Asakiyume mita

Before we went to the Everglades in 2016, I started reading Marjory Stoneman Douglas's seminal work on it, River of Grass. It was not only hugely informative but beautifully written. At that time, I discovered that she'd written novel for young people (I think we'd call it middle grade, these days) called Freedom River (originally published 1953). It takes place just before Florida becomes a state and features three boys: a White boy, a Black escaped slave boy, and a Miccosukee boy. I was curious to read it for all sorts of reasons, including an idiosyncratic one: a 1994 reissue has illustrations by a cousin of mine (first cousin once removed; he's my dad's age).

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born in 1890 and lived to be 108; in addition to being a tenacious environmentalist, she was also an advocate for women's rights and a charter member of the ACLU in the South. In 1948, appalled to learn there was no running water in the Black sections of racially segregated Coconut Grove, she helped set up a loan program so that the community could be connected to the sewer system and helped pass a law that no houses in Miami could be built without toilets. (Thanks go to Wikipedia for all this information.)

So--she was a social activist. But she was already in her sixties in the 1950s. So it's been very interesting, so far, to see how she handles this story of these three boys.

( man, this got long )

So... that's a lot of thoughts for a children's novel that I'm only halfway through. Oh! And yes, I picked it up again because Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School being in the news reminded me that I owned it and hadn't yet read it.

I've returned from paddling among mangroves and exploring the Everglades. It's hard to know where to begin, so I'm going to just plunge in any which way, and probably intersperse Florida-related LJ entries with other entries.

Why the Everglades? Many reasons. But, most basically, how could I not love a place that is neither water nor land. It's interphase, neither solid nor liquid. The sky is under your feet; the water is in the air; it's a supremely liminal place.



Along the horizon, you could see rain falling in one spot, bright skies in another. Here's what Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote in The Everglades: River of Grass about the rains around this time of year:

You can see it raining darkly and fiercely far off over their at the horizon across the scorched saw grass. The sky will be a boiling panorama of high and low cloud shapes, cumulus, strato-cumulus, alto-cumulus, dazzling and blue and dun ... When the clouds lift, the long straight rainy lines blow and curve from the sagging underbelly of the sky in steely wires or long trailing veils of wet the glitter in some sudden shaft of light from the forgotten sun.

Where you see dark steel blue toward the right, on the horizon, rain is falling


Rain is falling on the right and left edges of this photo's horizon



And here's the other end of those trailing clouds--the water underfoot around the grass, and the sun sparkling in it:



... And a swamp lily, because they were blooming everywhere, and they're beautiful: