The C-100 Canal in Palmetto Bay, Florida
I’m shipping out of Coral Reef Park in the Palmetto Bay sector of the Miami-Dade County suburban zone. Built and constructed with a purpose through…through dynamite and dredging. Through heavy metal and explosions. Through combustion and construction.
This channel was cut straight out of the bedrock. The limestone foundation. The Miami Limestone rock which forms the aquifer. This is what it was drawn from and what it was created for. And this is called The C-100.
C-100 is the C one double 0. And that’s a canal that drains out to the Biscayne Bay. The reason it was built in 1960 was as a drainage for flood lands. The two biggest high schools in Miami-Dade County are located in Kendall. So that could give you an idea of the density of the suburban population in an inverse reflection of the urban core which dominates the popular consensus of what it is that is Miami.
But, yo, I’m just here to tell you this is what it all used to be. The reason that this canal was built was to drain so that this place don’t flood. In 1960, there was a major hurricane which came through and flooded the zone. And I found like old articles from the Miami Herald that said that four weeks later after this hurricane of Hurricane Donna there was a dairy farm over there on 97th Avenue where the cows up to four weeks later were still swimming. All the land that was once wet became dry so that people could do things there, but when the natural environment enforces its power…it takes us back to reality.
Another place that you can access the C-100 from is called Bill Sadowski Park.
Woah it is hot…I’m sitting in a hot car on a hot day recording this. Hold up. Let me grab some A/C…. (This article is a transcription of an audio recording I created of my extemporaneous responses to about ten questions I wrote and recorded the improvised answers in my car with the engine off ((to eliminate noise)) while parked at WCA 3B adjacent to the Tamiami Trail about a mile west of Krome Ave near the Florida Everglades as part of my 55 minute documentary called Watery Miami which is available on youtube).
A lot of the people that live here (off the C-100) travel up to the city every day and they run things like the government, the media, and all the various sectors of public policy and how it is shaped.
But Palmetto Bay is a pretty enclosed enclave. So, I mean, you just make of that what you will. This canal was built through a process known as dredging. In dredging, every five feet, dynamite is strategically placed to blast open the rock face. That blasted rubble is picked up by heavy metal machinery, and that dredged matter is used over other places, transported for building things like manmade islands. Can you believe that? Check it out, I’m going to break it down to you. If you drop a shovel in the land in Miami you’re going to hit rock almost immediately. That’s..there’s no digging here, ok? There’s barely any digging here. That rock is limestone. The thing about Palmetto Bay is, a lot of people have money. A lot of people have power. And a lot of people have landscapers.
Hey, this is a fertile place. Soon as you cut a blade of grass it’s almost already sprung up with a new one. But basically in Palmetto Bay there’s so many levels of landscaping that people are often using fertilizer and pesticide. What is the role of fertilizer and pesticide in the built environment and how it affects the natural environment? How does it travel? And does it use the same systems of flow that the freshwater does to arrive at the ocean? The answer is yes. Biscayne Bay they say is changing from a seagrass dominated environment into an algae dominated environment. Algae dominated environment? Is that good? No. Algae blocks out the sun. Algae makes it so all the underwater flowers can’t get photosynthesis through the sunlight. Sunlight is the most important aspect of life for an underwater plant or flower. Seagrass is an underwater flower. It’s a flowering plant. That means it’s a plant that grows a flower. That means it buds and procreates. The seagrass meadows are over one million acres in the state of Florida. They’ve been greatly reduced. Greatly reduced. How? And why? Through pollution.
Pollution.
Dirt. Dirty water, dirty dishes. Think about it like that, ok? You going to do your dishes at your house in your kitchen, you got dirty water, you’re gonna have dirty dishes. You got dirty water you’re gonna have dirty fishes. You’re gonna have dirty animals. You’re gonna have dirty plankton. You’re gonna have dirty algae. Everything is gonna be dirty affected by the dirt that’s flowing to it. It resonates through the ecosystem. Pesticide kills the things that you don’t want. Fertilizer grows things that you do want. But these things, with the rainfall which occurs half the year, they should’ve been smart enough to figure it out…septic seepage from the septic tanks that undergird the pollution that flows into the ground water which becomes pollution in the ocean. Septic tanks are a pretty big feature in Florida where you got a pipe coming out of your house that goes into a big metal tank that holds all the poo poo and the pee pee and everything that you flush down your toilet. Every so often, maybe ten or twenty years or so, someone comes around in a big truck with a hose on it and they vacuum all that caca out. Whatever you put down there is gonna end up there. Whatever’s in there is going to end up out there…But guess what, the thing about it is that over decades and century time, that water leaks. That dirty water leaks. That dirty water leaks into the ground. What we see in the suburban built environment is almost a deadly seven venoms of of…uh destruction… Now once again…Whooo. Get a little hit of that window air. Dang. Now you can see why people die in a hot car. I mean that thing is deadly.
Woah. Let me catch some cool air. Catch some cool air right there. Ah startin’ to rain.
Get a couple drops of the rain. Aright back to it, man. There’s a perfect storm that occurs in the suburban zone. A perfect storm of disaster that flows into the bay into the natural environment thus decimating the seagrass that forms the nursery of the sea and is vitally important to very many commercial species which we have to keep in mind if we are ever to care about the future of this which we have on Earth.
Do you get what I’m saying now? Like, this ain’t a joke alright! The water flows from over here.
If that makes sense to you then it shouldn’t make sense. Because we shouldn’t be doing things that shoot ourself in the foot. Imagine going for a walk and before you do that you stab yourself in the foot with a sharp arrow.
That’s not gonna help you walk is it? That’s really not gonna help you get where you’re going.
As a matter of fact, that would be like nailing a shoe to your foot before going and taking a long walk. Putting a nail through your foot to hammer that nail into your shoe is not gonna be the best thing to do. It’s not going to help you and in the so-called long run it’s actually going to really negatively impact you. The other thing that you gotta know about the C-100 canal is that right where it meets the bay there’s a bridge.
This area was called Snowden’s.
It was Snowden’s Country Store. Snowden’s Country Store is one of the earliest features of commercial activity in Dade County. The great metropolis, the megalopolis known as Miami, the greater Miami area…around this area is called Old Florida. Old “Cracker” Florida. Might see Bahamians here, but you’re also gonna see a lot of weird wild wacky white people. There is a lot of weird wacky wild white people in Miami and to be coming down here in the back in the day times they had to be some of the strangest, ruggedest, uh brave people over here. And they joined…for they had to join forces and learn ways to work with the native people. Without the influence of the Bahamas and the native people of the Bahamas, the Bahamian Caribe, and also the African Bahamians and white British Bahamians that people learned how to even do any of the things needed to survive in this land.
Without the Bahamian influence there would be no agriculture. There would be no coontie. There would be no pineapple. There would be no buildings withstanding hurricanes from then until today. Miami has always been a combination of different people from different places working together to create something greater. That includes the native indigenous people. That includes the Caribbean native people.
That includes Black Americans. That includes White Americans. That includes Latin Americans.
Miami is the confluence of Caribbean America, Latin America, White America, and Black America.
A lot of people walked here from Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama, and South Carolina. Even Mississippi as far away as, and they contributed. And we find all this in the lands of the south.
Wake up, rich people. Wake up, Palmetto Bay. What’re you doing?!
I wanted to add to that, I was a free range baby around SW 72 st and 57th Ave. I got a bike at the age of six years old and I was wild in the streets. I was catching the metro bus and the metro rail through all the corners. So I got a deep connection. Maybe not through familial history, or genealogy, or ancestry, but through my very own experience as a youth and how I’ve grown up with it and seen it from many different perspectives.
True Miami-Dade County. Right here on this Old Cutler area. Old Cutler Road. Old Cutler influence of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights that I’m here. And I thank you.
