The mysterious Everglades was her favorite place in the world after studying for four years at the nearby University of Miami. She’d spent weeks at a time deep in the Everglades studying its vastly complicated ecosystem and biological systems. And the deeper she went, the more beautiful it all became.
The woman paddled slowly among the trees, allowing the canoe to coast against the soft ripples as she examined a sprawling manchineel tree, reaching ominously from the bank. The manchineel was one of the deadliest trees in the world, native to Florida. Its leaves were highly toxic as was its small flowering fruit, resembling a small apple. The tree was legendary for its poisonous sap, used for centuries by Carib Indians to poison the tips of their arrows, ensuring a long agonizing death for their enemies. A poison which held perhaps the most tragic and ironic reputation in history, being used to kill in battle the famed explorer Juan Ponce de León, who was searching for the legendary fountain of youth.
The manchineel was also the tree on which she had done her senior thesis. She was fascinated by the sheer power of its biological design, and deadly toxins, all wrapped in a cocoon of natural beauty and innocence. A plant-based eukaryote that could destroy an animal eukaryote so quickly, from a single brush, that it was one of the closest things she’d seen to an evolutionary anomaly. It was not the only poisonous plant in the world, but its efficacy and speed of eukaryote destruction put it in a class all its own.
The universe was balanced. Of that, she was sure. There was no existence of light without darkness or heat without cold. No death without life. Contraction and expansion, amorphous and formed, the list went on and on. What truly fascinated her about the manchineel tree was the rarity of those toxins coming together in an evolutionary process creating something so deadly. Including some toxins which still remained unidentified.
To her, it was proof that even the longest biological odds existed somewhere. And if one organism had evolved into a nearly perfect killer, its very existence suggested there could be another, somewhere, that had evolved into the perfect healer. An organism whose existence was just as much an anomaly as the manchineel tree.
And she thought she’d found it. No, she was sure she had found it. But so had someone else and the events that unfolded as a result were devastating. She’d briefly had in her hands the greatest biological anomaly in history, just days before it all came to a violent end.
She was aboard the Bowditch when it sank in a twisted heap of fire and steel. She was one of the crewmembers who made it off in time, thanks to one man who, in the face of the worst possible situation, still managed to save most of the lives on his ship. The same man who died trying to save his chief engineer below deck. In the end, the Captain was the greatest hero she had ever seen. And he was more than just a captain, he was her father. A father who didn’t just save his crew…but one who stood between death and his own daughter, and won.
Her eyes began to well up again as she pulled the paddle up and onto her lap, allowing the canoe to slow to a stop again, against the water’s soft ebbing.
Her father was gone. Her hero. Her dad.
Neely Lawton’s tears came again, as though they would never end. A week alone in the solitude of her Everglades still wasn’t enough to help heal her broken heart. She knew it would take time and yet she still didn’t want to let go. She didn’t want him to simply become a memory, or images she thought of periodically. She didn’t want him to fade.
She sat listlessly in the channel, listening to the subtle sounds of the earth around her –– the chirping birds and the trickling of the water around the worn hull of her canoe. In front of her knees sat her pack and tent, neatly bundled.
Neely had remained motionless against a large mangrove shoot for nearly thirty minutes when she heard it. The sound of an engine approaching. It had a distinct pitch which told her it was an airboat, a common craft in Florida used in shallow waters. And she was surprised to hear it.
Neely was miles from the larger lakes and channels. She hadn’t seen a soul for days, which filled her with a sense of both curiosity and concern.
It was unlikely to just happen upon someone that far up the Watson River, but the sound of the engine told Neely that the craft was headed straight for her.
She hadn’t seen anyone…but it didn’t mean someone had not seen her.
Someone had seen her. Someone she was about to wish had not.
Sitting on tall seats atop an old and dingy airboat, Sal and Jered Hicks had grown up in the backwoods and swamps of Southern Florida. Brothers who both had spent the better part of their lives among the unpatrolled waters of the northwestern Everglades hunting anything they could sell on the black market, protected or not. Yet the Glades provided something far more important to the brothers than just a source of poached alligators. It provided obscurity. The ability to simply disappear within the jungle-like terrain for months at a time. Especially when people might be looking for them. To the Hicks brothers, the state of Florida’s greatest natural treasure was the ultimate protection to its inhabitants from the world outside.