of land for at least an hour, not to mention in the path of large vessels. The
safer western channel crossing was rough enough. Stiff winds and choppy
waters pitched the rowboat, its stern and propeller rhythmically out of the
water in a trip of two and a half hours. Finally, ‘‘at Welaka one afternoon
we left the hyacinths swirling leisurely and turned up our home river, the
Ocklawaha,’’ Marjorie wrote. ‘‘I thought in a panic, I shall never be happy
on land again.’’ Yet then, ‘‘when the dry ground was under us, the world no
longer fluid, I found a forgotten loveliness in all the things that have noth-
ing to do with men. Beauty is pervasive, and fills, like perfume, more than
the object that contains it. Because I had known intimately a river, the earth
pulsed under me. The Creek was home, Oleanders were sweet past bear-
ing, and my own shabby fields, weed-tangled, were newly dear. I knew, for
a moment, that the only nightmare is the masochistic human mind.’’
tSo Marjorie returned to Cross Creek slightly battered, a bit older and
wiser, and altogether enchanted once more. That was three-quarters of a
century ago. There is enchantment to be found, still. Beholders are, after
all, various, with idiosyncratic criteria for beauty. Commonly held notions
seem ever to include quiet, purity—a quality of natural cleanliness—and
the possibility of solitude, or something close to that. Well before the end of
the twentieth century, though, hardly a place in the South remained clean
and/or quiet, especially Florida. The world had become noisy with motors
and dirty with smoke from trucks and cars and factories and power plants.
Chemical and sewage spills compromised or ruined water. Public works
to reduce mosquito populations (and create salable plots of land) drained
more than half of the vast wetlands that supplied the source of the St. Johns.
Human populations surged, demanding more forest and wetlands clear-
ance and pavement. Mounting consciousness of earthly degradation, cul-
minating perhaps with Bill McKibben’s announcement of nature’s actual
‘‘death’’ in , cast a grim if not defeatist pall over the latest version of con-
servation, called environmentalism. Enchantment became memory, then,
usually borrowed from a past ever more remote. The present is for disaf-
fected dreamers.
An excellent representative of these is the Florida writer and environ-
mental activist Gail Fishman. Miami-born and lately based in Tallahassee,
where she has worked for the Nature Conservancy, Fishman is the daugh-
ter of a father who loved to drive on weekends. During the late s and
s, then, as a child she knew not only a relatively simple Miami and an
uncluttered Dade County but Keys uncrowded and with coral reefs intact