Personal Geography — Lake Okeechobee
As if I had any say in the matter, my dad bribed me into leaving my piano, my friends, and my sole ally in life, my grandmother, just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the promise of a pony and beaches. Bribe accepted, we loaded into the station wagon with a trailer in tow and headed south. It was 1973. I was 8 years old and he kept his promises.
I spent my formative years growing up on the edge of Florida’s last great wilderness, Lake Okeechobee — the second-largest freshwater lake in the contiguous United States. This neotropical lake was once the heart of the Everglades, overflowing into a sixty-mile-wide river of grass on a limestone shelf that stretched more than a hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico.
When we moved to south-central Florida in the early ’70s, wildfires were common, and fire towers were part of the landscape, as were large dairies and citrus groves. The Kissimmee River watershed, which once snaked its way through central Florida, giving the lake most of its water, had been “straightened” by the Army Corps of Engineers into a wide canal. Many other canals were cut, crisscrossing the peninsula and delighting the newcomers with a steady supply of “waterfront” homes.
After a deadly hurricane in 1928, when the lake’s water surged out and drowned thousands, a large earthen dike was built completely around the lake, with feeder canals and locks controlling water flow in and out. Much of the surrounding Everglades and wetlands were drained, and the once-fertile land was converted to massive sugarcane fields.
Every inch of the land was managed. Forests were planted in neat rows of single-species pine, with wild Florida undergrowth strictly curtailed. Rivers were disciplined. Marshes were drained. Agriculture made the rules: dairies, citrus groves, sugarcane, pine lumber, each a kingdom of its own with its own kind of runoff. All of it devastating for the wildlife that once depended on the pure, never-ending river of grass. This became Florida’s new normal, my new normal.
As I grew up there, I learned how much had been silenced — the sawgrass, the herons, the slow brown pulse of Florida’s tannin-laden water. Later, I came to see the manatees, dolphins, and others suffering from algal blooms and red tides.
Florida shaped me. Not because it was wild, but because it wasn’t. It taught me how control and overuse, without any consideration for working with nature, leave heavy scars on a landscape, and how water remembers what we try to forget.