Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

If Chiles doesn't do something, the Everglades Forever Act is doomed to be another hollow promise. They'll need to rename it Big Sugar Forever.

Masterpiece foretold a legacy May 17, 1998

It was the first Friday this century that the Everglades awoke without Marjory Stoneman Douglas. In the bay where the great river empties, the sun rose vermillion over the Calusa Keys and hung there fixed like some holy ornament, ember-bright in a lavender rim of haze.

Near Whipray Basin an osprey enthroned on a wooden stake flared its wings and scanned the shallows for breakfast. Snowy egrets and blue herons high-stepped grassy banks in search of shrimp. Lemon sharks and spinners prowled the channels.

Closer to the mainland, at a place called Snake Bight, lives a flock of rare wild flamingos, pink and skittish confetti in the mangroves. Not far away a creek mouth is patrolled by several lean alligators and a single plump crocodile. At times the mullet run so thick that the water froths with predation.

Such spectacular eruptions of life and death—all flowing from one river that's a choking wisp of its old self; a river that by every scientific measure is dying itself. It might have been dead already, dried up and perhaps even plowed, were it not for the ardor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

You know about her book; a monumental book, The Everglades: River of Grass. But how many important books are published, acclaimed and then forgotten? For Douglas, her masterpiece wasn't the culmination of a life's work, but the beginning.

The book came out in November, 1947, a month before the dedication of Everglades National Park. What a park, too, the entire lush tip of the Florida peninsula, preserved forever! How easy it would have been for Douglas and her cohorts to congratulate themselves and let it end there, with that grand achievement.

But she was unlike many journalists. She owned a grown-up attention span. Even after the book became celebrated she remained not only intrigued by her subject, but passionate about it.

And she knew from science and common sense that the park alone wasn't enough, and would in fact be reduced to baked tundra and slime ponds if the rest of the Everglades was not similarly protected. She kept writing books, of course, but she also sent letters and made speeches and generally raised hell.

Long crucial years went by when not enough folks took notice, particularly those in Tallahassee and Washington. Meanwhile, the Everglades went from fire to flood to drought, and more and more of its water was siphoned for new cities, subdivisions and farms.

Douglas was discouraged, but never beaten. The older she got, the stronger and more insistent her voice became. Finally in the '705, when water woes began to jeopardize development, politicians discovered the Everglades.

And here's what they learned: A broad and avid constituency already existed, thanks to some blunt-spoken, floppy-hatted old woman who wrote a book a long time ago. Lots of people, it seemed, already cared about the Everglades. They wanted very much to save it.

So suddenly every Tom, Dick, and Corner who ran for office in Florida was waxing lyrical about Mrs. Douglas' river of grass. In shirtsleeves they pilgrimmed to Coconut Grove for a prized private audience and, if they were lucky, a photograph.

Because a photograph with the famous lady herself was worth votes. This they'd figured out, these genius politicians: People really loved those Everglades. How about that?

Douglas, naturally, used such occasions to make plain her skepticism. Do more, she would say. Do it faster. Being an icon was tolerable only because she could be an icon with teeth.

So part of her must have been pleased, after half a century of gnashing, when billions of dollars finally were pledged to fix the whole works, from Lake Okeechobee to the Ten Thousand Islands.

Can they be "restored?" Impossible. Patched up, cleaned up, re-jiggered—maybe. Shamefully little has been done so far, but Douglas leaves vocal legions who promise to keep the heat on.

She wasn't a misty-eyed dreamer but a wary realist. She understood the slagpit of politics, and what was needed to make a ripple. And she would not have continued fighting to the age of 109 if she'd believed the cause was lost.

Undoubtedly she would have found pleasure in the warmth of Friday's teasing sunrise over Florida Bay, and in the skittering baitfish and aristocratic wading birds and all-embracing solitude. But she'd also have reminded us that what we were seeing, no matter how singularly exquisite, was but a waning shadow of what existed not so long ago, in the slow blink of earth-time.