Randy White - Everglades

In Florida, most gated communities hire security people who look like retired wallpaper salesmen. Minimum-wage guys killing time between visits from the grandchildren.

This one was different. He looked like he spent his off-hours in the gym. Had that hard cop formality which is a form of controlled hostility.

DeAntoni opened his billfold, showing his badge. “I’m here on business.”

The guard looked at the badge; shrugged like it was invisible. “No, sir, you’re not here on business. Not unless someone from management notifies me.”

“Then call someone in management. It’s about one of your deceased members, Geoff Minster. I’m here representing his wife. I can have her call if you want.”

The guard thought for a moment, then said, “Back up and pull over. I don’t want you blocking the gate if a member needs to drive through.”

The gatehouse was sided by high stone walls and an acre or so of landscaped garden, hibiscus, travelers palms, and a life-sized Indian elephant carved of tropical wood next to a fountain. The elephant stood frozen, trunk down as if watering. In front of the elephant, a carved sign read: SAWGRASS A PRIVATE MEMBERSHIP SPORTING COMMUNITY

There was a much smaller sign on the gatehouse wall: OUR SECURITY STAFF IS AUTHORIZED TO CARRY FIREARMS AND AIR TASERS, AND MAY USE LAWFUL FORCE TO INTERCEPT OR DETAIN TRESPASSERS.

As we waited, a new Mercedes convertible pulled up, two middle-aged men in the front. The guard took the phone from his ear long enough to salute, smile and say, “’Morn ing, Mr. Terwilliger!” then touched a button to open the gate.

“Friendly little place,” DeAntoni said, watching. “The guy in the white jungle beanie-I wouldn’t mind slapping him around some. Him and his asshole attitude. What you think, Ford? He looks like a bleeder to me. The kind who stands in front of the mirror with his weight-lifter muscles, but starts to bawl if he gets smacked a couple of times.”

I said, “You’re not smacking anybody and neither am I. That’s not going to get us inside those gates, and it’s not going to help Sally.”

Tomlinson told him, “Doc’s embraced a policy of total nonviolence, which is a major spiritual breakthrough. We’ve discussed it. He’s trying to grow as a human being.”

Watching the guard walk toward us, DeAntoni said, “Oh yeah? Then explain why my beezer’s the size of a turnip,” touching his swollen nose gingerly.

The guard came out, leaned toward the window and handed DeAntoni a card. “Send a fax to this number, stating exactly who you want to interview-we need specific names to make a request-and your reasons for visiting Sawgrass. The office will get back with you within a week to ten days. You know, on whether we can provide assistance.”

In a flat voice, DeAntoni said, “‘A week to ten days.’”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Look, Mac, all I want to do is go to the restaurant, talk to a few people, maybe find someone who knew the late Geoff Minster. It’s not like we’re gonna filch the fucking silver-ware-”

I put my hand on DeAntoni’s arm, leaning across, and said to the guard, “Thanks. We’re leaving now.”

The guard said, “That’s right, sir. You are. ”

Tomlinson said, “Very, very cool. I don’t just like the idea, I love it.”

He said it in reply to DeAntoni’s suggestion that we park the Lincoln down one of the old logging roads, and sneak onto the property on foot.

DeAntoni said, “Except for Mister Tight-Ass, nobody in there’s gonna know we’re not friends of members, or maybe just scoping out real estate. Rent-a-cops, Mac. They really bust my balls.”

He sounded insulted.

I wasn’t as enthusiastic. I’ve spent a significant portion of my life working in places I was not supposed to be; places where I would have been shot-or worse-if discovered. Breaching security, compromising security systems, is demanding work.

I was once competent. No longer. Techniques change along with technology. You don’t probe a guarded position on impulse. It’s something to be researched and planned. Trespassing, like pyromania, is a word I associate with amateurs.

On the other hand, there wasn’t much risk. If we got caught poking around, asking questions about a dead member-and we almost certainly would get caught if we starting asking questions-what’s the worst they could do? Call the police?

More likely, they’d just tell us to get the hell off the grounds, and that’d be that. In the meantime, we might find a friend or two of the missing man. Having a member agree to talk to us would certainly mitigate matters with local security.

So I told DeAntoni, okay, pull up the road, and we’d work our way back on foot.

It was an instructive decision.

Sawgrass, the exclusive community, was a shaded garden of cypress, bromeliads and swamp maple. The wall that cosseted it was almost always hidden by trees. It followed the roadway for another mile or so before angling back into the shadows of its western boundary.

That’s where the wall ended. It is also where the tree line ended, and a new development project began.

Sally’d told us about it. Bhagwan Shiva’s theme community for gamblers: a self-contained city that adjoined Indian reservation land where he wanted to build casinos. Several thousand housing units plus a city center, restaurants, recreation centers, all designed to attract people from middle-income brackets; people with enough money to gamble, but not wealthy enough to buy property in Sawgrass.

He was having a lot of permitting problems, Sally’d told us.

From the road, though, construction seemed to be well underway, permits or no permits-although destruction seemed a more accurate term. There were several gated, dirt access roads, with modular offices, plastic Porta-Johns, temporary power poles. At each, were signs that read:

FUTURE HOME OF CASINO LAKES, AN EXCLUSIVE PLANNED COMMUNITY. PRECONSTRUCTION PRICES AVAILABLE.

The crews weren’t working on this Saturday morning. Hadn’t been working for several weeks, by the looks of things. The first stage of the operation, however, seemed complete. They’d brought in a fleet of bulldozers and scraped the earth bare. Several hundred acres of black earth were turning gray in the morning sun. Only a few bald cypresses out there were left standing, isolated, sculptured like bonsai trees on a massive desert plain.

The cypress is an interesting, exotic-looking tree, with its connected, tubular base, bulbous knees and leaves as delicate as oriental lace. They grow in distinctive settings: on islands of elevated terrain in sawgrass marshes where, as a community of many hundreds of trees-even thousands of trees-they form a characteristic dome. Green rotundas of shadow out on the sawgrass horizon.

Cypress also grows along floodplains on long, silver strands that can be miles long. South Florida’s interior was once an uninterrupted canopy of cypress domes and strands. Up until the late 1940s, they comprised America’s last virgin stand of bald cypress and pond cypress: trees well over a hundred feet tall and several centuries old.

At the end of World War II, though, the big lumber companies arrived in Florida, motivated by a postwar construction frenzy that was hungry for building material. Dried and milled, cypress is a handsome conifer wood that is insect-and rot-resistant-perfect for houses. Rail lines were built, spur lines added; labor was imported. It took the companies nine years to girdle, bleed and cut an epochal forest that had been the centerpiece of an ecosystem that dated back to the Pleistocene. Many thousands of loaded freight cars; many millions of board feet.

There’re still lots of small cypress trees in the ’Glades. But big cypresses, the old giants are rare. In this area, though, the loggers had missed a few. Now those few trees stood alone on the bulldozed plain, solitary dinosaurs revealed, naked in this new century.