Driving home from Marco Island along the Tamiami Trail, out of the 10,000 Islands’ bottomless salad bar, one-note symphony of the mangrove forest, Devonian green, and then the giraffe-colored grasslands of winter in South Florida, palmettos and sawgrass beneath a benevolent sky, devotional blue, then the nature boardwalk at Fakahatchee Strand, statuesque cypresses among the few uncut survivors, wild royal palm, mossy live oak, poplar oak,
and the swamp shrubs knee-deep in water,
pond apple and pop ash and wild coffee,
sword fern, alligator flag,
and we see:
buzzards perched on the lowest branches, ornery and grotesque
woodstork high up a dead limb
hurricane-damaged nest of the bald eagles repaired for new fledglings
some smaller birds, no positive ID
a raccoon scrubbing its front paws fastidiously in the muck
small alligators in repose among the water lilies
ten-foot alligator sunning on a log
“Well,” says Jackson, “that’s a big alligator.”
Onward.
Crowded with German tourists no stop for lunch at Joanie’s Blue Crab too bad.
Clyde Butcher’s photo gallery festooned with holiday lights, mostly empty, the boys tossing rocks in the pond.
Almost home, approaching Miami, just beyond the suburban perimeter we pull in to the Native American Arts Festival at the Miccosukee reservation: blue-raspberry Sno-Kones and pan-Amerindian handicrafts from Bolivian panpipes to Navajo blankets, gimcrack bows and arrows, dryfrond dolls in Seminole patchwork, and Johnny Cypress in a Santa Claus hat wrestling alligators in a concrete tank, the ancient manifestation of their diamond-black bodies, imperious visitors from the Age of Reptiles—
three small girls kicking a purple ball in the gravel,
oily smell of fry bread, boiled corn,
at the bandstand a performance by Klingit dancers from Alaska in dark mantles beaded with clan symbols, raven and eagle and coho salmon, bear and orca and the lovebirds, which is the eagle and the raven, explains the regal, delicate-voiced dance master, softly laughing in the clicking glottals and tongue-popping vocables of his native speech,
because in the old days those clans had to marry each other,
but nowadays we marry whoever we want,
but the young ladies asked me not to say that
cuz they’re getting too many proposals after the show!—
as I notice just beyond the stage’s half-painted backdrop the vast southern sweep of the grasslands commence, the Everglades, immediate and grave and theatrical, like a set of impossible dimension suspended in the wings,
and this next dance is a wedding dance,
and the song is a lovesong,
I can’t teach it all to you, but the first line, in Klingit, goes:
the world has flooded over me.