The Orchid Thief (16 page)

As part of a settlement over the wetlands it destroyed at Cape Coral, GAC donated almost ten thousand acres in the Fakahatchee to the state of Florida; the state then began buying up the privately held Gulf American lots, acre by acre. This land eventually became the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. There are still thousands and thousands of inholdings within the preserve that the state continues to buy, but since most of the lots are less than two acres, there are thousands of individual owners, and each purchase means a slow negotiation with an individual owner who often lives far away. The acquisition project is the most complex, controversial, and litigious of Florida’s land-conservation program. One hundred families did eventually move into Golden Gate Estates. They live in isolated houses without telephones or electricity or city water supplies, and the vacant lots all around them are slowly reverting back to swamp. Many people who bought land in Golden Gate probably never even visited it, and most of them have been happy to sell as soon as the government has offered to buy. Living in Golden Gate appeals to a highly independent individual. Many independent individuals in Golden Gate have mightily resisted the government’s acquisition plans. A while ago, one homesteader declared himself chairman and director of research of the East Collier County Landowners Improvement Committee. The committee’s slogan was “God promises to kill with the sword government men which take the land from widows and fatherless children.”

The grid of Golden Gate streets is still in place. People drag-race on them now and dump trash on them and land airplanes carrying drugs on them and stash smuggled goods
alongside them, and now that the swamp is repossessing the land they also chase bears and panthers across them and go fishing for snapper and needlefish in the drainage canals. Half of the emergency calls to the Collier County fire department are reporting fires on the old Gulf American land. Some of the fires are caused by lightning strikes. The rest are what is called “hunters’ lightning.” These are fires set by deer hunters to burn out a section of woods so that in a few weeks there will be tender new growth on the burned land and the hunters know that new growth is a sure way to attract deer. The only way into the area from the highway is a barely marked road called Miller Road Extension. Collier County doesn’t maintain Miller Road Extension, and left alone the road would be quickly overgrown by weeds and bushes or buried under accumulated trash. But, for years now, some unknown person comes with a bulldozer or a road grader every month or so and clears the road, smashing plants that have crept across it and nosing trash off to the side of the road. The anonymous bulldozer has been nicknamed the Ghost Grader. The property the Ghost Grader clears is no longer known as Golden Gate Estates or Remuda Ranch Grants. Officially, it is now referred to as Collier County Parcel 197, and the people who live nearby just call it the Blocks.

—

A ranger named Mike Owen met me at the Fakahatchee Strand headquarters, and before we went to see the stolen orchids we went for a drive around the Blocks. The roads were chalky and heat-beaten, and hip-high weeds knit an edge along them that shut off almost anything other than a straight-ahead view. The blocks were straight and squared, like blocks in a real suburb, and the roads were wide and white, like suburban streets, and some of the intersections
had street signs with ordinary-sounding street names and stop signs that jutted up out of a mesh of wild pine and salt grass and poison ivy. Driving around the Blocks wasn’t like driving through a jungle—it was like driving through a suburb that had had all its houses and people erased. Every once in a while we passed a shaved-down patch in the thick growth, probably the start of what would have been a driveway that would have led to what would have been somebody’s home. Some of these clearings were dotted with piles of junk—old rusted-out refrigerators missing their doors, a black heap of tires, a lawn chair. In one clearing I saw a pickup truck that looked as if it was operational. The bed of the truck was loaded with a dozen beekeeper boxes, but there was no beekeeper around. Far ahead, on the horizon, miles down the road, I noticed a shimmer, and then the shimmer became a blot and then the blot became a bigger blot and then it became a black sedan that looked as if it was growing rather than moving. In an instant it was in front of us and then in an instant it whooshed past and the road was blank again. It was spooky not to see any other cars or people but it was almost spookier to finally see one—it was like an intruder intruding on an intruder. I opened my window and stuck my head out. There were only a few sounds, and each of them was amplified—the thunking of the ranger’s car, the whirring and whining of invisible insects, the whistle of a bird. It was a weird unquiet stillness, and yet the place had a weird overfull emptiness. It was more ghostly than a ghost town. In a ghost town only the people are missing. Here the buildings were missing, too. It didn’t seem like a peaceful place where nothing ever happened—it was full of the feeling of a million things planned on and never done.

On a culvert over a drainage canal a man was lining up fishing rods and a little boy crouching beside him had his
arm wrist-deep in a bucket of bait. The ranger slowed his car down as we passed them and opened his window. “Hot out here,” he said to the man. Watery waves of heat rippled up from the hood of the car.

“Hot, yes, sir,” the mah said, nodding. The little boy stood up and waved at us with a hand full of worms.

The ranger turned at the next corner so we could start back to headquarters. Every stop sign we passed was punched with dozens of buckshot holes. After a couple of blocks we came upon a Ford Bronco. The driver was a large man with a long black beard. He stopped his Bronco and waved the ranger over. The bearded man was wearing khaki pants and a belt with a shiny buckle but no shirt at all. He was sweating on his forehead and along his collarbone, and his chest looked like damp rising dough. He told the ranger he had just passed a black bear that was being chased across a street by two hound dogs and a man carrying an assault rifle. The ranger had his hand on his gun the whole time the bearded man was talking. He took some notes and then said to the man, “Now, where did you say you saw the bear?”

The man pulled his beard and screwed up his face. After a minute he said, “Honest, sir, it’s kind of hard to describe in this jungle, but I think he was near the intersection of Stewart and De Soto.” It was odd to hear someone using street names to describe a place in a swamp that a bear would run past. It was odder to realize that years ago it was going to be someone’s address.

—

We went back to the preserve headquarters and I got myself ready to go into the swamp on foot. When I’d first walked into the Fakahatchee I hadn’t known what to wear; I just knew that I wanted to cover as much of my body as I could but still avoid getting parboiled. Finally I settled on a longsleeved
shirt, a pair of cotton and Lycra leggings, some tube socks and a pair of cheap sneakers. The outfit actually worked pretty well but it didn’t last long. When I got back to the ranger station at the end of that hike, I grabbed some spare clothes out of my car, ran to the restroom and washed my face for about ten minutes straight, and then stripped off every piece of my swamp outfit and threw it all out. My shirt was soaked with bug repellent and sunscreen, and my leggings were stiff with mud, and my shoes and socks were blackened by the silt I’d walked through in the sinkholes. Anyway, I was so happy to get out of them that I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than to pull everything off and stuff it into the wastebasket. On my way back to my hotel I stopped at a Kmart and stocked up on cheap long-sleeved shirts and leggings and sneakers to use on future walks in the swamp. When I got back to New York everyone I talked to about the hike asked what I wore, and they seemed surprised when I described my outfit. I suppose they expected that I would have worn something more heavy-duty and protective. It would be great if you could walk in a swamp wearing something secure-feeling like chest-high waders or a head-to-toe wet suit, but if you did you would die of heat prostration, and if your waders filled with water you would die of heat prostration and on top of that you would drown. Some of the Fakahatchee rangers wear their Park Service uniforms and regular leather boots in the swamp. I preferred wearing sneakers rather than boots, because even though boots feel safer and more substantial I thought that wearing sneakers would allow me to feel around on the bottom of the sinkholes to see if there were alligators in them or not. This was something Laroche had advised me to do, but when I came upon my first sinkhole I realized that he had never told me what to do if I thought I
had
found an alligator.
The fact is that the swamp is so grabby that even though I was covered from neck to foot I felt stark naked. The water was freezing cold, and mosquitoes sneaked in and out of my shirt by way of my collar and sleeves, and every plant with prickers snatched at my leggings, and the gritty sinkhole muck passed right through my socks and sneakers and stained my ankles and toes. I had mosquito bites on my stomach and my face, and toward the end of that first hike I got so nervous and exhausted that I broke out in hives for the first time in my life.

Mike Owens, the ranger who drove me through the Blocks, was going to drop me off near the big sinkhole lake where some of Laroche’s orchids had been wired up. He said that he was not going to go into the swamp with me—he was going to leave me there because he had some other things to do, and Katherine, the other ranger, was already out near the lake and would walk me in. He mentioned that Katherine might have a few volunteer workers with her who would join us so they could see the stolen orchids too. After I changed into my swamp clothes we drove a couple of miles down the Fakahatchee’s only road. Every mile looked like every other mile to me—profuse and green and impenetrable. After a few minutes we pulled over and parked at a profuse, green, impenetrable-looking spot, and in a moment Katherine emerged from the woods. She was solidly built and had flushed cheeks and curly brown hair that had frizzed into a nimbus around her head. Her ranger uniform was soaking wet up to her waist. Behind her were two huge men, the biggest men I have ever seen, as big as sides of beef, shoulders like sirloin roasts. I had once read that the Skunk Man who supposedly lives in the Fakahatchee is seven feet tall and weighs seven hundred pounds. These huge men were dressed in shapeless pastel prison uniforms and they had
rags wrapped jauntily around their hair. “Come on in,” the ranger said, waving to me. Mike Owens said he’d see me later and got back into his car and drove away.

I stepped off the shoulder of the road into the swamp without looking; if I had looked, I might not have done it, since stepping off a high bank into deep black water is something I can do only if I don’t think about it too much. I sank up to my knees and then over my knees. Bladderwort and pennywort floating on the water surface looped around my legs. The muck on the bottom was soft, but not soft in a pleasant way—it was mushy-soft, like cereal that had been sitting too long in milk. The ranger set off at a clip, and we waded after her in a line—first me, then Giant #1 and then, a few feet behind him, Giant #2. The ranger mentioned the orchids were in a swamp lake that we would be able to walk through because it was deep but not as deep as some lakes in the Fakahatchee. Deep Lake, for instance, drops ninety-seven feet into the ground. We walked for about ten minutes to a spot where the underbrush opened and you couldn’t see through the water to the floor of the swamp. This was the lake. In the middle of the lake were a few pond apple trees, and the ranger beckoned me over so I could see the orchids that she had attached to them. There were several sawed-off sections of logs attached to branches by baling wire. Laroche had removed the orchids by sawing off sections of the tree limbs they had been attached to because he didn’t want to risk hurting them by prying them off the limbs. The rangers got the orchids back after they had been photographed for evidence, and they left them on their limbs and wired the limbs onto pond apple trees. They’d put them in several locations around the swamp. Here there were two clamshell orchids and one butterfly orchid and one ghost. None of the plants were in bloom—they were just small knots of roots and
almond-shaped pseudobulbs, and all but the leafless ghost orchids had light-green tapering leaves. The baling wire was wrapped a couple of times around the trees to hold the limbs securely. It was a crazy-looking concoction, but so far the orchids hadn’t died.

To get a good look at the orchids we had to walk from thigh-high water into waist-high and deeper. It was a good time for me to recite to myself the section of the Fakahatchee Strategic Plan that states, “The preserve attracts visitors with an affinity for totally undeveloped areas, who enjoy strenuous hikes and have no aversion to wading hip-deep in a swamp.” When the four of us were gathered by the tree, the ranger finally introduced me to the giants and said they were in the inmate work-release program of Copeland Road Prison, just down the road from the Fakahatchee—I had passed it on my way in. Both of the men were bashful and spoke in tiny, mumbly voices. After we were introduced I noticed that both of them were carrying three-foot-long machetes. I’m not sure how I hadn’t seen the machetes before that, but maybe it was because the men had been wading behind me most of the way. I hate hiking with convicts carrying machetes. We stood in the lake for a while and every now and then one or the other or both of them would raise their machetes and then smash them into the water with a frightful, squeamish look on their faces. The speed of their swings was ferocious, and the machetes smashing against the water sounded like someone getting spanked. The ranger leaned over and whispered to me that she had given the men the machetes because they were both terrified of snakes and had refused to get into the swamp without some protection. After she gave them the machetes they had agreed to get in, but even heavily armed they were as jumpy as rabbits and stood holding their hands stiff and high above the water. Every
time a bubble would rise to the surface of the lake or a tree would drop a leaf or a bird would peep, the giants and I would panic. When I panicked I froze. When one of the giants panicked he would pop up nervously and then the other one would pop up nervously too, and the water displaced by their combined weight rolled in silky waves across the lake. The cold black water slapped at my belly button every time they would pop up and down. The swamp was hot and hushed except for all the splashing and the smack of the giants’ machetes against the water. You could disappear in a place like this, really disappear, into one of these inky sinkholes or in the warm muck under the thick brush. No one could find you in a place like this once you sank in. Just then I got extremely curious but decided to wait until we were out of the swamp and in a secure government vehicle before I asked the giants what they were in prison for.