The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  As we walked around the Fort Lauderdale show he said the most awful things—for instance, I asked him what his current girlfriend did and he said, “She’s a bitch”—and then a minute later he bragged that she was incredibly smart and had been in medical school before she took her current sales position at Miami Subs. As usual he was sarcastic about everyone and everything, but then he would become lyrical and sad as he described a trip he took into the Fakahatchee with his late mother, when they had hiked to a clearing and suddenly the swamp opened onto this: a pond filled with bright yellow water lilies, an otter, a piliated woodpecker, and a scarlet ibis staring into the pond. I was getting used to his contrariness but he still puzzled me. He was always daring me to mistrust him, and then surprising me by being reliable, and he was always daring me to think he was a creep, and then he would unveil something that belied any creepiness. When I first met him, he told me he had found the only gem-grade fossil pearl in existence, a boast so specific that I couldn’t resist investigating it, and no one I talked to ever confirmed that such a thing could be true. I really wanted to confront him about it, but when he brought it up another time and I was about to challenge him, he said, “You know why I love that pearl so much? Because as long as I have it, I still sort of have the moment when I got it. The place I got it was wild when I was there, and it’s gone now, it’s all developed and the woods are just gone. And I was with my wife when I found it, she’s my ex-wife now, and I was with my mom, and my mom’s dead now. But having that pearl is like still having that moment, my mom is alive and I’m still happily married and the place I found it is still gorgeous.” I never brought up the question of the pearl again. I’m not a sucker. It’s just that questioning whether it really is the only gem-grade fossil pearl in existence felt piddling compared to what he said it meant to him—it would have felt like telling someone deeply in love that the beloved one was ugly and short.

  —

  I had to take a break from the flowers. My eyes were tired. I had a tendency to look too hard into the flowers’ centers, because I kept seeing faces in the crinkles and spikes—little tongues, blind eyes, puffy lips, pugilists’ squashed noses, a lobster, a caterpillar with a grin. When I saw a face I would stare at it and try to remember who or what it reminded me of until my eyes twinged. Also there was something bottomless about the colors and patterns that drew me, so I stared and stared until Laroche would get impatient and pry me away. After an hour or so I suggested that we take a recess, so we walked over to the auditorium snack bar and sat down at a tipsy linoleum table. I drank sour brown coffee and Laroche ate a hot dog, and we both breathed greasy snackbar air. “You want to know how much a dealer can make at a show like this?” Laroche asked me when he was finished eating. “You can make a shitload of money. There’s a lot of money in plants. Plants are a commodity, just like pork bellies. Here’s an example. There are eight million dollars’ worth of palm trees in the Fakahatchee and Collier-Seminole State Park—eight million dollars’ worth. One royal palm sells for four thousand dollars. Landscapers love them. I was thinking the other day that if you stole one palm a week, you could make fifty thousand dollars a year.” I asked if he was considering becoming a palm rustler. “Of course not,” he said peevishly. “It’d be a great little business, but bottom line, I’m on the side of the plants. See, with the ghost orchids, I wanted to make a dollar but I really want the plants to be saved from extinction. And even then, when we were taking them out of the Fakahatchee, in my own sick little morality I felt kind of guilty” He stood up and fished around in his pockets for cigarettes. “People get crazy for plants. I took this woman once to the Fakahatchee, she wanted to see—oh, it was a ghost orchid, as a matter of fact. She had been having dreams about this plant. I knew where one was that was blooming, so we go to the swamp, walk in for two miles through the nastiest stuff, she’s practically running to get there, and I see something that I don’t like, so I’m saying, ‘Oh, Baaaarbra, you might want to slow down,’ because right in front of her is a six-foot-long rattlesnake. She freezes, I chop it with the machete, I’m ready to, oh fuck, I’d had enough, and she’s just off and running again. She just couldn’t wait to go on to see the damn flower. She reminded me of a friend of mine who found this great weird orchid in Ecuador. What he didn’t realize was that he was on military land. So he gets stopped by the military police and they are really pissed, and they want him to hand over his bag of plants. So he says, ‘Go ahead, shoot me. I’m not leaving without this plant. I’d rather that you shoot me,’ and they look at him like he’s totally insane. Which he is.”

  The Good Life

  Some of the stolen orchids died. The rest had been glued onto trees in the Fakahatchee.

  The rangers at the Fakahatchee had put the orchids they’d confiscated from Laroche back into the woods and were waiting to see if they would survive. This was not the first time I had heard of gluing orchids onto trees. On my first trip to Florida after Laroche’s arrest I met a naturalist named Roger Hammer who had hiked through the Fakahatchee after Hurricane Andrew and whenever he found orchids that had been blown down in the storm he glued them onto standing trees with a few squeezes of an adhesive called Liquid Nails. The orchids tolerated the glue. In general, orchids are tougher than you expect them to be. They look as fragile as glass but they aren’t. Baby orchids are shipped around the world stuffed into boxes, matted, squashed, jostled, and suffocated, and yet most of the time when the boxes are opened and the little plants are untangled and dusted off they’re fine. The first time I saw an orchid grower open a shipment he’d gotten from Singapore I took one look at the mess of seedlings and figured the grower would sue. Instead he pulled a few out and admired them and said, “Well, hello, babies!” Wild orchids can take a lot of punishment too. After Hurricane Andrew, people found trees that had been slammed down and were dead as doornails and yet orchids on them were still flourishing. Laroche told me that he and his ex-wife used to drive around on orchid-rescue missions all the time. At construction sites they would hunt through the rubbish to look for orchids on trees that had been plowed down and pitched aside. If Laroche could get to the flowers without getting in trouble, he’d pry them off and take them to some nearby woods and attach them to an upright tree.

  You could write a book about the invincible plants of Florida. I was once introduced to some in the Loxahatchee Refuge in Palm Beach County. The refuge is marshy and level and most of its vegetation is either bushes or cattails or hip-high grass or clumps of cypresses, all low as the horizon, except for three skinny Australian pine trees in the middle of the marsh. The trees aren’t especially tall, but in that level world they stick up like skyscrapers. Whenever there is lightning in the area, it automatically gravitates to these trees, and since there is lightning all the time in south Florida the trees are hit over and over again. By now their branches are partly stripped and their insides are probably toasted, but somehow they have managed to remain standing and to still be living trees. There is even a grand champion of Florida’s deathless plants. It is the melaleuca, a homely tree from Australia that was brought to the state in 1906 as an ornamental landscaping plant. Melaleucas grow to be fifty feet tall and have spongy white bark and look a little like a eucalyptus tree with long hair. They drink so much water that they can dry out an acre of wetlands a day, so they were also used to help drain what was then considered Florida’s useless swampland. In the 1930s real estate developers had melaleuca seeds scattered over the Everglades by plane. Melaleucas love living in Florida. Since their introduction they have multiplied by the thousands. They spread at the rate of fifty acres a day. They have parched and then taken over a half million of the Everglades’ 7.6 million acres. Melaleuca leaves are oily and burn intensely. A melaleuca-leaf fire in 1985 left two million people in Florida without electricity because the fueled-up flames reached as high as the main power-transmission lines. No one has any sentimental feelings about the species, and most people now consider them a spreading evil. The
problem is that melaleucas hate to die. If a melaleuca tree is frozen or starved or chopped or poisoned or broken or burned, it will release twenty million seeds right before it dies and resow itself in every direction, so in a sense it ends up more alive than dead. The trick is to kill the tree gradually, because the shock of dying is what causes it to shoot out its seeds. The ranger who led me on my first walk in the Fakahatchee was a melaleuca-murder expert. He said that a tiny, pudgy Australian weevil known as the snout beetle lives on melaleuca leaves and flower buds, and that three hundred of them had been imported and released in the Everglades in hopes of paring down the melaleuca population. He said that, otherwise, the only way to kill the trees in an unshocking way is a method called hack-and-squirt—you hack a little bit of the tree, squirt in just a little bit of herbicide, come back after a while and hack and squirt again, and keep hacking and squirting until the tree languidly dies.

  Foreigners in general do well in Florida. Twenty-five percent of all the plants in the state are aliens. The most common orchid in Florida, the little lawn orchid, is a native of India. Its seeds had been mixed in sacks of grass seed by accident and then shipped to Miami and sown unwittingly in thousands of lawns. Brazilian pepper trees are all over; like melaleucas, they were imported as landscape plants but then escaped and took hold in the wild, and like melaleucas they hate to die and will reseed themselves if they are burned or cut down or pulled up. They are so at home in the Everglades that they have taken over huge tracts, and botanists have concluded that the only way to get rid of them is to scrape away the entire surface layer of dirt they are growing in. Common Asian cogon grass entered Florida as seeds stuck in the tire treads of road-building equipment and in packing material. Noxious alligator weed has been a runaway success since it sneaked into Florida from its native South America. The day I decided to go to the Fakahatchee to check on the poached orchids I saw an article in the Miami paper reporting that Vietnamese farmers were being ordered to destroy their Chinese water-spinach crops. The spinach is common in Asia. The Vietnamese farmers were new to Florida and so was the spinach. The article didn’t mention how the farmers were faring, but the spinach had certainly done well, and in fact it was now growing so ferociously that it was plugging up local waterways. A few weeks later I saw a story about another overly successful immigrant, a species of poisonous South American toad that had been introduced to Florida to eat sugarcane pests. They are now growing as long as seven inches and weighing in at more than three pounds. Recently they have been accused of killing house pets with their poison and scaring tourists with their monstrous pimply looks.

  —

  There are two ways to get from my quarters in West Palm Beach to the Fakahatchee Strand, which is diagonally across from West Palm on the other side of the state. One way is to drive west on Alligator Alley. I preferred going the other way, zigzagging across Palm Beach County and Hendry County, rounding the bottom of Lake Okeechobee, then cutting across the Everglades and along the edges of the sugar farms and through the Seminole reservation near Immokalee, past the ghostly signs for long-gone tourist stops like Gatorama and Native Village, on the small state roads that go off at right angles every few miles as if they had been drawn by a box cutter. It is slow going but broadening. The day I went to see the glued-on orchids I knew I should get to the swamp early before it got intolerably hot, but I liked the small roads too much to take the faster route. It was a windy morning, and all the palm trees had their fronds tossed forward like models’ hair in a fashion shoot. There was no one walking on any block I drove past. Just outside Palm Beach I finally saw some people, a lot of people marching single file on the shoulder of the road carrying banners with nothing written on them and long poles with bird feathers tied to the tops. I rolled down my window as I drove by to see if they were chanting or saying anything that would explain what they were doing, but they were absolutely quiet, and all I heard was the sound of forty pairs of feet crunching the sand on the side of the road. I passed the entrance to Lion Country Safari and then I was alongside sugarcane fields that were miles long and miles wide, covered with cane as high as my head or cane cut down to dry stubble. A few trucks pulled in and out of field roads. Now and again there were houses far off the road so miniaturized by the distance that they looked like toys, but I didn’t see a human being in any direction. The sugar fields went on forever. With miles of sugar behind me and miles more to go, I stopped at a gas station and went inside to buy a Diet Coke, but there was not a single artificially sweetened soft drink in the place.

  Near the high, humpy levee of Lake Okeechobee I saw a sign for a picnic area at something called John Stretch Park. I pulled in so I could climb up the levee to take a look at the lake. There were six yellow taxicabs in the John Stretch parking lot. Three stout women in rich-colored saris were inching up the trail that led to the top of the levee, and in an open-sided pavilion across from the taxis there were about twenty other adults and a bunch of kids running around. A few men were tending barbecue grills and a few women were setting the picnic tables. The whole park smelled like cumin. I climbed to the top of the levee and looked at the big blue lake. The three stout women were already at the top and then two women climbed up behind me, holding their saris high to keep them out of the dirt, and each time the skirts rippled in the wind the sequins on them threw brilliant dime-sized dots of light. Everyone nodded and gazed at the blue blob of lake, and then we all walked down together and I followed them into the pavilion. One of the men tending the grills told me that they were members of a large Pakistani family from Fort Lauderdale and that they’d gathered at the park for a picnic. Several of the men were taxicab drivers in Fort Lauderdale; the cabs in the parking lot were theirs. The man at the grill was wearing dress trousers and a starchy white shirt and large and glittering jewelry. As he was talking he flipped patties that were sputtering on the grill. “Lamb and chili patties,” he explained, pointing with his spatula. “Pakistani burgers. You’ve ever had them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We have plenty, you know,” he said. “You should sit with us and eat.”

  I told him I couldn’t stay because I was late as it was. He looked deflated. “I understand,” he said. “A lot of people in Florida are afraid of our food.”

  —

  Past John Stretch Park the roads bent through towns called Devil’s Garden and Bean City and Citrus Center and Harlem and Flag Hole and around wetlands called Telegraph Swamp and Corkscrew Swamp and Grassy Marsh and Graham Marsh. The land was marble-smooth and it rolled without a pucker to the horizon. My eyes grazed across the green band of ground and the blue bowl of sky and then lingered on a dead tire, a bird in flight, an old fence, a rusted barrel. Hardly any cars came toward me, and I saw no one in the rearview mirror the entire time. I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. If I had been an orchid hunter I wouldn’t have seen this space as sad-making and vacant—I think I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found.

  All along the roads there were shallow trenches filled with black muck and brown water and green snarls of weeds. They looked like somewhere an alligator might like to loaf around. Near one of the trenches a billboard for an old tourist attraction promised in giant black letters GATOR GUARANTEED!!! It wasn’t a very daring guarantee, because in Florida alligators are as common as crickets. In fact, every county in the state has an official Nuisance Alligator Rustler who is on call to remove excess or inappropriate reptiles. On my last trip to t
he Fakahatchee I stopped at a gas station, and as I was squeegeeing the bugs off my windshield, four baby alligators scooted from one trench to another, about six inches away from my feet. At that particular moment I was wearing sandals. About one second later I changed into regular shoes.