Category: Books

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Where We’re Not Going: The Everglades

I first read Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 River of Grass when I thought I wanted to canoe the Everglades. I thought it was a travel guide, and I’m not certain I finished it. I may have only carried it around for a while. I’ve started it again, and it’s a far better book than I remembered. Shows what a little time will do.

This may be obvious to everybody else, but it wasn’t obvious to me: The Everglades system is not coterminous with the Everglades National Park, and the system was not preserved by designation of the Park.  The Park is about one quarter of the area originally covered by the Everglades. Not small change, but the Park is only the southern part of the original area. It’s separated from its historic northern water sources by building a dike around Lake Okeechobee, building barriers like the Tamiami Trail, changing the direction of water discharges from the Lake, and draining 700,000 acres  for agriculture in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Before that stuff happened,  sheet flow flowed from Lake Okeechobee down to the Bay of Florida, with normal flows of as little as 100 feet per day. Douglas described the system as a shallow river, often only inches deep, that covered most of South Florida. The river stretched from near present day Orlando south to the Keys where the land ran out.

Map of the Everglades by US War Department, 1856

In the decades after 1920 the flow stopped. After deadly floods in the 1930s, Lake Okeechobee was surrounded by the Herbert Hoover Dike for flood control.  Areas of the Everglades were isolated, drained for agriculture and urban development, urbanized at its boundaries, and managed for different purposes. Today’s arguments aren’t really about restoration to original conditions, but the extent to which regionalization can be reversed and the freshwater sheet flow out of Lake Okeechobee restored to its original southerly meander.

The Park now gets most of its water from the 60 inches of average annual rainfall in Southern Florida, and it doesn’t feed much freshwater into Florida Bay.  Because there isn’t freshwater flowing in, the Bay is hyper-saline. It’s lost thousands of acres of sea grass and is periodically strangled by algae. Not just any old algae, either. You can’t talk about Florida algae without saying toxic algae. It’s gotta be toxic.

And up top the Okeechobee isn’t the cleanest of lakes. Except for industry, it receives pollutants from the same list of sources as The Chesapeake: Agriculture and urban development.  Phosphorous and nitrogen, the stuff of fertilizers for yards and crops, seem to be the biggest problem. Instead of flowing south to Florida Bay, the Lake overflow is now shunted east to the Atlantic estuaries by the St. Lucie Canal and west by the Caloosahatchee River.

The phosphorous-laden freshwater flows hit the saltwater systems on the Atlantic side around Stuart and in the south central bays on the Gulf side. The whole mess plays havoc with fish and wildlife in a big swatch of Southern Florida. The Everglades is also the recharge source for the Biscayne Aquifer, the principal water supply for South Florida, Miami and whatnot. There are 8 million people who depend on drinking water ultimately sourced from the Everglades, plus a lot of golf courses. Where’s the water for putting greens going to come from?

The bad guy in all of this is Big Sugar.  Florida produces about half the nation’s sugar through three refiners. At its worst, Big Sugar’s historic labor practices made the West Virginia coal industry look benevolent.  And the two, coal and sugar,  ran neck and neck for environmental sensitivity: lop off a mountain top here, drain a wetlands there.  Federal sugar subsidies are a favorite target of fiscal conservatives, who argue that artificial support of American sugar prices kills American jobs.  Maybe anymore it doesn’t deserve to be the active bad guy it used to be: Creation of the Everglades Agricultural Area is done, no additional land will be added, and it’s half-life is short because of the subsidence of the soil in the EAA.

But unfairly or no Big Sugar remains the Villain in the eyes of restoration proponents. In South Florida, a fishing guides’ environmental group, Bullsugar, takes its name from the alliteration of sugar and, well, shit. Orvis is a sponsor. Patagonia is a sponsor.  Hell, Raymond James is a sponsor.  Raymond James. There are lots of other similar groups too: The Everglades Foundation, the Everglades Trust, Captains for Clean Water . . . The Everglades Coalition counts over 50 member organizations. Meanwhile in 2016 the New York Times reported that the Miami Herald had reported that over the past 22 years the sugar industry contributed $57 million to Florida elections.  Sweet.

It’s probably no wonder that the proponents think that the governmental group with the most direct control over the Everglades water, the South Florida Water Management District, isn’t an ally. Its board is appointed by a Governor who is not seen as an ally. $57 million.

Meantime proponents believe that establishment of a storage and treatment reservoir in the Everglades Agricultural Area is the key to Everglades restoration. The reservoir would use about 15 percent of the EAA area. It would release water South, surely whistling Dixie, down through the supposedly cleansing and detoxifying Glades to the southward bay. Neither east nor west but only south.

Apparently the money is there: as a result of federal lawsuits Florida has pledged expenditures for restoration. Maybe the plan is there.  Expenditures are being made and the Tamiami Trail is being raised. Apparently the big hold-up to return of substantial southward flow is Big Sugar’s willingness to sell the land for the Okeechobee drainage reservoir. 26,800 acres were purchased by the state in 2010. The proponents want 46,800 more acres. Sugar backed out once. It reached agreement and then . . . hesitated. And of course the concern is that on the horizon Big Sugar sees the possibility of more lucrative residential development, and maybe there’s a lack of sufficient interest at the state level to force the issue.

So’s anyway we’re heading to Florida, but we’re not going to the Everglades.

http://www.evergladestrust.org/toxic_algae, From the Everglades Trust, Algae Bloom in Stuart, Florida

 

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Dave Robicheaux: Sex, Drugs, and Other Such

“Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.”
James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

I’ve been listening to James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels. Other than Ann Rice ( who I find unreadable), they’re perhaps the most popular novels out of Louisiana. I read most of the novels the first time spaced over the years as they were published, but I’ve been listening to them in bunches. In bunches they’re relentless.

Burke was born in Houston, and still has ties here.  I went into Orvis once to buy something, tippet or leaders probably, and the young woman behind the counter had a name tag, Alafair. I told her I was reading a novel with a character named Alafair and she said that it was a grandmother’s name and that Burke was her great uncle. Even before Orvis I had linked Burke with fly fishing; I started reading Burke after a local bookshop, Murder by the Book, recommended  Black Cherry Blues as reading material for a fly fishing trip to Idaho, and Burke’s main characters, Robicheaux and Cletus Purcell, fly fish. In Black Cherry Blues a serial killer runs over Purcell’s fly rod with a car. Dang. They’re violent books.

There was another young woman in law school with me who I also think of when I think of Burke.  I didn’t know her, and never talked to her, but she was noticeable: petite, pretty, dark honey skin and lighter honey hair, and well-dressed for a student. Rich looking I guess. I remember a conversation about her once with other law students. Someone said her family was New Orleans’ mafia and to stay away. As far as I could tell most everyone did stay away. I’m sure there’s plenty of organized crime in Houston, but somehow New Orleans’ mafia just had that special ring.

Burke captures that special ring, that special Louisiana familiarity with prostitution, poverty, violence, drugs, alcoholism, murder, racism, gambling, corporate and environmental greed, and general depravity.  Laissez les bons temps rouler. Before there was Las Vegas there was New Orleans. Before there was online porn there was Storyville and Bourbon Street.

Mostly nothing good ever happens in a James Lee Burke novel. Made guys bring crime into Iberia Parish day-in, day-out, and then for the weekend Roubicheaux visits  New Orleans for some real violence. Wives get executed when the mob hit misses the hero.  Victims of childhood abuse nail their hands to the backyard gazebo.  The hero’s sidekick drinks Scotch in his milk and regularly goes off the rails.  Gun bulls rape the inmates, oil wells blow, Justice is not just. The only time that violence isn’t a breath away, the only time there’s anything like peace, is when Roubicheaux is in the natural world, watching gar turning in bayou currents under the green canopy of the Louisiana coast. The books ring true, unrelenting as they are, because we are certain that New Orleans’ mafioso and corrupt politicians and violence are the stuff of Louisiana. And it’s true. Louisiana routinely has the highest murder rate in the nation, more than twice that of Texas, which is not a place known for peaceful coexistence.

There are plenty of causes for Louisiana crime. U.S. News & World Report seems now to be mostly a publisher of lists: best of this, worst of that.  It ranks states, and of the 50 states Louisiana ranked last. I don’t know how they come up with their list, but they try to measure different weighted factors that are supposed to matter to people: health care, education, economy, infrastructure, crime and corrections . . . Health care? 47. Education? 49. Its highest ranking, 42, is for quality of life. You have someplace where everything else is bad, It makes sense crime is bad. Or maybe it’s just always been that way.

It does have good fishing though, and gumbo.

 

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Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Rita Mae Brown

To get ready to fly fish Florida, I need to do some reading.  I’ve been preparing.

Possibly the best known authors from Florida are three women: Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Rita Mae Brown. I’ve read one novel by each (though I may long ago have also read a collection of folklore by Hurston).  Hurston of course was an African American author whose most famous work,Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937. Rawlings was a white carpetbagger-author from Washington, D.C. who published The Yearling in 1938. Both novels were about rural hard-scrabble Florida and were published at the end of the Great Depression. Brown wrote a lot of mystery novels that involve a cat which I don’t think I’ve read, but is famous for Rubyfruit Jungle, a lesbian coming-of-age novel published in 1973.  I probably read it in 1978 or so.  I haven’t re-read it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God begins early in the 1900s in Eatonville, a black community north of Orlando.  I guess it’s a coming-of-age novel, though the heroine Janey shoots right through the coming-of and lands on independent womanhood. It does take three husbands, one of whom she marries as a child and then abandons, one of whom she is happy to see die, and one of whom she shoots with a rifle when he gets rabies and tries to shoot her with a pistol.  She liked the last one. There are a paucity of white folk, and a lot of rural black dialogue, but it’s an immensely likable novel, and important. I’m not really sure I remember how God comes into it, but being omnipresent he’s probably in the center of things.

The Yearling, published a year later, is set earlier, after the Civil War, but again a bit north of Orlando. It is also a coming of age novel, a dark coming of age novel about a boy who is forced to choose between his greatest friend, a yearling deer, and his family’s survival.  The deer decides the corn crop is ready to hand and tasty. The Yearling probably qualifies as young adult fiction. There are the bad guys who burn houses but are always there to lend a hand,  likable Pa who in the book is remarkably small but in the movie is miscast as Gregory Peck, the world-weary and no-nonsense Ma who is large and ugly but in the movie is miscast as Jane Wyman, and Jody the boy who almost kills himself getting to manhood.  As young adult fiction it is extremely important, as adult fiction maybe not so much.  It did win a Pulitzer, and it was my mother’s favorite novel–she was 21 the year it was published–and I suspect her childhood on a Texas dryland farm was closer to the childhood in The Yearling than it was to my childhood. I love the book.

In Finding Florida T.D. Allman lambasts Rawlings because there are no blacks in The Yearling, when a significant portion of Florida’s population was and is black, but it doesn’t seem that strange to me.  InTheir Eyes Were Watching God, other than Janey’s birth story, there’s no significant white presence (though like God there may be some omnipresence).  Among the rural Southern poor, there wasn’t always much cross-racial exchange.  You might as well criticize Rawlings and Hurston for failing to include lesbians.  I’m sure there were some lesbians in Florida, I don’t think lesbians were invented in 1973, but they wouldn’t have been particularly central to the lives of the characters in these novels. It is easy to forget how complete segregation was, and among poor whites there were no servants from which to wring a Driving Miss Daisy or The Help.  It is perfectly likely that The Yearling’s Baxters on their  isolated farm had as much interaction with African Americans as Rawlings portrayed. Maybe some more, but not so much as to be worth noticing, and the Baxter’s attitudes probably wouldn’t have made them more likable; maybe taught us something, but only as a sideshow.

As for Rubyfruit Jungle, I don’t remember much about it.  The heroine was a young woman who always knew she was a lesbian and grew into it and out into the world. It was the novel of the age when it was published, rich with feminist principal and sexual liberation, but for me at least its age has probably come and gone.  Maybe not, but I suspect it’s past its shelf life. When I read it originally I’m not sure I got the reference in the title, I was far more familiar with ruby red grapefruit, Texas’ finest, than other forms of ruby fruit, but I’ve always been a bit slow.  It is more parochial than the other two novels.  I suspect that many lesbians would say it’s more personal than the other two novels.

I don’t believe there’s a mandate that Florida authoresses have three-part names.

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I’m Going to Disney World

Actually I’m not.  I’m going to West Palm Beach in 23 days, where the Astros will play the Nationals in the first spring training game of the season.  Maybe somewhere between Mickey Mouse and 331  lynchings of African Americans, between Where the Boys Are and Scarface, there may be some there there in the Sunshine State.

I like to travel, and I’m old enough to know that at best when you travel you get some passing notion of a place, and you get some interesting tales with which to bore your friends.  There’s not much method in how I choose where I go:  I go places for business, or family, or to watch the Astros play.  Sometimes I go to fish.  But how I approach the place is usually similar. I try to get ready for travel by reading some books about the place I’m going.  If nothing else I at least read a mystery novel or two. I try to put together a music soundtrack of the place. I try to stay at a hotel with some history. I find it easiest to visit cities: there are civic buildings, there are museums, there are restaurants and baseball stadiums and public transportation.  Recently I’ve made it a point to go fishing because it gets me into the landscape.

We’ve booked a guide in Florida, found a place to stay, and bought our baseball tickets.  It’s a quick trip in and out to a place I went once, many years ago.  I didn’t fish then.  I saw no museums.  I drove around, went to the beach once, and saw nick-knack shops.

Getting ready to go to Florida I’ve been listening to Finding Florida by T.D. Allman. In many ways it’s a good book.  Did you know that Florida has no metals and no igneous rock? That makes it hard to advance to the paleolithic if you’re not already there, but apparently the aboriginal Foridians did quite well with what was to hand. I gather they ate a lot of oysters and made arrowheads out of fish bones. The pre-Columbians did not do so well with disease or the Spanish, and disappeared.  The Seminoles were not natives but refugees from Georgia, and would have to wait for the Americans to be mistreated.

Ponce de Leon never searched for the Fountain of Youth, and that favorite story of my childhood was made up out of whole cloth by Washington Irving.  Andrew Jackson was a bastard, but I had suspected as much. Allman criticizes the economic and racial reality of The Yearling, my mother’s favorite coming of age YA novel about a boy and his deer.  It was published in 1938 when she was 21.

Which is the problem with Allman: his unrelenting moral outrage.  Everybody was a bastard, at least among the Europeans and their descendants. No doubt the only things ever produced out of Florida were racism, cupidity, and film-flam, though being a Texan I don’t know why that makes them so special.  But truly, I really doubt that every Floridian woke up every day thinking I’m going to go out today and do something evil, or at least really stupid. Allman can even get indignant about Stephen F. Foster’s “Old Folks Back Home” for what seems like acres of print.  It just hardly seems worth the effort about a fake sweet song about longing.  All that righteousness does get wearisome, and honestly, I don’t know what he wants me to do? Not go to Florida? Tell all Floridians whose ancestors weren’t either Seminoles or slaves that they are deeply flawed?  Of course there is Florida Man.  Maybe they are deeply flawed.

Which gets back to how hiring a guide to go fishing for four hours is just a bit like going to Disney World, but then all travel is. At worst I’ll have a thrill ride courtesy of some poor fish, at best I’ll understand just a bit more of the world. I do need to watch Where the Boys Are.  I haven’t read Allman’s criticism of Spring Break yet.