The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  —

  Before we each went home, Laroche and I made our plans for the next day. It was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the Miami area to the Fakahatchee, and Laroche wanted to start before dawn. “Otherwise we’ll get there late in the day and the bugs will be miserable and you’ll just get burned,” he said. “Believe me, I’m warning you. I think you should pick me up around four-thirty tomorrow morning. Or five, at the latest. I’ll be up and waiting for you at four-thirty. And what about food? I’ll get all our supplies. What kind of stuff do you like?”

  I said I liked pretzels, and he said, “Well, that’s not enough. How about pretzels and those crackers with peanut butter and maybe some kind of cheese. Maybe some candy, too. And lots of water. And we should have some sunscreen and dry clothes. Look, I’ll get everything. I’ll get the supplies for both of us.” He ticked off on his fingers: “Pretzels, peanut butter crackers, Hershey bars, cheese.”

  “How about a compass?” I said. The rangers carried compasses. “Or a map?”

  Laroche glared at me. “We don’t need a map. I’ve got everything under control. I know the Fakahatchee like the back of my hand. I mean, you have to know it to go in there. It’s dangerous. All those pits of mud and those big sheets of water. You can disappear and die in the swamp,”

  I slept through my 3:00 A.M. alarm and then jerked awake at 4:30, imagining Laroche standing in his driveway, chewing on a cigarette and fuming. It took me only a minute to get ready. The night before, I had laid out my swamp clothes—leggings, cheap tennis shoes, long-sleeved white shirt—and a set of clean clothes to put on when we emerged and a little camera to photograph the flowering ghost orchids I was quite sure that I wasn’t going to see. I threw on my swamp outfit and raced down through the hotel lobby, deserted and dim at that hour except for the glow of a pink neon wall clock. The street was deserted and dim, too, and all the hotels along it were still, and the surf was low and miles out, barely licking at the hard brown edge of sand. The beach itself was vacant except for a cluster of furled beach umbrellas and a bony-looking beach chair missing a seat. There is nothing more melancholy than empty festive places, and I was glad when I got to my car and started down the highway to pick up Laroche.

  He was not standing in his driveway when I arrived. I guess he had been in the front hall, and when he heard my car pull in he cracked open the door and signaled me to be quiet and then stepped out. Every time I saw Laroche I was freshly amazed. His tallness, thinness, and paleness seemed always to be growing taller, thinner, and paler. He had the bulk and shape of a coat hanger. Even though he had spent a lot of time in his life walking around the woods he was wispy and unmuscled. The aura of peacefulness and repose was not anywhere around him. Instead he had the composure of a jackrabbit.

  He didn’t look dressed for the woods. He was wearing a Miami Hurricanes hat, a pair of thin corduroy pants, a flimsy short-sleeved shirt, and aerobics shoes. He wasn’t carrying anything—no pretzels, crackers, water, Hershey bars, cheese, maps, compasses, emergency flares. I asked him where our stuff was, all the stuff we’d need in the Fakahatchee. He tapped his shirt pocket and then pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “Brand-new pack. I just bought it last night,” he said. “I’ve got everything I need.”

  I turned off the ignition and sat staring at the steering wheel. Laroche looked at me and shrugged. “Look, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll stop and get stuff at the Indian trading post on Alligator Alley. Hey, do you want me to drive?”

  —

  It was not even 7:00 A.M. when we started out, but it was already warm outside. The road gleamed in the bright light and melting tar around potholes made a bubbly sound under the tires. Laroche was steering with one half of one finger on the wheel. He was able to do this because Alligator Alley is so straight, rolling over the land like a hall runner, but more because he didn’t seem to care if we veered onto the shoulder now and then. I knew him to be one of those people who are really sour in the morning, but that day he was very talkative. He described his new computer work to me and some new software he was writing that he was convinced would make him rich. As he was talking he saw a car coming in the other direction that reminded him of his mother’s car, so he began reminiscing about slogging around the swamp with her and recalled the time they walked through a charred prairie in the Fakahatchee and came upon a single snowy Polyrrhiza lindenii in bloom. The way he recited this made it sound like a fairy tale or Bible story—the bleak journey with the radiant finale, the hopeful journey through darkness into light. A more conventional, more comfortable story wouldn’t have this rhythm of struggle and victory, and instead it would have had the unswinging tempo of usualness and habit, a kind of deadly incessancy. I never thought very many people in the world were very much like John Laroche, but I realized more and more that he was only an extreme, not an aberration—that most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.

  Just then we crested a little rise in the road. On our right was the Indian trading post. Laroche swerved onto the exit ramp and into the parking lot.

  “Go ahead and get whatever you want,” he said. “I’ll meet you inside.” He peered out the windshield. “This will be interesting. They hate me here.”

  In the store I picked up some crackers and bottled water, and soon Laroche came in and bought cigarettes and some Doritos, and then we stood in the sweltering parking lot for a few minutes before we got back in the car and onto the road. “Nobody in there gave me any shit,” he said. “I’m surprised. All the Indians recognize me and they all hate me now because of the orchid case. We used to stop here all the time on our way to the swamp.” He shaded his eyes and looked out over the highway. “You know, I had really big plans for the Seminoles. What I really wanted was to get the orchid lab going. The nursery was fine, but the real money was going to be in the lab. We could have been cloning orchids day and night, really made it into a huge operation. Eventually I wanted to chuck the nursery completely and just have a huge lab the size of the Seminole bingo hall. That was the master plan. Then we wouldn’t really need the nursery. We’d just be cloning native Florida orchids and wholesaling them around the world, and then we’d expand and not just clone orchids but clone everything. And in the meantime I’d be training my guys in some basic botany. They would have really gotten something out of it. We would do some mutation, some bizarre hybridizing. We were going to weird people out. It would have really been cool. Cool as hell.”

  He sped down Alligator Alley and then onto State Road 29, the road that leads under three elevated panther crossings and past Copeland Road Prison to the entrance of the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. At Laroche’s chosen speed the trees looked like green streamers. When he slowed down to eighty or so, a dirty orange blur in the sky resolved into a column of slow-moving smoke, maybe from a torched sugarcane field or maybe from the plane crash. We whipped past abandoned bungalows melting into woodpiles, and past NO TRESPASSING signs that were all shot up like Swiss cheese, and past a rusty boat run aground on someone’s driveway, and past fences leaning like old ladies, and then almost past a hand-lettered sign that interested Laroche, so he smashed the brakes and craned his neck to read it. “Look at this!” he exclaimed. The sign read FOR SALE: BABY GOATS, GUAVA JAM, CACTUS. “That’s pretty fucking weird, don’t you think?” he asked. “Now, how would you end up with those three things for sale? Is it random or do you wake up one day and say, Hey, honey, let’s have a baby goat and guava jam business. Why not something else? How about lambs, ferns, and raspberries? Or, Christ, I don’t know—cows and tulips and orange juice?” He sighed. “What the hell,” he muttered after a moment. “People are so strange.”

  At last we were at the Fakahatchee entrance. The car bounced onto the hard road and past the houses and trailers you go by before you cross the boundary of the preserve. The road bent around a creek and then cut diagonally through the
swamp, through brush and weeds and trees that were woven together like wool. Every few yards there was a clearing on the side of the road that led to a flat-topped levee—the old tramways built by the Lee Tidewater Cypress Company when they came here in 1947 for the Fakahatchee’s cypress trees. Each levee looked exactly like the next levee, and each stretch of swamp looked exactly like the next. I glanced over at Laroche. His face was puckered with concentration. He caught me looking at him and broke into a smile. He had mentioned a few weeks earlier that he was thinking about buying teeth to replace all of the ones he had knocked out in the car crash that had killed his mother, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet, so his smile was still holey, a fence missing pickets. “Don’t worry. I know exactly where we are,” he said. “I know this place like the back of my hand.” We drove a few miles more. The road was empty in every direction. At last he steered into one of the clearings and gunned the engine before turning it off. He pointed ahead into the green thicket and said this was the trail we wanted and that we’d better get moving before the day got too hot.

  —

  The levee was high and dry and we walked for a mile or two before we stepped off. The water we stepped into was as black as coffee. It was hard to tell how far down we would go, and when our feet touched the bottom it yielded like pudding. Duckweed floating on the water’s surface wound around our calves. There is a deep stillness in the Fakahatchee, but there is not a moment of physical peace. Something is always brushing against you or lapping at you or snagging you or tangling in your legs, and the sun is always pummeling your skin, and the wetness in the air makes your hair coil like a phone cord. You never smell plain air in a swamp—you smell the tang of mud and the sourness of rotting leaves and the cool musk of new leaves and the perfumes of a million different flowers floating by, each distinct but transparent, like soap bubbles. The biggest number in the universe would not be big enough to count the things your eyes see. Every inch of land holds up a thatch of tall grass or a bush or a tree, and every bush or tree is girdled with another plant’s roots, and every root is topped with a flower or a fern or a swollen bulb, and every one of those flowers and ferns is the pivot around which a world of bees and gnats and spiders and dragonflies revolve. The sounds you hear are twigs cracking underfoot and branches whistling past you and leaves murmuring and water slopping over the trunks of old dead trees and every imaginable and unimaginable insect noise and every kind of bird peep and screech and tootle, and then all those unclaimed sounds of something moving in a hurry, something low to the ground and heavy, maybe the size of a horse in the shape of a lizard, or maybe the size, shape, and essential character of a snake. In the swamp you feel as if someone had plugged all of your senses into a light socket. A swamp is logy and slow-moving but at the same time highly overstimulating. Even in the dim, sultry places deep within it, it is easy to stay awake.

  —

  The first orchid we saw was a butterfly orchid, Encyclia tampensis, that was growing in a crotch of a pop ash tree. It was a little plant with lustrous green pseudobulbs. The flower was yellow with a lip that was white with purplish veins. After Laroche pointed it out to me, he lit a cigarette and clenched it between his teeth. “Nice little sucker, isn’t it?” he asked, examining the flower. “Cute.” I appreciated it from a distance because I could feel the land sloping downward as I moved toward the tree and I had decided I’d be happier if the swamp water never went above my waist. We turned north and slogged on. It was slow going. The water was heavy and the mucky bottom held tight, and each step was really three steps—a test step to feel for alligators and a second test to feel for cypress knees, those shin-cracking knuckles of wood that cypress trees send out from their roots to help them breathe. Then finally you commit the real step. After an hour of inching through the water we moved onto slightly higher ground, where we followed a path of palm fronds and fallen limbs so swollen with swamp water that they crumbled under our feet. Laroche stopped under a laurel oak that was draped with vines. “Toward the end of my plant career, flowering vines were my new love,” he said. “It was, sad to say, unrequited.” He frowned for an instant and then noticed a tiny clamshell orchid on a nearby tree he wanted me to see. “I found you two already,” he said excitedly. “I’m going to show you one of every orchid you want today. I’ll show you a fucking ghost orchid if it kills me.” A few minutes later he stopped and pointed triumphantly at a pond apple tree with ghost orchid roots around a low branch. I loved the look of the roots, the glossy greenness of them and their squashed tubular shape and the way they wrapped around the branch like a bandage. “Already flowered,” Laroche said. “Well, there’ll be more to see. We’re definitely going to see one in bloom.” We circled around a sinkhole, then through a tunnel of cabbage palms, then into a stand of willows. We stopped by one shrubby tree. “Here’s an ugly-ass orchid,” Laroche said, reaching up. “Rigid Epidendrum. Ugly-ass. But I’m not a snob. I was always interested in all orchids, not just pretty ones. When we poached we took pretty ones and drab ones, not just the showy ones. They’re all cool, if you ask me.”

  By this time a few hours had gone by since we had started walking and the sun had slid above the trees. It was getting hotter and hotter, and a haze of mosquitoes had settled around me. Even my fingers were sweating. Ahead and behind and on either side of me was a snarl of brush and palm fronds and sedge, and above were the mop tops of bromeliads and the gray trunks of trees. The land was as level as a pool table. I had no bearings. I wondered if we were getting close to the ghost orchids. “They’re right nearby,” Laroche said. “Just follow me.”

  He set out in one direction and then paused and changed course and then paused and changed again. This depressed me. “Laroche,” I said, “can I ask you a personal question?”

  He turned and scowled. “We’re not lost, if that’s what you plan to ask,” he said. “It’s this way. We passed on the right of this tree before, didn’t we?” The tree he was referring to had a thick, bumpy trunk and green leaves—the same thick, bumpy trunk and green leaves of at least ten thousand other trees in the Fakahatchee. He started toward the left of this particular tree. I followed. I was getting tired and clumsy. We started moving faster and recklessly, making a racket as we pushed through the underbrush and splashed through the sinkholes. I had the powerful feeling we were walking in a spiral. The Fakahatchee consists of eighty thousand acres, and I was sure you could walk a lot of spirals in eighty thousand acres without crossing the boundary.

  We came to a small clearing where the ground was mostly dry, so we stopped to eat something and consider our whereabouts. The fact is we were lost. Laroche knew it and I knew it. “We’re not lost,” Laroche said. He fumbled around for a cigarette. “I’m just turned around a little. Anyway, here’s what we’ll do.” He sifted through stuff on the ground until he found a short straight twig. “I’ll make a sundial,” he explained. “We’ll just set this up and wait a few minutes and we’ll be able to tell which way the sun is moving. We want to be heading southeast.” He glanced at me. “This is no big deal.”

  He stuck the twig in the dirt and sat on his heels. “You know, I was thinking that it would be really cool to have a little amusement park for orchids,” he said. “No snakes, no critters, nothing but orchids, sort of like an orchid safari.” He laughed. “My feeling is that anything is interesting, especially if there’s even a slight chance to make money at it.” He stretched out his leg and accidentally knocked over our sundial. Without looking up he found another section of twig and poked it into the ground.

  “Do you collect anything?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “It’s not really about collecting the thing itself,” Laroche went on. “It’s about getting immersed in something, and learning about it, and having it become part of your life. It’s a kind of direction.” He stopped on the word “direction” and chortled. “If anybody had a plant I didn’t have, I made sure to get it. It was like a heroin addiction. If I eve
r had money I would spend it on plants. When my wife and I had our nursery, we had forty thousand just totally unimaginable plants.”

  “Your favorite?”

  He scuffed his heel in the dirt, “I think it would have to be this little Boesenbergia ornata, this gorgeous little ginger plant a friend got me in New Zealand. It had first been collected a hundred years ago, and I think I had the only one in cultivation. It had these tiny round leaves, sort of brownish, with silver chevron markings. I swear it looked like it was made out of crystal. And it had an amazing huge orange flower, too.”

  I asked if he still had it. “I don’t have any plants anymore,” he said, crossly. “I sold that one for nine hundred dollars and sent a cutting of it to Kew Gardens.”

  “The sundial isn’t working.”

  He looked at it and squinted up at the sun and then narrowed his eyes at me. “It is so working,” he said.

  A wave of wind pushed by. It felt like the exhaust from a pizza shop, oily and thick and hot. My cheeks were pulsing. I felt extremely uncomposed, like many other Fakahatchee wanderers: The place looked wild and lonely. About three o’clock it seemed to get on Henry’s nerves and we saw him crying, he could not tell us why, he was just plain scared. I did want desperately to see a ghost orchid in bloom, to complete the cycle, to make sense of everything I’d been doing in Florida, but at that moment I wanted even more not to spend the night in the swamp. I also very much wanted to kill Laroche, to actually murder him and leave his body here, not because murder is part of my nature or upbringing and not because I thought it would help me find the way out of the swamp but just because I was furious with him and I was wrought up and had a lot of nervous energy. The sundial was definitely not working. Something whirred in the underbrush, and a crow dipped down from above and cawed. A hundred years ago plume hunters would come here and gather enough feathers to decorate ten thousand fashionable ladies’ hats. If a ranger interfered with them, they would kill him. “The thing about computers,” Laroche said, “the thing that I like is that I’m immersed in it but it’s not a living thing that’s going to leave or die or something. I like having the minimum number of living things to worry about in my life.”