Voyager

by Russell Banks

  But the swarming details of the Everglades can overwhelm you. It’s almost too much to absorb and organize. In this finely delineated and particularized landscape, to gain perspective you have to step away from time to time and abstract it. Along with Thoreau’s eye, you need to develop an almost Emersonian appreciation for the vast circular canopy of blue that stretches unbroken from horizon to horizon and the broad watery swale under your feet. It’s as if you are at sea and stand upon a shimmering grassy plain that floats like a Sargasso between the firmaments, above and below. The light is spectacular and shifts constantly as clouds build and dissipate and build again. The intensity of the light and its movement are dizzying. To steady yourself, you shift your gaze almost involuntarily back to what’s close at hand, clinging to it as if to the rail of a ship. In so abstract a landscape, to ground yourself you have to look again at the details.

  And so it goes—back and forth, the long view and the short, the abstract and the concrete—for here you are situated in an infinitely complex world whose parts and the tissue of connections between them can be seen only if the viewer keeps shifting his focal point. By comparison, the city of man, the anthrosphere, from nearby Miami to distant Mumbai, seems stilled, frozen, caught in a snapshot in relatively recent time, serving either as all foreground or all background, with no movement between them. The central figure, the subject, is always us; humanity is the figure and the ground; we are content as well as context. In the Everglades, the central figure is the ancient planet itself and its immense plenitude.

  Sometimes, instead of visiting the southern end of the Everglades, I drive out from Miami along Route 41, the old Tamiami Trail, cross through the Miccosukee Indian reservation, past the airboat rentals (banned inside the park but ready to rent all around it) and the solitary fishermen sitting by the canals built by the Army Corps of Engineers, to reach the north side of the park and spend the day at Shark Valley. It’s less a valley than a broad, shallow slough twelve miles wide, a one- to three-foot-deep scimitar-shaped depression in the limestone bedrock that carries the overflow from Lake Okeechobee in a tectonically slow drift south and west at barely one hundred feet per day, sliding the fresh, nutrient-rich waters across the saw grass plain to the mangrove estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico. Out here, South Florida seems freshly emerged from the ocean, still dripping and draining back into the Gulf, as if the Ice Age ended only yesterday. Its highest point is barely eight feet above sea level, but from it you can see for miles.

  At the Shark Valley Visitor Center there’s an open, rubber-tired tram that carts tourists into the Glades a ways, with a Park Service guide on a loudspeaker who’ll describe what you’re seeing. There’s a bike-rental shop and a fifteen-mile bike path to an observation tower and numerous trails where you can walk in silence. In a half hour, I’m under the hot May sun a few miles out on the bicycle path, pedaling the wobbly old one-speed bike I rented next to the visitor center. I’m finally far enough into the Glades that I can no longer hear the visitors or their cars and RVs or the guide on the tram, so I pull off the path and stop.

  Purple pickerelweed is flowering everywhere, and bladderwort, like yellow stars, blooms against the dark water of the slough. Deerflies cruise by and then swerve hungrily back toward me, a new warm-blooded mammal, and hairless, too. All I can hear now is the clank of the links in the food chain. Herons and egrets stand knee-deep in water, waiting motionless, like the fishermen I saw earlier alongside the canal on the Tamiami Trail, and now and then I hear the splash of a gar or a bass busting the air for a low-flying dragonfly. For a long time, without making a ripple, a six-foot alligator on the far side of the slough stalks a spindly white egret, drawing closer and closer, undetected, until suddenly there is a great furious roil and splash of water, then feathers floating, and silence as the gator slides away.

  Later, out at the observation tower, I pause halfway up and look down, and in the copse below, a rust-colored fawn with pale spots across its belly lies curled and hidden by its mother. Intent only on protecting her offspring from the huge gator snoozing in the slough fifty feet away, she obviously has not considered aerial reconnaissance, especially by a human. Down below, the fawn lies as still as a statue in the cool shade of the copse. I feel oddly invasive for watching and resume climbing to the top of the tower. There I gaze out across the watery veldlike plain of saw grass. In the west a bank of cumulus clouds piles up above the Gulf near Everglades City, promising rain. For a moment I consider hurrying back to the car, but then decide no, let the rain come down. And within the hour it does, and as I walk my rented bike the eight miles back to the visitor center, I feel finally invisible, lost in time and space, afloat inside a dream of a lost and coherent world.

  Crossing Shark Valley by foot in the warm torrential rain, it’s almost inconceivable somehow that my points of departure—Keene, New York, and Miami, Florida—are in the same time zone as the Everglades. Not just longitudinally, as on a map, but literally, as on a calendar or a wristwatch. Here and in Keene and Miami, today’s headlines and stock quotes are the same, the historical facts still hold, and thus all three places bear, at least abstractly, the same relation to the onrushing millennium, to its ethnic cleansings, genocidal massacres, famines, global floods of refugees, men and women and children gunning one another down with automatic weapons, wanton destruction of the planet—everything that drives a modern man or woman nearly mad with grief and despair, so that finally all one wants is to get out of this time zone. “Anywhere, so long as it’s out of this world,” said Baudelaire. And here I am, out of that world. Astonishing!

  Later in the day, after the rain has passed east toward Miami and the Atlantic, I drive out on Route 41 to Everglades City in the northwest corner of the Everglades, where there is another visitor center and a marina located at the entrance to the Ten Thousand Islands, a vast spray of mangrove islands that stretches about forty miles from Marco Island in the north to Pavilion Key. It was Ponce de León who guessed there were ten thousand islands, but the modern count, via satellite, is 14,022. The number keeps changing, because most of the “islands,” even those several miles across, are built on clustered red mangroves and are constantly being broken apart and restructured by hurricanes.

  It’s close to five o’clock, though midafternoon bright at this time of year. The sky is washed clean of clouds, and the still surface of the cordovan-colored waters of Chokoloskee Bay is glazed with a taut silvery skin. In these calm tidal waters there is an abundance of snook, tarpon, redfish, blue crabs, and bottlenose dolphins, feeding and breeding and being preyed upon by one another, by the thousands of cormorants and ospreys and cranes and pelicans and egrets and ibis that flock year-round on the mangrove islets and rookeries, and by the sport and commercial fishermen from the tiny villages of Everglades City and Chokoloskee as well. They’re not preyed upon in such numbers as to endanger them yet—except, of course, for the elusive, mysterious manatee, that fifty-million-year-old watery relative to the elephant, a seagoing cow with flippers. The manatees are protected, but their death rate may exceed their birth rate: these gentle two-thousand-pound animals are being decimated and cruelly wounded by the propellers of the fishing and pleasure boats that roar up and down the waterways here. Nine out of ten of the remaining eighteen hundred manatees bear ugly prop scars on their smooth backs. There are about seven hundred thousand registered powerboats in Florida, and thanks to persistent lobbying in Tallahassee by their owners, there are no speed limits in these peaceful, secluded waters. The boats race along the thousands of interlaced channels and crisscross the myriad unnamed bays at thirty to fifty miles an hour, chopping through anything too slow or confused by the noise to get out of the way. Generally the manatees keep to the channels among the islands, feeding on sea grass in waters so darkened by the tannin from the roots and dead leaves of the red mangrove that the animal cannot see the bottom of the boat approaching; nor can it hear the roar of the motor until the boat is nearly on top of it, and thus cannot fl
ee in time to elude death or maiming.

  There’s enough daylight left to tempt me to rent a canoe at the visitor center. I push out into Chokoloskee Bay and paddle slowly along one of the scores of channels that cut into and around Sandfly Island in the general direction of the Turner River Canoe Trail, the start of the Wilderness Waterway that winds for ninety-nine miles through the most extensive mangrove forest in America, all the way to Flamingo and Florida Bay in the south. All I want today, however, is a few hours of solitude on the water, a closer look at the cormorants and the frigate birds and the tricolor Louisiana heron I glimpsed heading low over the bay toward Sandfly Island.

  Halfway out, barely a quarter mile from shore, a pod of bottlenose dolphins, maybe four or five, swimming a short way off my bow, notice the canoe and slice through the water to investigate, their dorsal fins racing toward me like black knife blades. After circling the intruder several times, they move off again, apparently satisfied or bored, but the last in the pod—an adolescent, probably—makes a show-off’s grinning leap. It practically stands on the water and plops over, splashing me and rocking the canoe, and then cruises back to join the others.

  I move out into the bay another half mile. Atop many of the channel markers, ospreys have built their nests, turning the poles into tall, branchless trees. They are incredibly stable birds, mating for life, and they use the same nest year after year. Off to my right a ways, one of the smaller islands has been converted into a rookery by a huge flock of fork-tailed frigate birds. There seems to be a great flurry of activity, so I paddle over. Fifty or more parent frigate birds are huddling protectively over their fuzzy gray hatchlings, while another fifty make a great racket and fight off dozens of predatory, sharp-beaked cormorants screeching and hungrily diving for the offspring. I draw near in my canoe and watch the fight for a long while, an invisible witness to a savage siege and great acts of parental courage and sacrifice.

  To let you see what’s there, most national parks get you up high on a mountain or make you gape into a canyon or a gorge, playing with scale and fostering delusions of human grandeur without your even having to leave your car. “This car climbed Pikes Peak, Whiteface Mountain, Mount Washington,” and so on. In the Everglades, though, you’re kept on the same plane as the natural world. You can’t see the Everglades at all, really, unless you get close up and keep it at eye level, which humbles you a bit. “This car drove through the Everglades” is not much of a claim. This sort of viewing is interactive, and your travel backward in time to the continent’s beginnings is all the more convincing for it.

  Maybe it’s especially true for Americans—we whose present is too much with us, we whose future looks worse and whose past is increasingly paved over or deliberately erased—that, for our emotional and intellectual well-being, for our moral health as well, time travel has become more essential than ever. Maybe it’s this need that explains the growing popularity and proliferation of historical theme parks, the desire to build a Disney World near a Civil War battlefield, for instance. Or the whole Jurassic Park concept, which surely, as much as the animated dinosaurs, accounts for the extraordinary popularity of the movies. It’s the idea of safe passage to the distant past that appeals. This idea may also account for the rapidly increasing popularity of our national parks. The total number of visitors is up 10 percent overall in the last decade, and it’s much greater in some parks (70 percent in Yosemite, for instance), bringing—especially in the parks located within easy striking distance of urban areas—traffic jams, environmental damage, graffiti, crime: all the woes of life in the here and now that we’re trying to escape.

  The Everglades, which is more demanding of its visitors’ imaginations than most other parks, has not yet suffered as they have. The greatest danger to the Glades comes from outside the park, from the agriculture industry and real estate developers, who for generations have been blocking and draining off its freshwater sources in central and southeastern Florida for human use and polluting the rest with chemical fertilizers and runoff. In recent years, the National Park Service, the state of Florida, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have begun cooperating to restore the old flow of water from Okeechobee as much as possible and to control with great rigor the amount of pollutants allowed to enter the system. In 1994, Florida governor Lawton Chiles signed the Everglades Forever Act, a complicated, expensive compromise between the environmentalists and the agricultural interests, brokered with the assistance of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. The bill requires the state to construct forty thousand acres of filtration marshes around Lake Okeechobee at a cost of $700 million, with the farmers paying a third of the costs and the rest coming from Florida taxpayers. No one is happy with the deal, which suggests that it’s as good a deal as anyone is going to get right now. This act sets a temporary clean-water goal of fifty parts of phosphorus per billion parts of water, which means that the pollution from chemical fertilizers, though diminished, will nonetheless continue. But saving the Everglades is an ongoing, extremely costly fight, and for some species it may be too late. One of the thirty remaining Florida panthers was recently found dead inside the park, and its body contained mercury at a level that would kill a human being.

  The sky in the west has faded to pale rose. Ragged silver-blue strips of cloud along the horizon glow red at the edges, as if about to burst into flame. I turn my canoe back toward the marina and paddle fairly energetically now, for I don’t want to get caught out here after dark among ten thousand islands and ten million mosquitoes. You could easily get lost in this maze of channels and not be found for days and be extremely ill by then. I’m reluctant to leave this primeval world, however. Once again, the peaceful, impersonal beauty of the Everglades has soothed and nourished my mind and heart and has restored some of the broken connections to my layered selves and memories. It’s time to return to the anthrosphere.

  Then, suddenly, a few yards ahead of my canoe, I see a swelling disturbance in the water. It smooths and rises, and the water parts and spills, as first one, then two large, sleek-backed, pale gray manatees surface and exhale gusts of mist into the air. They slowly roll and dive. A second later they reappear, and this time there is a calf the size of a dolphin nestled safely between them. I can hear the three animals inhaling huge quantities of air, and then they dive again and are gone. The water seethes and settles and is still. A low-flying pelican cruises down the channel ahead of me and disappears in the dusk.

  For a long time I sit there in my canoe, thrilled by the memory of the sight, feeling unexpectedly, undeservedly blessed. Jurassic Park, indeed. This is the real thing! For a few wondrous seconds, a creature from the Paleocene has let me enter its world and has come close enough almost to touch. It’s as if the old planet earth itself contained a virtue, a profound generosity of spirit, that has allowed it to reach forward in time all the way to the twenty-first century in North America, and has brought me into its embrace.

  HOUSE OF SLAVES

  Arriving at a so-called Developing World capital from the so-called Developed World can be metabolically disruptive: a familiar logic displaced suddenly by an unfamiliar one. It jangles one’s body as much as one’s mind. Compared with landing in Lima or Djibouti, however, my arrival at Dakar from New York via Brussels was orderly in a familiar way. There was, of course, the expected military presence—tall, pistol-packing Senegalese youths with aviator sunglasses and mustaches and batons—but the passport check was swift and efficient, and my baggage showed up quickly and intact, and taxis into the city were waiting patiently in a line outside.

  Nearly half my fellow arriving passengers were white European tourists, mainly French and too young to feel even vaguely postcolonial. The rest were returning upper-crust Senegalese, elegantly tall and slender, many dressed in traditional, elaborately embroidered boubous, and a large number of middle-aged African Americans on package tour, most of them somewhat overweight, wearing stone-washed jeans and brightly colored dashikis—somber men and women on a serious, r
oots-finding mission to West Africa. I was here on business, one might say—research for a novel requiring use of the archives at the Gorée Institute, a Pan-African think tank and conference center on Gorée Island, a few miles offshore. I had a second reason for coming to West Africa, but didn’t know it yet. Before departing Gorée, I would learn that, despite being a white American, I, too, was on a roots-finding mission.

  A twenty-minute ride through the treeless, sun-baked sprawl of cinder-block suburbs brought me to the congested heart of the capital. Dakar was thronged, a hustling, bustling city of more than a million and a half people and growing way too fast to adjust. The main drags were jammed with cars and smoke-belching trucks and buses. The entire downtown seemed to be one big open-air market. On Avenue Blaise Diagne, as in midtown New York and the Marais in Paris, smiling Senegalese sold genuine Rolex watches for twenty bucks or, for five, a Lacoste shirt guaranteed not to shrink. The streets and sidewalks were packed with pedestrians, fully half of them selling—everything from Bic lighters to pirated videos and CDs and knockoffs by the thousands of carved wooden figures and tribal masks—the other half arguing good-naturedly over the prices.

  My host, John Matshikiza, a South African writer and head of the humanities department at the Gorée Institute, got us aboard the last ferry to Gorée just as it left the terminal at the eastern end of the port, where a half-dozen rusting freighters and tankers under a Panamanian or Liberian flag lay wheezing at anchor. The double-decker ferry was filled to the rails with island residents returning from the mainland, most of them women chatting and arguing cheerfully in Wolof or simply resting from a long day’s work before beginning the night’s. As the sun set, a group of muscular teenaged boys wailed away on drums, while the rest of us, helpless to resist, swayed in time and gazed at the fading skyline of Dakar silhouetted against the blood-orange sky.