pp. 159-60.

[vii]  Lame Deer, Lakota shaman, quoted in “The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Perspective,” Paula Gunn Allen, Studies in American Indian Literature , (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983),  p. 16.

[viii]  Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass , rev. ed., (Sarasota, Fla.: Pineapple Press, 1988), p. 299. 

[ix]  "Three Nahuatl Poems (Aztec):  workings by William Carlos Williams," in Thomas Mabry Cranfill (ed.), The Muse in Mexico  (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959), pp. 90-91.

[x]   Douglas, The Everglades, pp. 278-79,  310 - 311. 

[xi]  Robert S. Chandler, quoted by Keith Schneider in Returning Part of Everglades To Nature for $700 Million,” The New York Times , March 11, 1991. As Peter and I glide through the swamp, Miami courtrooms are full of everglades politics: a federal lawsuit, filed in 1988 on behalf of the Everglades National Park by the U.S. Attorney in Miami, means to compel Florida to eliminate pollution in water that enters those everglades included in the National Park. Two months after our journey, in March of 1991, the long impasse in the matter has yielded a plan: to return the Kissimmee River to its original channel;  to establish 25,300 acres of mashland to filter pollution entering the glades; to breach several canals, allowing water to flow across a conservation area; to add 107,000 acres to the Park;  to allow water to again fill the Shark River Slough. At the same time, a one-hundred-year-old woman met with EPA head William Reilly to urge that funding for the $700 million plans be forthcoming. She wore a straw hat with a wide brim, a rope of pearls, and a fierce look: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, on the case. 

[xii]  Ernst Bloch, as quoted by Jurgen Moltmann,in "The Alienation and Liberation of Nature," in On Nature , Boston University Studies in  Philosophy and Religion, Volume Six, ed. Leroy Rouner.  (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p.135-136.  from Das Prinzip Hoffnung  (Frankfurt, 1959), chap. 37:  "Wille und Natur, die technischen Utopein," pp. 786.

[xiii] Song lyric quoted: ©1989, Peter Niels Dunn, from "United States of Genoice," Friends and Guitars.  

[xiv]  J. Donald Hughes, American Indian Ecology  (El Paso: Texas Western Press, The University of Texas at El Paso, 1983), pps. 3-4.

[xv]  Marion Spjut Gilliland, The Material Culture of Key Marco , Florida  (Gainesville: University of Flordia Presses, 1975).   

[xvi]  Jerald T. Milanich and Charles H. Fairbanks, Flordia Archaeology  (New York: Academic Press, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1980).

[xvii] Douglas, The Everglades, p. 91

[xviii]   Father Juan Rogel, Jesuit priest among the Calusa, quoted in Jerald T. Milanich, and Charles H. Fairbanks, Florida Archaeology  (New York: Academic Press, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 249. 

[xix]  Three Nahuatl Poems (Aztec):  Workings by William Carlos Williams in Thomas Mabry Cranfill (ed.), The Muse in Mexico  (University of Texas Press, 1959), pp. 90-91.

[xx]   Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi  (New York: Heritage Press, 1944).

[xxi]  Virgil, Eclogues, after a translation by Paul Alpers, The Singer of the Eclogues, A Study of Vigilian Pastoral , (Berkeley, California Press, 1979), p. 15.