When you are travelling in Ecuador, there’s no good reason to read Carl Hiaasen’s “Stormy Weather,” a dark and humorous novel that, like all his books partially takes place in the Everglades, which are the subject of today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on December 5, 1947.
But that’s what I did in 2011 (back in the “before times” when you could easily make such trips.) I hadn’t brought the book with me. Rather, I picked up at an inn after I had finishing the book I’d brought to me understand the country where my daughter, who was travelling with us, had been studying for several months. (Or maybe I decided I wasn’t interested in or engaged by one of the books I had brought with, I can’t remember).
One the many things I love about travelling is how the “running out of things to read problems” often leads me to unexpectedly wonderful books. One long-ago summer at the AMC’s family camp on Echo Lake in Maine I was engrossed in Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny.” At a lake house in Maine two years ago, I re-read and (and took much more from) Peter Mathieson’s “The Snow Leopard.” Earlier that summer, in a different lake house, I immersed myself in Joseph Monninger’s “Eternal on the Water,” which provided a wonderful wedding toast that I used later that year at the wedding of a man we’ve known since he was born.
In Ecuador, I immediately was hooked by Hiaasen. As Neil Nyren wrote on the CrimeReads website, Hiaasen’s books “are all set in Florida, because of course they are….It is a place utterly unique in both its natural beauty and its level of venality. ‘Every pillhead fugitive felon in America winds up in Florida eventually,’ muses a detective in Double Whammy (1987). ‘The Human Sludge Factor-it all drops to the South.'”
He adds: “Another detective in Skinny Dip (2004), who is originally from Minnesota, concurs,” noting that in the upper Midwest “the crimes were typically forthright and obvious, ignited by common greed, lust or alcohol. Florida was more complicated and extreme, and nothing could be assumed. Every scheming shithead in America turned up here sooner or later, such were the opportunities for predators.'” And, Nyren concludes, there’s “a crooked (and entirely uncredentialed) plastic surgeon in Skin Tight (1989),” who gloats: “‘One of the wondrous things about Florida was the climate of unabashed corruption. There was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you.'”
As in most of Hiaasen’s books, the Everglades, a fragile wetland ecosystem that once stretched across four million acres, play a major role in “Stormy Weather.” The area has been under assault since the late 19th century, when newly arrived white settlers began building canals that made it possible to grow sugar and later to build homes on the recently drained wetlands but, in doing so, greatly damaged the area’s fragile ecosystem. This led to efforts to preserve and protect at least some of the area, which culminated in December 1947 with the dedication of the Everglades National Park.
The dedication occurred one day after the stamp was released and about a month after the publication of “The Everglades: River of Grass,” the seminal book by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. “There are no other Everglades in the world,” the book famously opens. In the Everglades, Douglas lyrically notes, “the miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.”
She also writes: “The Everglades at their greatest concentration [is] a world of nothing but saw grass. Nothing seems to live here but a few insects, hawks, working a few acres, buzzards soaring against the piled snow of a cloud, a heron flying its far solitary line.” But, in fact, many things live in the Everglades. The park, for example, is the most significant breeding ground for tropical wading birds in North America; contains the largest mangrove ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere; is home to about 350 species of birds, 300 species of fresh and saltwater fish, 40 species of mammals, and 50 species of reptiles; and provides runoffs needed to recharge the aquifer that provides most of South Florida’s drinking water.
Stoneman warned – and Hiaasen continues to warn—that if nothing is done to protect it, the Everglades will be lost to some of the worst forces in America. “In all those years of talk and excitement about drainage, the only argument was a schoolboy’s logic,” Stoneman wrote. “The drainage of the Everglades would be a Great Thing. Americans did Great Things. Therefore Americans would drain the Everglades. Beyond that-to the intricate and subtle relation of soil, of fresh water and evaporation, and of runoff and salt intrusion, and all the consequences of disturbing the fine balance nature had set up in the past four thousand years-no one knew enough to look. They saw the Everglades no longer as a vast expanse of saw grass and water, but as a dream, a mirage of riches that many men would follow to their ruin.”
In 1969 when she was 79, Douglas founded Friends of the Everglades to fight a proposed jetport. A lifelong activist who also fought for women’s rights and adequate housing for Black residents of Miami, Douglas had a clear sense of what was needed in this and other fights.
“Don’t think it is enough to attend meetings and sit there like a lump,” she advised. “…It is better to address envelopes than to attend foolish meetings. It is better to study than act too quickly. But it is best to be ready to act intelligently when the appropriate opportunity arises…without over-emotion, always from sound preparation and knowledge. Be a nuisance where it counts, but don’t be a bore at any time…Do your part to inform and stimulate the public to join your action….Be depressed, discouraged and disappointed at failure and the disheartening effects of ignorance, greed, corruption and bad politics – but never give up.”
Douglas died in 1998 but Hiaasen, who published another novel that features the Everglades earlier this year, continues to be a strong advocate for the Everglades, which, he notes on his website, “continue to be strangled by pollution, overdevelopment and misguided flood-control policies.”
Be well, stay safe, don’t give up, fight for justice, and work for peace.