Lost Man's River(3)

Beyond the tiny hamlet at Ochopee, Lucius crossed the small bridge over the shady headwaters of Turner River, which flowed south through shining grasslands and the brackish mangrove coast to the backwaters of Chokoloskee Bay. In the fiery sunshine which arose from the Atlantic horizon, the stately pace of his antiquated auto, putt-putting and rumbling like an old boat, permitted a calm appreciation of the morning. Strings of white ibis crossed pink sky, and egrets hunched like still white growths on the green walls of subtropical forest that had taken hold on the higher ground along the Trail. Over the savanna flew a swallow-tailed kite which, in recent days, had descended from the towering Gulf skies, at the end of its northward migration from the Amazon.

Delighted, Lucius stopped the car and climbed onto its dented roof to follow the bird’s hawking course over the Glades. Before him, the bright expanse spread away forever, seeping south and east over the infinitesimal incline of the ancient seafloor which formed the flat peninsula of southern Florida. In the distance, like a green armada sailing north against the sky, rose isolated hardwood hammocks, tear-shaped islands in the slow sparkling sheet of grassy river. The hammocks were rounded at the northern end and pointed at the south from long ages of parting the broad water that the Indians knew as River Long or Hatchee Chok-ti, transcribed by the early white men as “Shark River”—“the Undiscovered Country,” Lucius’s father had called it, evoking not only the remoteness of that labyrinthal wilderness but its mystery. “From whose bourn no man returns,” Papa intoned. In those days, there was no sign of man, only fine cracks in the floating vegetation made by narrow cypress dugouts, which left scarcely more trace than the passage of great birds in the Glades skies.

Placing one hand on the hot metal, Lucius made the jump down to the road. Though the road jarred him, he was grateful he could still do this without undue creaking. He straightened and stretched and gazed at the silent savanna all around. How terrible and beautiful it was! At one time, Mikasuki water trails had traversed the Glades from the east coast to the west, and permitted a passage of one hundred miles from great Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. In recent years, with the advent of the Park, the Indians had been banished from Hatchee Chok-ti, and the last of the wild Mikasuki—Billie Jimmie’s people, who refused to join the acculturated Indians on the reservations—lived in small camps along the Trail canal, guarding their old ways as best they could behind vine-shrouded stockades which hid all but the roofs of the thatched chekes.

At Monroe Station, the old aid and rescue post for early motorists, Lucius turned south on the narrow spur which joined the Trail to the old Chevelier Road. Known these days as the Loop Road, the track had been reduced by decades of disuse to a narrow passage pocked and broken by white limestone potholes and marl pools. In places it was all but lost in the coarse crowding undergrowth of the subtropics, and brush and thorn raked and screeched at the car’s doors as it lurched along. Farther on, the road lay submerged beneath risen water of the spring rains, and frogs and crayfish and quicksilver sprinklings of sun-tipped minnows moved freely back and forth between the warm gold of the marshes to the south and the soft silvers of the pond cypress to the northward.

But now the sky had clouded over, casting a pall of gloom over the swamp, and his sunrise mood of early morning evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius’s moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a dread and melancholy dragged at his spirits, as heavy as the graybeard lichen which shrouded the black corridors between the trees. In forcing his way into this road, he seemed to push at a mighty spring which, at the first faltering of his resolve, would hurl him outwards.



Gator Hook was a shack community on a large piney-woods hammock south of the Trail. The hammock lay on the old road named for the Chevelier Corporation, which was named in turn for an irascible old Frenchman—an ornithologist and plume hunter—who had once attempted a citizen’s arrest of Lucius’s father. In the intoxicated days of the Florida Boom, back in the twenties, the Chevelier people had pioneered a track due west from the Dade County line through the cypress swamps and coarse savanna drained by the upper creeks of Lost Man’s River. Its destination was Chevelier Bay in the Ten Thousand Islands, a wilderness region advertised as “the Gulf Coast Miami.” The developers were confident the authorities would approve their road as the middle section of the cross-Florida highway, but at Forty-Mile Bend, the engineers had turned “the Tamiami Trail” toward the northwest, into another county. The Chevelier Road was still ten miles short of its destination when the Hurricane of 1926, followed three years later by the Wall Street Crash, put an end to the last development schemes ever to be attempted in the Ten Thousand Islands. By the time the Trail was finished, in 1928, the Chevelier Road had been all but abandoned.