|
Salvaging
the Real Florida: Lost and Found in the State of Dreams by Bill Belleville (University Press
of Florida, Hardcover, 293 pp., $24.95) Reviewed by Justin Bendell
In Salvaging the Real Florida essayist Bill Belleville
saunters through pine and palmetto country, fins deep down into artesian springs, visits shipwrecks off Key Largo, and kayaks
through the densest gator populations in Florida. He treks off the map and close to home, seeking not only “the real
Florida,” but a “chance to rediscover [him]self—the chance to be found.”
I walk now for miles in the hammocks and flatwoods, the marshes and swamps of Florida. I walk to discover new
things, and to remember in my heart the ones I once found. I walk in celebration of discovery, and in the evocation of people
and place. I walk to remember. Unlike Belleville’s
previous work, Losing It All to Sprawl, which documented his ten years staying put in a Cracker house in Sanford,
these 47 short essays (some no longer than two pages) cover much land and water in Belleville’s adopted state.
In the first essay, Belleville kayaks with friends after dark in search of bioluminescent plankton.
Crabs drift along, glowing, sometimes bumping into my hull, hard calcium shells clanking oddly against plastic.
Alex cups her hand in the water, and the liquid she holds sparkles as if electrified. In the distance, a dolphin arches out
of the water, bringing a massive column of light with it. I know, intellectually, that tiny, single-celled plankton called
dinoflagellates do this, absorbing energy from the sun and releasing it to confuse predators at night, twisting and turning
in the water. But that doesn’t explain the full magic of it to my senses. In “Midge World,”
Belleville taps an Ed Abbeyesque vein. In their zeal to rid pesky midges from a popular Sanford waterfront, local powers fumigate
a well-peopled area with pesticides. Belleville reveals his funny bone in describing the pesticide truck’s annual appearance
in the Christmas Parade. “When it [showed], it would get a healthy round of applause—although to the best of my
knowledge, it did not actually gas the audience during the parade.” In “Following
the Unseen,” Belleville ruminates on taking the path less travelled. The best way to keep folks from poking about
places like this is to simply leave them off the public map. And so, the unmapped parcel is always my choice: It’s seldom
used by other hikers; it offers a better chance to see wildlife—or at least signs of them; and, it allows you the opportunity
to get lost. Belleville does not always mean ‘lost’ in a strictly
metaphorical sense. In “A Florida Swamp,” the GPS malfunctions and Belleville and a friend get lost in a place
“where slender piers and pointed arches and vaulted stumps were woven with the filigree of branches, hanging mosses,
and vines.” He plays with the idea of Florida as a dream realm, a “place in the unconscious where thoughts and
feelings went to be considered before they were born—a mushroom here, a lichen there, all mossy and green and pungent.”
This frame also works in the sense of manufactured dreams like those promulgated by Disney. As Belleville notes, in Florida
“the story is just about anything you want it to be.” Although the shortest essays
sometimes feel like anecdotes, some of the longer chapters are particularly moving. In “The Wekiva,” Belleville
paddles up the Wekiva River, where “bald cypresses—the ones that were too small to be logged a century ago—endure
with a sort of timeless resolve.” Belleville finds that, after years of heavy RV use, the river basin is recovering.
It is a restoration story. Despite decades of damage, if we give enough time and space, places like Wekiva can heal themselves. Belleville is at his best
when he captures on the page his wonder and love for wild places—sand pine and saw palmetto, sawgrass sloughs, coral
reefs. But it is also refreshing when he offsets a string of essays about place with one about people. In “Riverkeeping with Tree,” we meet Tree Trimmer, a Vietnam vet who spent twenty-years camping on a
tributary of the St. Johns River. Booted from his campsite, he is a nomad, trading gator meat to airboat operators for
beer and cigarettes. When an alligator ate his black lab, Tree tracked the reptile down, “shot it, carved it up for
meat, and—out of its stomach—retrieved the [dog’s] collar.” Belleville writes: Tree exists for now in a little time warp, insulated by the remoteness of place. . . a true American river character,
maybe what happens when Huck Finn goes to war and then comes home as a mad-sane drunken shaman. While there is no clear narrative thread in this collection, several themes recur in the essays—dream versus
reality; nature as sacred space; the myopia of human Progress. Belleville draws links between present Florida and the one
that naturalists like William Bartram, Archie Carr, and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas wrote and advocated for in decades past.
This is a smart, knowing collection that sheds light on Florida’s lesser known natural wonders. Belleville takes the
reader to places that most people figure are already gone. He reminds us that all is not lost; there are places worth being
found. We only have to know where and how to look.
Justin Bendell lives and writes in Miami Beach.
Mirage:
Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. by Cynthia Barnett (University of
Michigan Press, Paperback, 248pp., $18.95) Reviewed by James Barrett-Morison Cynthia Barnett
begins her tale of Florida's water with the story of David and Vivian Atteberry, two Illinoians who retired to the Orlando
area. Within a year, their home began to crack and break apart – it was falling into a giant sinkhole.
They were forced to abandon ship (or house) and moved back to Illinois. Barnett expertly and effortlessly
transitions from the Atteberrys' tale to science, explaining how a lack of groundwater increases the rate of sinkhole formation
in southern and western Florida.
In Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.,
Barnett links characters and environmental history, looking at well-known players like Henry Flagler, Walt Disney and
Bob Graham, but also others we don't expect. I never knew that Harriet Beecher Stowe, after the Civil War,
moved to Florida and acted as an advertiser luring northeasterners to Florida, becoming effectively the originator of the
Florida snowbirds. Barnett can be scathing. Take, for example, her assessment of one
well-known Broward County community: “If there ever was a town that should not exist, it is Weston,
Florida. . . To get there, you can take Florida's Sawgrass Expressway, which wiped out sawgrass, or the Panther Parkway, which
devastated panther habitat. The city of 65,000 is flush up against the remaining Everglades.
If you stand at its edge with your back to the city, the vista is sawgrass, as far as the eye can see.
Turn around, and the view is clay-colored rooftops, as far as the eye can see.” Without
Barnett's humor, the book might be a dry tome about the horrible effects of a lack of water on Florida and the Eastern United
States. Instead, the book becomes fun, albeit in a twist-your-stomach kind of way. When discussing the
Everglades restoration plan signed into law in 2000, she asks a pivotal question: “How much water will go to lawn sprinklers,
and how much to spoonbills?” Turn the page, and you see: “AND THE WINNER IS. . . THE
LAWN SPRINKLERS” Who is to blame? Politicians, even those who view themselves as environmentalists,
are forced by the electorate to support both the environment and growth in what Barnett calls the “Florida
politician's Janus pose.” Developers and businessmen share culpability, as does the Army Corps of
Engineers, which has its own Janus pose: many of its environmental projects seek to counter the effects
of its other projects, like restoring beaches eroded by earlier Corps actions. The Corps were placed in
charge of wetlands permits in Florida, supposedly in order to help protect the environment. But between
1999 and 2003, they granted more than 12,000 permits, and rejected only one. Smaller-scale groups,
like homeowners’ associations, are responsible too. Barnett relates the story of Sol Koppel, whose
attempt to xeriscape his lawn with native plants in order to conserve water was shot down by his homeowners' association.
What was his crime? “Not having enough grass.” After the
wars and inefficiencies of the first three-quarters of the book, the last few chapters take a more positive turn, looking
at possible solutions like conservation efforts and desalination plants. These are difficult and expensive ways of quenching
Florida's thirst. But the real refrain is best summed up by schoolteacher Elizabeth Falcone at a Boca Raton
water-conservation meeting: “The bottom line is, too many people.” If present
trends continue, Florida will grow by 21% and surpass New York to become America's third-most populous state within fifteen
years. Without these new arrivals, Barnett argues, the water troubles would be much more manageable. But
what will stop them? Even David and Vivian Atteberry, who fell into the sinkhole, still dream of living in Florida. Is Mirage
one chapter in a horror story or a turning point? With books like Barnett’s, no one can plead ignorance.
James Barrett-Morison is a contributing editor at Florida Book Review.
|
 |
 |
 |
Caribbbean Monk seals: Lost Seals of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea by John
Hairr (Coachwhip Publications, Paperback, 198 pp., $14.95) Reviewed by James Barrett-Morison
The last
Caribbean monk seal in Florida was caught off Key West in 1922. By that point, seals were a rare novelty, and crowds lined
up on the beach to see the seal’s carcass. Twenty years earlier, a few seals had been kept in a moat on the Dry Tortugas.
Two hundred years before that, seals were frequently sighted off the coasts of Florida, plus in a range from Nicaragua to
North Carolina and Texas to Trinidad. But by the middle of the twentieth century, they had gone completely extinct. What happened
to the seals? In Caribbean Monk Seals, John Hairr tells the story of their life and death.
Caribbean Monk Seals is largely targeted towards those with scientific interest in the seals, and so there is a lot
of data included on classification, relative skull sizes and shell pit locations. While the data can be dry, there are occasional
entertaining tidbits, like the whimsically named 1836 magazine Journal for the Bahamian Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge.
There are a number of interesting and detailed maps, dating back as far as the seventeenth century. The
book contains interesting information about the archaeological evidence for seals from the pre-Columbian period, especially
among the Maya. Evidence is rare and often misinterpreted (as with a Mayan carving of a seal which was at first misidentified
as a peccary), but a picture does emerge about the way native peoples and monk seals interacted. Archaeological evidence and
written reports indicate that among the Maya, Calusa and other peoples of the Caribbean, seals were only eaten by the elite
members of society, as they were considered a delicacy. Seal teeth and bones were also used for jewelry and ornamentation. Still, both before and
after Columbus’ arrival, the main interaction between humans and seals was a negative one, with an increase in humans
resulting in a dramatic decrease in seals. The opposite is also true: when many of the native people of the Caribbean perished
after Europeans first arrived, monk seal populations actually increased as their main hunters, the natives, disappeared. This
trend quickly reversed, however, once European colonists began to hunt the seals in great numbers. Originally seals were hunted
for food, but later seal oil was used in lamps, much like whale oil. Even scientists of the nineteenth century killed scores
of seals in order to study them, failing to focus on their preservation in a period when “naturalists were as renowned
for their skill with a rifle as they were for their writing.” By 1900, seals had almost completely vanished, and rarely
appeared except in the most isolated parts of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Despite being extinct, the seals have left relics of their existence. Numerous
locations in the Caribbean region are named after them; Seal Cays exist in Belize, Nicaragua, Anguilla and the Bahamas, for
example. Hairr writes that he has hope for another legacy of the monk seals, that they will represent why it is important,
as we study endangered species, to work, as well, to preserve them.
James Barrett-Morison is a college student in Massachusetts who hails
from Miami. He is also a contributing editor of the Florida Book Review.
Unspoiled,
Writers Speak for Florida's Coast edited by Susan Cerulean, Janisse Ray, and A. James Wohlpart. Artwork by David Moynahan
(Red
Hills Writers Project, Paperback, 163 pp., $9.99) Reviewed by Deb Alberto
Literary advocates for the continued preservation of Florida’s coasts unite in Unspoiled,
Writers Speak for Florida’s Coast. The collection of moving essays, short stories and poems by 38 writers includes
a wealth of information for anyone interested in the splendor of the gulf and its ecosystem. It is also a treasure trove of
bold statements that cast a suspicious eye on Big Oil and Big Development.
The tales tell the trickle-down effect that bad environmental decisions tend to have on land and sea dwellers alike.
The essays also accurately portray the inimitable splendor that is Florida’s gulf coast and the imminent threats to
its longevity in the form of proposed offshore drilling and avaricious developers. With financial support from the Center
for Environmental and Sustainability Education at Florida Gulf Coast University, the project was initiated in Fall 2009 in
response to discussion of lifting the ban against drilling off Florida's coast. It was published after the Deepwater Horizon
spill, when the alarms it raises have become all the more urgent.
From fisherman to professors to reporters and students, every author in Unspoiled
has a story to tell. They range from the personal, like Lola Haskins' poem, “The View From Cedar Key,” where she
captures her feelings about the possibility of oil drilling off Florida’s gulf coast, to Diane Roberts' “Selling
Florida,” an essay in which she delves into the political side of the same issue.
Roberts, a professor at FSU and an NPR commentator, has done her research. In “Selling Florida,” she explores
the impetus behind the big money interests who push for the drilling:
And to encourage Florida citizens (and, more importantly, Florida legislators) to embrace drilling here
and drilling now, Florida Energy Associates has hired three dozen lobbyists. One of their lobbyists is Claudia Diaz de la
Portilla who is (what a coincidence!) married to Alex Diaz de la Portilla, senate majority leader and (another coincidence!)
chairman of the Energy, Environment and Land Use Committee. Well, now we know who you have to sleep with to get
Florida’s ban on drilling repealed. These ecological arguments
are not only a must read for anyone interested in the environment and preservation of natural resources, they are a pleasurable
read. In his short story, Ichthus, O. Victor Miller, a naturalist and novelist, writes about mullet, a fish with a bit of
a checkered past: Too drunk to sit in church, I kayak up the Wakulla River to sojourn with a spawning school of mullet. Ichthus is
Greek for this holiest of fishes. Before there was a church, lion-wary Christians scratched icon picttographs on aqueducts
and inside caves among the ancient graffiti. To them, the mullet symbolized redemption from original naughtiness and lots
of other stuff. For me, the mullet is a sort of sub-aquatic dove, a transcendental spirit. USF-Saint Petersburg's Thomas
Hallock, in his essay, “The Way of All Flesh,” writes about Treasure Island, just north of Saint Petersburg beach: Sadly the
vintage motels have not aged well. Salt air is corroding the steel in their concrete walls, causing the buildings to rot from
inside. The owners, faced with increased property values, sell rather than repair. And the developers favor tall condos, which
are empty most of the year. Now, instead of two-story motels tucked behind the dunes, there are rows of shuttered windows
along the beach. This is how things go in Florida: what is funky, beautiful, or cool gets taken away. The anthology’s
editors did an impressive job of interspersing the serious stories with the lighthearted -- the political arguments with the
personal stories -- in such a way that reading Unspoiled is not only enjoyable, but
balanced. The book is informative, yet playful, tackling serious issues while reminding us of the reason why they need to
be addressed.
Deb Alberto is a Miami native and former journalist who is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Florida
International University.
|