Everglades Water Conservation Area 3B
Here I am with all of the Evergladers.
Birds as big as tractor trailers.
Airboats, snakes, and alligators.
They’ll kill you now, and eat you later.
If that’s your fate, you’ll meet your maker.
Reporting live. I’m a space invader.
I’m here right now, but I’ll be gone later.
I’m in too deep like a shallow hater.
I’m a revving up like a revelator.
Paddling all along an airboat trailer.
You gotta be crazy to be out here. You gotta be outta your mind is what they would say. Whattaya doin?! Hey man. What is going through your head? What are you doing out in the middle of the Everglades paddling around this wild airboat trail like you think it’s all good. But you know what I say to them, the natural environment is truly our home and although I walk through anywhere I want in any city and in the world I’m out here paddling in the Florida Everglades. I’m in WCA 3B. Water Conservation Area 3B. Out here where you can be free, truly, like people have done for millenia.
For all space and time people have used Florida as a land to run away to.
Explorers from Europe who came here, they found people already here who had already been here. These are the ancient people encompassed by the tribes of the Calusa and the Tekesta. Or Tequesta. Or Tequesta and the Caloosa. And they also inter-traveled, inter-married, and inter-partied with the people from the Caribbean islands who were defined by the basic all encompassing tribal name of The Caribe. The Caribe from Cuba. The Caribe from The Bahamas. And from all the other islands. Basically, effectively the Caribbean Basin. From Nicaragua to Puerto Rico to all the other places where people have come from and to here all throughout time, throughout history immemorial.
The thing that we notice about here is that under each and every leaf there could be something that can kill you.
What?!
Yeah, that’s real. I’m out here in the wild wilderness. Where you can’t get a GPS signal. Where you can’t get a cellular signal. Where the 5G is not going to affect you because it doesn’t reach here. Yet this is the most consistently managed piece of elemental property in the contiguous state of Florida.
What is that? How is it that the water is managed here and what does that even mean for us? There’s a vast interconnected network of canals, channels, locks, levees, dams, and areas of managementation.
The Paradox of The Built Environment and the Natural Environment
Where I’m paddling right now loosely defines the paradox of what it truly means to be a human in South Florida. This is the, this is the exact juxtaposition of human managed elemental resource and complete and total wilderness. The Everglades. The Everglades? The “River of Grass” as so coined by Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
It’s dominated by creatures great and small. Have you ever seen a Everglades hornet? That’s a wasp with a stinger so big it looks like the back edge of a Chevy. Truck. Yeah. This area is so violent and deadly that death occurs here with reckless abandon on an acutely minute basis.
So what is it that’s drawn me here today? And how is it that I expect to survive? And even just to be able to live to tell the tale to show you this? Well it’s August of the year 2020. Nobody wants to be out in the sun in the Florida Everglades in the middle of the day.
All of the creatures are hiding under the shade. So I feel relatively safe even with twelve, thirteen, and even fourteen foot alligators, and snakes in the area.
There’s been twenty-five foot snakes caught around here. And they’re not even from around here. But they’ve come to be the kings, the apex of the predators in the area. Hey, people live out here. Miccosukees did it. Seminoles did it. Caribe did it. Calusa did it. Tequesta did it. Everybody did it. Even white people called Gladesfolk. The Gladesmen. The Gladesmen and Gladeswomen. The white pioneers of the South Florida as well.
If you’re crazy enough to come out here and give it a try, I’m not gonna lie, you might not die. I feel protected by the most dangerous element that there is. The sunlight. And that’s why I’m able to paddle through here with seemingly reckless disregard for anything that may which kill me. I don’t have knife on me right now. I got a two foot Philippine machete blade in the trunk. But I forgot to bring it.
So it is here that we see in the paradox of the juxtaposition of the built environment and the natural environment where we see the subjugation of the natural environment to the will of human kind through engineering and various feats of locks, channels, dams, and other structures which control the flow of water across the entire region.
It is this very mixture and this very paradoxical nature through the juxtaposition of fresh and the salt, the life and the death, the vegetative cycle, the prey and the predator, the small and the weak, the great and the strong and how they inter-operate with each other. Directly south of here is the federal park known as Everglades National Park. It’s not exactly clean, but it’s crystal clear. It’s a Florida beauty. It’s a Florida beauty that we live for, and we strive for, and we survive for. This is the land of the survivor.
Without this very area that you see here, the existence of the city would simply not be possible. For in exactitude, Miami is actually built under sea level. Everything west of Downtown Miami was this… Where we’re storing water for the case of emergencies.
That’s what makes this a Water Conservation Area.
Here in this very place and land you will see that nothing is what it seems. There could be a forty foot alligator under here. We don’t know. I myself have seen twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen foot alligators here. But an alligator bigger than a yellow school bus may very well be here and I don’t know. I could be flowing over its back right now.
So what is nitrogen? What is phosphorus? If you go due west from West Palm Beach you will arrive at Lake Okeechobee where everything south of it gets its drinking water. Some of the biggest agricultural impact points in the total South Florida ecosystem are the cow industry, the sugar industry, and the tomato industry.
Every winter a lot of the tomatoes that go around the United States are grown right here in South Florida in the area called Immokalee. Now, in the area of Palm Beach County, you find a great statistical percentage of all the sugar that is grown from sugar cane and then refined into white pure cane sugar. That occurs in the Belle Glade area right there in Palm Beach County.
On top of that we’ve got a lot of steaks, and milk, and cheese, and different things like that, that come from the cow industry. You’re gonna find farmers that do things with chickens. People have tried to drill for oil.
Water here is driven. And controlled.
The most uncontrolled element on Earth is controlled. Everything is different and not really the same. So it’s hard to say what’s going to happen but I can tell you what’s happening now.
This section…This section of the Florida Everglades is so managed, planned, defined, divided, and conquistadored upon that it is both the exact example of the wilderness that it represents as well as the physical manifestation of our need to build the infrastructure for society in a modern sense. For what it represents is the vast freshwater environment which defines South Florida.
Out here used to be all sawgrass. Out here used to be ALL sawgrass. Do you know what sawgrass is? It’s sharp. It’s as sharp as a blade of a knife. It’s sharp as a razor’s edge. But it’s a piece of grass. With little hooks. Cause if you look on the edge of it…When that blood drips it’ll drip amongst the dinosaurs. Life and death exists on a needle’s thread here. And every day, every minute of every day you’re looking with your head on a swivel to see that you aren’t killed instantly.
Right where we’re paddling… right where I’m paddling right now, all this around here is cat tail. Cat tail!? What’s cat tail?! Cat tail used to be here. Cat tail used to be here. Cat tail used to be here. Used to be about as common as a real cat tail. There was Florida Panther here. There was Bobcat here. The cat tail reed is what dominates this landscape now. All this is cat tail. Cat tail reed. Millions of reeds. A reed is that thin, twig-like stick-like structure that’s up jumping because of phosphorus and nitrogen.
Phosphorus and Nitrogen
These elements have inundated the entire watery landscape of this area. Phosphorus and nitrogen are the chemicals that reign supreme alongside mercury as they’ve been introduced to the environment from agriculture runoff…Listen, ey…Without without certain things happening there would be no modern society. If we did not destroy one thing, we could not build another. Things that we did yesterday are affecting how we live tomorrow; and what we do today changes everything.
[This article is an excerpt from Watery Miami, the new book and movie by Jacob Katel. This is his seventh book in a series on the history of Miami, Florida. Watery Miami is a one of a kind journey across 120 miles of Miami-Dade County by kayak. From Star Island to the Everglades through Little River, Coral Gables, Old Cutler, and Homestead, this epic adventure offers a flood of perspective, seven essays and 180 color photos, on the nature, science, and history of South Florida.]
