In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  My friend, we are all of nature, and we’re in it, too. All the time. No matter what. It’s a trite-seeming thing to say, but it stands reminding. The natural world is not over there, away from our human one, a pure but vanishing Eden. Nature’s not civilization’s opposite, a refuge or an antidote. Nature’s not the name for the place where humans aren’t.

  So no, we don’t save the swamp by isolating it. We save the Everglades (to say nothing of the state of Florida) by conforming our way of being to it. We repent in the old sense of the word: “turn away from.” We about-face. Realize we’ve gone astray, and correct course. We accept that Florida is a wild place, and always will be.

  * * *

  —

  We continued south and east for another day, filming as we went. I demanded more breaks than usual, as the plantar wart on my heel has spawned two lackey warts. Their triplicate pain is getting to be too much to bear. These warts bleed. They force me to alter my already comical posture and gait; this altered gait causes me to suffer new muscle and joint discomfort; this discomfort forces me to alter my posture and gait again; till here I am with ankles that have swelled to the circumference of Quaker Oats canisters.

  “If I could just fly home, or die,” Glenn said dreamily. “Either one would be acceptable at this point.”

  “Both’re still on the table,” Noah responded.

  The empty grid of Golden Gate roads stretched into the Big Cypress Basin. Palms, pines, and oaks shagged either side of the crushed lime rock, lining up thin rails of jaundiced storm cloud overhead. Structures of any kind grew sparser and thus more sinister-seeming. The monotony was labyrinthine. It felt as though we were trapped in an endlessly rotating record groove. Or a subroutine that could not stop repeating its code because it had been programmed never to halt:

  def florida ():

  print (“Fuck you, Imma do me!”)

  print (“Can we base a society on nothing but atomized individuals?”)

  florida (“Fuck you, Imma do me!”)

  print (“Can we base a society on atomized individuals asserting nothing but their rights?”)

  florida (“Fuck you, Imma do me!”)

  print (“Can a society based on atomized individuals’ rights survive without corresponding duties?”)

  florida (“Fuck you, Imma do me!”)

  print (“How long before a society of atomized individuals rightfully following only their desires, heedless of what they owe others, destroys itself?”)

  florida (“Fuck you, Imma do me!”)

  Very suddenly in the early afternoon, rain fell with tropical force. Inside a minute or two, the water completely swamped the road. We tried to force our way into nearby foliage; this proved as difficult as trying to walk through a privacy hedge. Instead, we constructed a lean-to out of tarps and jackets. There we huddled watching fat drops hit standing water so hard that the ground appeared to be firing back at the sky. Glenn aimed the camera at me. “There he is, folks,” he said. “The Grinch who stole my life.” We laughed.

  We waited out the frog strangler. All around us was a roiling cauldron until…it wasn’t. The rain stopped as if a spigot had been turned. In rushed the voiceless hymn of silence, too seldom heard on this walk. We took a few moments to shake off our tarps.

  I was wringing water from my mullet when Noah made another noise I didn’t know he was capable of: a grotesque and immediate bating of his breath, something like if his heart had been stopped by thrombosis. Without turning to me, he grabbed the collar of my shirt. He twisted it around his fist. With his left hand, he pointed.

  A Florida panther had materialized on the road and was padding toward us. I, too, gasped audibly. The endangered cat was sleek, golden, low to the ground. Like any luminary glimpsed in real life, it was both smaller than expected and more exaggerated in its features: steeply angled brows, neon-yellow eyes. The panther loped with protracted grace as though not subject to our laws of physics. I don’t know what else to say. I was experiencing sheer existential surprise, which has shuddered through me once, maybe twice before—and both of those times I’d classify as religious experiences.

  Paralyzing fullness. Intimate strangeness. One unambiguous touch lasting for one beat of my heart. I cannot speak to this occurrence directly, but at best analogously: Happening across this panther at this moment on this day was like being reminded of something rather than being informed. The world need not be as it is. It need not be at all. But it is, and that is a mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.

  The panther veered off the road. It vanished as instantaneously as it had appeared. My revelation slipped away with it.

  Snapped out of our trance, we fumbled for our gear. We were too late, but so what. We got to work resetting the scene for the dramatization.

  * * *

  —

  We woke the next day to cashed batteries, which effectively ended our stay in Golden Gate Estates. We began the long double-back to the entrance. After some relatively quiet morning hours—“relatively” because the flora was seething like a kitchen timer counting down—we heard an all-terrain vehicle growling toward us a bit after noon. When it hove into view, we saw the ATV was being driven by a shirtless young white guy. Prison-tatted like our shrimp friend Wesley, this guy put me in mind of a Peter Matthiessen line: “Most of our old Glades pioneers was drifters and deserters from the War Between the States who never got the word that we was licked.” This guy sped past while swiveling his head to keep eyes on us.

  I shouted, “Where you going?”

  “Runnin’!” he called back through the dust and fumes.

  Did he catch up with us later? Oh yeah. Did he, after hearing our shpiel, invite us to his family’s nearby property? Uh-huh. Did we accept his invitation less out of curiosity than out of a very strong desire to have all our shit loaded onto a Chevy Silverado and then driven to the entrance of the Estates? You bet.

  On an unsignatured plot of swamp, his family had marked their X: cinder-block home with a dilapidated trailer out front. Out back: some old circular saw blades, earthmoving equipment, and a lean-to stacked with planed wood, all of it spread out like stations in a boxing gym. We kicked our way around the compound, running our hands along boards and testing our fingertips against the edges of honed tools. We saw some rows of vegetables, a shade house, and a decent-sized marijuana grow operation. Milling about that were a few more young adults who glowered like they might go for my floating rib if I made a false move. An older woman came out of the house, told them to relax, and they did.

  Noah knew how best to play this particular instrument, so he did most of the talking. Thanks to him—and the lure of the recharged camera—we were joshing with everyone in no time. The older woman used to work on cattle ranches in Central Florida before retiring a few years ago. One of the men (no names, thank you) supplemented his modest drug income by diving for centuries-old cypress logs at certain spots along the Gulf Coast. “Places where, when there was a timber industry there, they used to load the logs, but then some of ’em would get jammed up and sink.”

  “So you salvage them?” I asked. “And it’s finders keepers?”

  “You think the state, the federal government, or the paper company is gonna go to the trouble—is gonna file all the licenses—to dredge this wood up?” the youngster scoffed.

  The growers took turns monologuing into Glenn’s camera. “See, what you do is,” the ATV guy said, stepping between the others and the camera. “What you do is, after laying eggs, the turtle, you flip the turtle over. They can’t even move. So you flip ’em over. Then you throw ’em in the truck. Then you drive down the beach to the next one.”

  “Sea cow, and the porpoise—you did it back then when you was young,” the older woman explained. “Because that way, you had something to eat!”

  “There’s not a lot of meat in a
turtle,” a second grower said, putting a hand on the ATV guy’s shoulder. He pulled himself level and then past the ATV guy on his way to the lens. “You’d think it’s full of meat, but it’s not.”

  “Like a little cone-shaped piece of meat,” the ATV guy said, drawing nearer.

  “Just the flippers, the neck, and the tail,” the other said, pulling ahead.

  “And that’s it,” ATV guy agreed, shouldering past the other grower, filling Glenn’s frame completely.

  “Rest of it’s guts, yup,” the other said, dropping his hand from the ATV guy’s shoulder as though conceding defeat.

  They continued in this vein for a while, rationalizing how they could love the things that made possible their economic and social freedom while simultaneously destroying those things through acts which (supposedly) revealed their love for them. I’d delve further into these rationalizations, as well as our time spent drinking their beers, riding their ATV, shooting their guns—but, c’mon. You’ve heard this song. The growers were Redner without the money and legal chutzpah. They were Cassadaga mediums without the emotional intelligence and flimflam aptitude. They’re distantly related to Captain Dale, yessir, uh-huh. They’re just some more Floridians, is what I mean.

  We dealt with them not as subjects but as ends in themselves. It was nice. We listened to their many yarns about life in the Estates for no other reason than we wanted to. Which was incredible, they emphasized. Life in the Estates was incredible. True freedom. Could do whatever you wanted. Which was for the most part mudding, they emphasized. They loved to rip apart boggy vacant plots with their ATVs and trucks. That was the best part of life in the Estates, if you asked them. Though they needed new cameras for when they record themselves when they go. And they’d noticed me and Noah carrying around GoPros. Mightn’t we be willing to trade?

  Because we had been using our phones more and our GoPros less (and because I was the one who’d purchased them), I said OK, show us your wares.

  Scrap, miscellany—their property was like a junk drawer mixed with a trailer park pawnshop. Scattered here and there were genuine bits of desiderata (read: knives) that Noah thought might aid us in our voyage into the Everglades. I, however, had eyes for but one thing: the mobility scooter in the garage.

  She’s all electric, the growers told me. Forty inches long, only twenty-seven inches wide. Three (3) pneumatic tires: a big sixteen-incher up front and two four-inch wheels in back. Baby looked something like a Big Wheel for the infirm. Rear-wheel drive, too, meaning it could scoot up to fifteen miles per hour. And range? She topped out at twenty-five miles on a single charge. Comes complete with handbrake. Front basket. Headlight. They’d even include the charging cable, they said, which is compatible with the standard electrical hookups provided throughout the Everglades’ campgrounds.

  “Hmm,” I responded, pinching my chin and pretending as though I wasn’t elated by the prospect of scooting across the swamp instead of fording it peg-legged like Ahab.

  I pulled Noah aside. I hissed into his ear, “Look, man, I know. But I am absolutely taking it.”

  Because I am a master haggler in addition to an expert logistician, I convinced the growers to throw in a half ounce of the magic mushrooms I’d espied in a corner of their hothouse. “Unless you don’t want the memory cards that’re in the cameras?” I said. They handed over several baggies’ worth. The caps weren’t as gold as you’d like, and the stems weren’t as bruised blue as you’d hope, but what can you do. I was now ready to tackle the squirming, yelping, rampant morass to the east.

  We retrieved Glenn from the circle of swole pitbulls walk-hopping around him in the front yard. We loaded our gear plus the new addition into the growers’ truck. A truck not too dissimilar from the one that almost sent us pinwheeling outside of Gainesville, Noah noticed. As we reversed out of the driveway, the older woman hollered, “Y’all so free!” She waved. “Don’t you forget that. Hey, camera, make sure they don’t forget that. Y’all so free!”

  —

  MILE 957 — THE EVERGLADES

  WHERE HUNGER IS THE UNSTATED CORE,

  AND DYING THE PROXIMATE REALITY

  In a way, I thought as I throttled my mobility scooter, we are what perfect agency looks like to a certain kind of despairing adult.

  I can see it in their faces when they drive by. They catch sight of us, they put two and two together, and they light up like they’ve just learned heaven is real. To these individuals, we represent a blessed state of being. A hereafter they might ascend to, God willing, once their obligations have been seen out or abandoned. Oh, to be an itinerant gadabout! An RVless RVer navigating a post-responsibility paradise where every day is novel and serendipitous. An unattached, uncommitted, unconfined, unconstrained, unimpeded, unobstructed, unregulated, untrammeled self walking the earth, meeting others face-to-face, getting into adventures along the way like Caine in Kung Fu. These despairing adults cheer to us and, in so doing, cheer to their own potentiality.

  Then there’s the other kind of despairing adults. To them, three flighty men, an eldercycle, and a jogging stroller full of film gear represents something else entirely: a condensed symbol of every last pathology that has spread throughout this nation as though vectored by the interstate highway system.

  These other despairing adults also use their faces to communicate their feelings vis-à-vis us. As well their car horns, their hands, and their passengers’ bare asses.

  Glenn kicked a crispy snakeskin at me from the opposite shoulder of the Tamiami Trail. I came to.

  “You know,” I said. “Passing a, like, certified public accountant’s office in a mini mall? I no longer think that’s a sad thing. A sad, drab life.”

  “Wisdom from the scooter,” Noah said, pushing Jog-a-bye behind me.

  “No, I understand them now,” I said. “Those lives seem remarkably sensible to me.”

  “They seem like reasonable lives that a person would want to live?” Glenn called out sarcastically. A sedan sped by while straddling the two lanes’ dividing line, equidistant from us.

  “Comfortable,” Noah said. “Safe. Not along the side of the highway, where there are vipers.”

  “The offices don’t seem like crypts for complacency or insufficient ambition,” I explained. “Actually, they seem like monuments to love. You know? The small, thankless sacrifices that it takes to love and provide.”

  Noah made a raspberry. Glenn joked, “No, tell us more about love, you cretin.”

  “Fuck you guys,” I said. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah,” Noah said.

  “Yeah,” Glenn said.

  We lapsed into silence. We passed more Drive Carefully crosses planted in front of the guardrails that were holding back the swamp. Beyond them: lattices of mangroves drinking deeply from teak water. Golden saw grass prairie as far as the eye could see.

  As its name suggests, the Tamiami Trail connects Tampa and Miami with 275 miles of L-shaped road. The north-south portion of the L was easy; the west-east, not so much. Prior to the completion of the Trail’s Everglades leg in 1928, no road linked South Florida’s coasts. Clearing crews had to slash through rank vegetation in order to lay rails for the drilling crews behind them. The drillers used sixteen-foot bits mounted on railway cars to bore deep holes along the proposed route. Blasting crews followed them, clearing out each hole with ten to forty sticks of dynamite. In the end, it took some 2,584,000 sticks of dynamite—thirty or forty boxes daily—to blast a way through the swamp. Dredging crews scooped this sludge in big metal dippers and piled it onto the Trail route, creating thoroughfare and canal simultaneously. The last workers in this procession were the road crews, who graded the Trail flat with tractors.

  The two-lane highway was a huge success. It even brought the Seminole and Miccosukee Indians out of hiding. At first, they sold handicrafts along the roadside. In a few yea
rs’ time, they became airboat pilots, alligator wrestlers—they became sideshow attractions. They built up tourist empires, they learned the ins and outs of politics, they mastered that grandest of American pastimes, governmental lobbying. In practically no time, they became the first Native tribes to win the right to run casinos. They grew fantastically wealthy—to the point where the Seminoles now own every last Hard Rock Cafe in the world.

  As we walked, the mangroves chittered and the grasses stirred. Creatures ducked, hid, dove into the water. Alligators leapt from the Tamiami Trail’s berm like swimmers off the starting block. If they were already in the drink, they slowly submerged.

  “Smells like vaguely diluted diarrhea,” Glenn said while tying a bandanna around his nose and mouth.

  “That’s probably not helping things,” Noah responded, pointing to a fly-studded alligator decaying on the shoulder. The left half of its body had been crushed, most likely by a car traveling late at night, when the cold-blooded reptiles leave the water for the residual warmth of the asphalt. A swoosh of dried blood led from it to the middle of the highway.

  “It really is just a soggy carousel of murder out here,” Glenn noted.

  Early December, and still the pitiless downpouring sun was lording over us. No reprieve on the way, either—the sky was empty of clouds. Occasionally a breeze flared up, and amid the waving blades of saw grass I could see the water’s rocking reflection of blue. Off to the south of the Trail, a handful of buzzards were drifting down, down like flakes of stirred-up sediment.