Lost Man's River(250)
Hell, boys, I ain’t talkin to my country, not no more! A man can’t trust a single word that ain’t writ down in black and white, signed, sealed, and hand-delivered, and even then it don’t mean diddley-shit. If you ain’t some kind of a big corporation that helps to grease their skids, get ’em elected, they’ll weasel around and break their promises, they’ll screw you every time. I finally realized how them Injuns must of felt about all them broken treaties, bein lied to and stole off of and cheated for two hundred years! Well, you know somethin? All us old-time pioneers are disappearin down that Injun road!
Weren’t that the way you was brought up? To trust the Gov’ment? Hellamighty, they ain’t done nothin for us common people, not around the Glades! Too busy throwin the taxpayers’ money at developers and farm corporations like United Sugar that wanted Okeechobee diked and the Glades drained and the Kissimmee River funneled away through concrete sewage pipes so’s rich men can get richer every day growin cane and citrus on the public land. Same way all over the damn country! Well, some of us don’t aim to sit and take it!
Since Parks come in, they been playin right along with Flood Control and the growers and developers that’s behind it. That good water overflowin Okeechobee don’t come south no more, and this part of the Glades here in the Park is starved for water. Pretty soon all this wild country over here will be lay in dead under the sun, no more use than a old gator carcass with the flat stripped off the belly and guts fallin out. Might still look like a live gator from a little ways off, till the stink hits you, and you hear the flies. Well, this wild Florida that was our home country and got took away from us is goin to wind up as dead and stinkin as that gator! Might look like Florida to tourists drivin past, but they better not stop or look too close!
Man like me never got much education, never needed it. Never knowed no other way than huntin and fishin, usin a boat. We done that all the year around. Then the Big Cypress and the north Glades started dyin, to where they ain’t hardly nothin left to hunt. Don’t see no game from one year to the next! Finally we said to hell with it and went over to huntin in the Park. Got to take what’s left before the gator holes dry up and the last life dies away for want of water.
Goin to sleep nights, starin straight up at the stars, I pine away for the Glades the way they was. I know in my mind it would all come back if them sonsabitches would just leave this place alone. You take that bad storm last September—that one them lyin bastards claimed done so much damage to the Watson Place! Come in after midnight, hit Florida Bay, lashin along at 150 miles an hour, pulled all the water off them flats, mile after mile, dead dry as far out as the eye could see. When them seas come back, they was fourteen foot above mean high water! Struck Flamingo at daybreak and broke most of the trees, all the way up and down that low flat coast, carried milky marl inland ten miles, all the way to the Nine-Mile Bend! Left long drift lines of dead fish and birds when the tide went out again—miles and miles of dead-lookin gray swamp and not so much as a buzzard in the sky. That country laid there so still and ghosty that any stranger comin through, he’d say, It’s finished. This Glades country is deader’n a dead man’s dick.
Well, the greenery and the birds, too, is startin to come back, and it ain’t a year yet! Had to learn all over again what our granddaddies been tellin us since Nap Broward started messin with the Glades when we was boys. This big ol’ swamp got nothin in the world to fear from hurricanes, not in the long run. Only thing it got to fear is two-legged idiots screwin with the water, and doin it legal with the help of politician-lawyers. Destroy the whole damn Everglades for profit, then turn around and call a man a criminal who is huntin gators in his own home country, same as his daddy and granddaddy done before him! That seem right to you? You call that justice?
Them corporations and the lawyers and the politicians on their payroll—the bigger they are, the more the Gov’ment rigs the laws for ’em so they don’t pay taxes! Grab the whole pot for their sel ves! Big Sugar and them others, hell, they’re already so fat they don’t know what to do with all their profits, but even so they will still move in on every square mile of the Glades they can lay their hands on! Same thing everywhere! Call themselves “big businessmen”—fuckin stupid hogs is all they are! Never raise their snouts out of the trough for long enough to see what their hoggishness is doin to our great country!
Know how they get away with it? They get away with it because they own the government, state government and federal both. Them so-called elected people, they’re just overhead! Now what the hell kind of a democracy is that? All them bought-and-paid-for politicians ever done was sell the people out, then holler about progress and democracy and wave the American flag over their dirty dealins! Get us into their damn wars so they can make more money for the arms industries and oil and chemicals that paid to get these chickenshits elected!