By Skip Clement
Over the weekend, I got to fish Everglades National Park (ENP) – the third largest national park in the lower 48. It encompasses 1.5 million acres of which more than half is water with a maximum depth of around 9-feet at high tide. I’d been to the Park and fished it dozens of times. Including a memorable summer day that yielded a back-country slam.
It was a nice day in February, sunny, warm with a break here and there that provided cloud cover relief from the sun. It was a still water day and it was unusually clear water – no real big rains for two weeks. What caught my eye was the trash floating in Florida Bay: plastic bottles, fast food wrappers, cardboard and plastic fishing gear packages, chunks of styrofoam and a busted pallet. It wasn’t overwhelming, it’s just that it was there. We’d seen trash before, but just not that much. We picked up the pallet and netted a dozen or so bottles. It got me to thinking about – what if . . .
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n May 12, 2056 near what once was the Shark River Slough; a major fresh water feed to the former Everglades National Park and just west of the ‘Trail’ (Tamiami Trail / Florida state road 41) near Forty Mile Bend, a precocious six year old, Hawk Tiger, asked his father a question. “Father, where are the Everglades?” A graying University of Miami English professor, Billy Tiger, the great grandson of the famous Miccosukee Chief William Buffalo Tiger, felt his stomach turn inside out. After a long pause, Billy Tiger looked up at the day’s dust and smoke filled-sky and painfully said to his youngest child: “Son, the Everglades are gone.” Then he said the words he disliked most. “White men destroyed the Everglades, and then they left . . . he looked at the Everglades as a place that begged for his hand.” Young Hawk frowned in complete and utter puzzlement, then asked, “Why would they destroy it?”
His father thought for a long, long while before answering his son. “White men wanted to change what the Breathmaker gave us. A place that had plenty of clean, clear water, many, many birds, and all the game and fish we needed to live. Hawk,” he said with an elevated voice that surprised him; “Most white men are insanely shortsighted. They think exploiting the land and water means progress. They will even kill fish and game just for the boast of it and, somehow, feel no shame.” Billy Tiger paused again, then said: “Our people adapted to the elements. We used the land and water, but took only from it what we needed to live. Our people lived in harmony with the natural environment. Every man, woman and child of our Nation is connected to the belief that the land and water are sacred. We innately know what white men never learned.”
U. S. Dept. of the Interior map / photo.
Billy Tiger took great pause again, and Hawk waited without voice for his father to begin again – he knew his father’s deliberateness well. Billy Tiger began again, “We have always known that what you do to the land and water you do to yourself. If you destroy the land and water, you destroy yourself. Conversely, white men who came to the Breathmaker’s masterpiece adapted the land and water to meet his needs in order to live. They fought the nature of things. For white men it was never a harmonious union with the natural environment. He exploited the land and water, and never connected the environment to his everyday life – the land and water were not sacred to him. He thought that what he did to the land and water was of very little consequence. Everything would always be there for the taking, regardless of his actions. White men measure success in the things they build, not in what they refuse to destroy. Our people have never understood their need to destroy . . . it must be sewn into the silky folds of their brains.”
The little boy thought long and hard before he spoke. He said to his father in a questioning tone, “The Breathmaker is angry with white men?” Billy Tiger quickly answered, “Very, very, very angry.”
Many, many native American minutes passed, an hour, before Young Hawk asked, “Will I ever see the Everglades of our forefathers?
His father answered, “Never.”
