Dessie womaned the outboard, whistling and requesting directions.
Marjorie sat toward the bow with her compass and Coast and Geodetic Sur-
vey chart of the river. Her first bad news, from the chart, was that there
would be no ‘‘lights, beacons nor buoys for at least a hundred miles.’’ A
kindly fisherman and his wife, from their shack leaning over the river-
bank, pointed downriver and named a certain tree that would guide them
to the proper channel. (The fisherman also asked them to send him a post-
card when they arrived safely at home, so he might stop worrying about
two women in the wilderness.) But they could not find the tree and were
soon lost in a maze of water hyacinths. Trying one opening after another,
they found nothing but false channels. Finally they turned off the motor,
drifted, and felt and watched the river for definite motion. This tactic, and
Marjorie’s dogged persistence with her compass, led to the true channel, at
last. Marjorie had navigated Puzzle Lake—all the while thinking they were
on Lake Harney.
The puzzle-maker was the hyacinths. The women were not charmed by
drifting, dividing, recombining islands of hyacinths, as William Bartram
had been by islands ofPistia, or ‘‘watterlettuce.’’ Water lettuce itself was
probably an introduction, brought to the St. Johns by European ships long
before . It was regarded as a hazard to navigation and a threat to the
river’s quality, too, since rottingPistiafouled sandy shores and the river’s
bottom. Water hyacinth was a more recent introduction, made foolishly
for aesthetic effect. In Mrs. W. F. Fuller, Brooklyn-born but a resident
of Edgewater, Florida, attended the Cotton Exposition in New Orleans and
came home with souvenirs: a few filched clippings of water hyacinth. By the
St. Johns once more, she set the hyacinths in her fish pond. Soon spikes of
stunning lavender flowers appeared. Mrs. Fuller so loved the effect in her
pond that she set more hyacinth into the river in front of her house. The
rest, as it is said, is the history of yet another disaster of unintended conse-
quences. By water hyacinth was universally condemned as a pest, and
a century later the editor of Jacksonville’s principal newspaper demanded
the plant’s extermination. During the s, hydrilla, yet another aquatic
floater, got into the St. Johns.
Back in , meanwhile, Marjorie and Dessie plowed through and
around hyacinth islands not only in the puzzling upper reaches of the river
but past Sanford and through Lake George and beyond, where yachts, tug-
boats, and large ships negotiated the great plant drifts. Neither woman
complained. To Marjorie, the passage through ‘‘Hyacinth Drift’’ (the name
ofastoryinScribner’s Magazinelater in , then a chapter inCross Creek)