Randy White - Everglades

“So what’s going to happen when they cover half the original land mass with the whole, original amount of flowing water? They’re going to flood us out, that’s what. When water reduces the amount of uplands habitat, where’re the bear, the deer, the people-where’re we supposed to go. Miami?

“This has been one of the driest winters ever, but the water’s already come up so much here that some of the trees are getting root rot. Our island’s shrinking.”

She added, “This place is delicate. The ’Glades has spent the last hundred years adapting to change, evolving, surviving. Now they want the area to go through the whole process again, but in reverse.” Sounding emotional for the first time, she added, “Anything as beautiful as the Everglades has to be fragile. Like a butterfly.”

Tomlinson was listening to her, not agreeing but not disagreeing, either. In a soft voice, he said, “Everglades. Yes, this place is the real Magic Kingdom.”

The man driving the white pickup truck with the skid tank in back didn’t want us to see his face.

My interpretation. Something about the way he behaved when Billie called out to him, “Hey, mister! Mind if I ask what’re you doing down there?”

She startled him. Made him jump. He didn’t expect anyone to come walking up out of the sawgrass the way we did. Ninety-nine percent of the people, they’ll look around when surprised.

Not this guy.

He was about fifty yards away and slightly below us. He stiffened at the sound of her voice. Paused as if thinking about what to do. Then he turned away from us, his face partially hidden by an open hand as he waved, maybe trying to appear friendly, but maybe trying to shield himself, too.

Still waving, he called back a gruff, “Howdy!”

My second assessment: He was trying to disguise his voice.

I watched the man duck slightly, keeping the truck between us and himself. He didn’t rush, kept it calm, but he didn’t waste any time opening the driver’s-side door and getting in.

Billie was walking fast toward the access road. Then she began to trot as the truck pulled away. I jogged along with her, for no other reason than the man’s behavior did not seem appropriate for the situation.

She was motioning at the driver, calling for him to stop. But he didn’t. When he passed within fifteen yards or so of us, he waved again, palm open-shielding his face once more.

“Asshole,” Billie said. She was looking at the truck as it bounced away. “And wouldn’t you know: There’s mud on his license plate.”

A few minutes later, the four of us were going over the area where the truck had been parked.

Yes, it was an abandoned limestone quarry, or “barrow pit”; limestone dredged to built roads. The pit was rocky, honeycombed with holes.

I know enough about Florida geology to recognize that this area would be described as a karst formation. A karst is a limestone area that consists of sinkholes and abrupt ridges-some as high as fifteen or twenty feet above sea level.

For millions of years, naturally acidic rain and groundwater flowed through these limestone karsts, dissolving conduits and caverns out of rock. Some plates of limestone fell, some rose. Thus the unusual elevation.

This quarry had been dug into the side of a high ridge. Searching around at the bottom of it, we found a couple of daubs of white goo that smelled like fuel oil-insecticide, DeAntoni suggested. Nothing more until Billie held up a large, empty fertilizer bag, and said, “Look at this. He must be one of the golf course maintenance guys. Probably came out here to get away from his supervisor, sneaking in a nap.”

She told us her primary worry was that the guy had been dumping trash. She said the Sawgrass staff did that a lot-dumped their junk on Indian property. Old refrigerators, air conditioners, broken bedding and wallboard-anything too bulky or heavy to drive to the county dump.

She said she’d complained to Jerry Singh, but got a sense of indifference behind his promise to speak with his staff. Plus, it didn’t stop. They kept right on dumping.

She told us she thought Singh was secretly encouraging the dumping for the same reason he was encouraging his staff to bully the local Indians. If the Egret Seminoles agreed to Shiva’s terms, the Seminole corporate board would have the power to hire and fire. It would be a way for the Indians to rid the area of the Ashram’s thugs.

Tomlinson asked, “Then why would you want to go into the casino business with someone like Shiva? I’ve got to be right up front with you. I think the guy’s a slime.”

She answered. “I don’t want to go into the casino business with him. With Geoff involved, it might’ve been a different story. I doubt it, but at least there was a possibility. Now there’s not a chance-as far as I’m concerned, anyway.”

“Then why deal with him?”

She thought for a moment, perhaps calculating how honest she should be. Finally, she said, “I’m dealing with him for a real simple reason. We want his land. I want his land. Not for a housing development or anything like that. I want to replant it. Make it part of our home again. But just because I was elected tribal chair, that doesn’t mean I make the final decision.”

She explained that the Egret Seminoles as a tribe were still considering the casino proposal because Shiva had, in her opinion, conned her five older aunts and uncles. Billie said that, as chairman, she could vote only in the event of a tie. So Shiva had effectively captured the interests of a majority of corporate members on a voting board of eight.

She told us, “A year back, Singh sent a limo and drove us all to his Palm Beach Ashram. He gave us the red-carpet treatment; anything we wanted. What impressed my aunts and uncles, though, was his office. On his office walls, he’s got these carvings of pre-Columbian masks and totems. They were copies of Calusa masks. Masks that almost no one knows about.

“Singh acted surprised when my uncle identified them. It was like Jerry had no idea what they were. He claimed to have carved the masks himself because the images kept coming to him night after night in his dreams. Jerry told us he was a mystic, and sometimes received messages that he didn’t always understand right away. Then he told my aunts and uncles that maybe the masks-the fact that he saw them in his dreams-were a positive sign about the casino. ”

DeAntoni said, “Did they believe him?”

“I think they’d like to believe him. I love my relatives, but they grew up in poverty. I think they’d like a reason to justify voting for the casinos, and have some money for once. So, they’re still waiting to decide.”

“Waiting for what?”

“Shiva promised them another sign. A more powerful sign. Maybe someday I’ll tell you what he promised them he’d do-it’s actually kind of funny. It’ll never happen, of course. So what I’ve got to do is figure out how to get Shiva’s land without agreeing to let him build casinos.”

As she said that, she handed the bag she’d found to Tomlinson, and he held it up for me to see. It was the industrial variety; triple-thick brown paper. Printing on the outside said that it had contained fifty pounds of ammonium nitrate commercial-grade fertilizer, manufactured by Chem-A-World Products, Bucyrus, Ohio.

As I looked at the bag, I said, “Is anyone doing any blasting around here?”

She said, “No. In the Everglades? They’d never allow it. They used to back when they were digging barrow pits, but not now.”

As I asked Billie if ammonium nitrate was a fertilizer commonly used by golf courses, DeAntoni’s cell phone began to ring.

She shrugged- I don’t know -as Frank put the phone to his ear and, after listening a moment, said, “Speak of the devil.”