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.

Justin Bendell lives and writes in Miami Beach.

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.