Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones by Levine, Paul (ebook reader web .txt) 📕

behind aviator sunglasses. He wore the traditional Miccosukee jacket of bright red with multicolored stripes.

As the engine idled. Baker said, "We get buzzards during floods, and we get them during drought. The damn shame is that man causes both. Feast or famine, we're to blame."

Baker sat next to me in the small airboat. He wore khaki pants, a bush jacket, and a Boston Red Sox cap. He had a white mustache, a sun-creased face, and a patrician bearing. Twenty years ago, Baker had retired from an insurance company up north and discovered the Everglades. Now he devoted his life to saving what was left of it.

In the water next to us, an alligator carried its baby on its back. Nearby, a scrawny deer waded through shallow water toward the hammock, but the leaves of low-hanging branches had already been stripped clean, leaving nothing edible on the little island. Through binoculars, I could see the skeletons of small animals on the shore. We floated in a shallow channel, but on both sides, the earth was dried into a cracked mosaic of parched soil. It was in the nineties and humid. This time of year, Miamians with the wherewithal head for the mountains. The deer apparently hadn't gotten the message or didn't know the route.

Baker pointed toward a stretch of land near the hammock. "There ought to be two feet of water right there. There ought to be plenty of vegetation for the deer, tiny fish for the wading birds, and water holes for the gators to lay their eggs. But look at it."

"Dry as my granny's rye toast," I said.

Jimmy Tiger leaned down from his perch above us. "They're taking all the water for the farms and the cities. Then, in the rainy season, they flood us."

Tiger gunned the engine, and we took off again down the channel in the east Glades, through patches of green water lettuce and lilies. To my untrained eye, there seemed to be plenty of flora and fauna as we sped over the shallow water, crunching through yellow sawgrass. But then, I didn't know what it was like a century ago. We roared past hardwood hammocks with live oak and royal palm trees, scattering half a dozen egrets into the air. A predatory osprey flew overhead, searching for lunch, reminding me that I was hungry. A turtle swam slowly by, and two black snakes gracefully slithered through the water. Earlier, on wetter ground near the Shark Valley Slough, I had spotted the unique pink feathers of a roseate spoonbill carrying twigs in its spoon-shaped beak and, not far away, a black-and-white wood stork.

When I pointed out all the birds, Baker gave me a bitter laugh. "Not long before you were born, Jake, there was an area called Rookery Branch west of here that was packed with white ibis, tricolored herons, and snowy egrets. Between half a million and a million of them in a strand of trees a hundred yards wide and three quarters of mile long. Can you even imagine the sound they made?"

"Yeah, and the birdshit, too," I said.

"Their songs could be heard for miles," Baker continued.

It made me think of the banyan trees near the public tennis courts on Florida Avenue in the Grove. Two dozen green parrots roost there in the winter, chirping their hearts out. "What happened?" I asked.

"The Army Corps of Engineers built the canal south of Tamiami Trail. The water turned brackish. No more birds, no more music."

I am not an environmental nut, believing in moderation in all things except consumption of Dutch beer. I am more pained by an inner-city child without a home than a heron without a nest. I don't understand people who treat a man sleeping in a cardboard box as if he were invisible but race across the street to curse at a woman wearing a fur. Sorry, but I care more about people than minks, which I always considered uptown rats.

At the same time, I am opposed to fat-cat business-industrial types, such as a certain rotund, cigar-smoking radio host who calls people like Baker "environmental Nazis." There is a balancing to be done between the needs of a growing populace and the preservation of the wild. If I had to choose between Baker and those who would pave the wetlands, drill for oil on the reefs, and ravage the forests, count me with the tree huggers.

Harrison Baker had already given me a history lesson. The Everglades, that wide, slow river flowing from Lake Okeechobee on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, has been strait-jacketed by fifteen hundred miles of canals and levees, two-hundred water control structures, and eighteen pumping stations. A man-made plumbing system tries to accommodate the water needs of farmers, industries, and ten million people in the southern half of the state. The environment comes last. The Glades is half its original size, and the number of endangered species grows each year.

"South Florida is an environmental disaster," Baker told me. "We've got one-tenth the wading birds we had at the turn of the century. We've cut the flow of fresh water through the Glades, so Florida Bay is dying. Algae has killed the shoalgrass and turtle grass and turned the water brown. The mullet, trout, and tarpon have been devastated. The Glades is polluted with mercury and phosphorus and pesticides. Beaches are eroding, mangroves are fouled with garbage, reefs are dying, and every week new developments are started, moving west from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach right into what's left of the wetlands."

"What about water?" I asked him. "Fresh water?"

"Ah," he said, a sad smile crinkling his eyes. "Water is the real story. Water is where it'll all come home to roost. We're bleeding ourselves dry, and no one seems to care."

Tiger skidded the airboat to a stop next to a squat metal building on stilts. Here in the wilderness, it looked so out of place it could have been from Mars. "Water control station,"