The Orchid Thief (5 page)

The reservation is midway between Laroche’s house and the American Orchid Society headquarters, on a cube of land
a few miles west of I-95. People driving by might not realize they are on tribal land. The only hint is a few tax-free tribal smoke shops and tribal gas stations and the low gray Seminole casino that takes up an entire block. From the road you can’t see the tribe headquarters or the rodeo arena or the blocks of neat white reservation houses where most tribe members live. I ended up at the reservation many times during my trips to Florida, and every time I almost accidentally passed it by.

I was developing mixed feeling about spending time with Laroche. I didn’t enjoy driving with him but I did enjoy hearing his version of his life. We weren’t natural friends. He struck me as the late-sleeping, heavy-smoking, junk-food-eating, law-bending type, whereas I am not, but I am the sort of person who finds his sort of person engaging. Many things he said were incredible or staggering or cracked or improbable, but they were never boring. The current of his mind and behavior was more riptide than rivulet. I didn’t care all that much whether what he said was true or not; I just found the flow irresistible. That day I wanted to get a tour of the nursery and he had promised that was what he would give me, but when I arrived he was waiting near the nursery’s front gate and said that it was very important that we leave immediately because there was something he absolutely had to do. I parked and got into his van and asked him where the fire was. He snorted at me and said that he needed to go visit a friend he’d given some plants to a few years earlier because he had just decided, based on nothing in particular, that he wanted to repossess the plants.

We drove off, and he started talking about his orchid plans to me, and then suddenly he pulled over onto the shoulder of the road under a palm, put the van in neutral, and hauled on the hand brake. He patted himself down for cigarettes and
then dug around under his seat and at last unfolded with a triumphant grin on his face and a crushed pack of Marlboros in his hand. His match hissed. The palm fronds made scratchy sounds on the roof of the van. “Look,” he said at last, “I don’t think you ought to have a bunch of Indians just running through the Fakahatchee pulling up plants. I mean, someone like Buster—well, Buster’s pretty belligerent. In the meantime, though,
someone
is going to figure out how to benefit from the law the way it is now and I just figured it might as well be me.” He shifted in his seat and leaned back against the window. His knees bracketed the steering wheel. He had the longest, skinniest lap I think I have ever seen. “I figured we’d get what we needed out of the swamp and then the legislature would change the laws. That’s what I wanted to say in court: The state needs to
protect
itself. I’m working for the Seminoles but I’m really on the side of the plants. Is what I did ethical? I don’t know. I’m a shrewd bastard. I could be a great criminal. I could be a great con man, but it’s more interesting to live your life within the confines of the law. It’s more challenging to do what you want but try to do it so you can justify it. People look at what I do and think, Is that moral? Is that right? Well, isn’t every great thing the result of that kind of struggle? Look at something like atomic energy. It can be diabolic or it can be a blessing. Evil or good. Well, that’s where the give is—at the edge of ethics. And that’s
exactly
where I like to live.”

He started the van and drove down the block into the parking lot of a nursery. Laroche said the owner of the nursery was a man he met when he and his wife still owned the Bromeliad Tree. He mentioned that the man was gay. “You don’t have any problems with homosexuals, do you?” he asked me.

“Of course not,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“I just needed to check,” he said. “Because whatever your personal issues are, when you’re in the plant business you realize that gay people
are
your friends.”

After the hurricane Laroche hadn’t had anywhere to keep his few remaining plants and he had no stomach for trying to care for them, so he had given them to the nursery owner. None of the plants were orchids—those had all died; they were mostly hoyas, a species of plant with tough, rubbery leaves and long, loopy vines. Laroche hadn’t been especially fond of the hoyas back then and he wasn’t especially fond of them now, but for some reason he had decided that he wanted the plants back. He seemed to think there was nothing wrong with taking them. We got out of the van and walked down a crunchy gravel path to a shadehouse. Along the path there were enormous tropical trees with pimply bark and flowers the color of bubble gum, the kind of trees you would draw in a tropical cartoon. The hoyas were hanging by themselves in a small shadehouse with a padlock on the door, and for a moment I wondered if the nursery owner had ever worried that Laroche might someday come back for them. We waited next to the shadehouse looking in at the hoyas and smacking mosquitoes. The plants were in pots suspended from the ceiling. The tips of the vines dusted the floor. “They were pretty good plants to begin with,” Laroche said. “It looks like he’s kept them happy.” It had gotten dopey and warm, an afternoon with a lazy pace, and the light in and around the greenhouses was peculiar and still, as if it were captured inside a bubble, and all the sounds—the crackling of the gravel paths, the mumbling of leaves in the wind, the squeak of doors, the abstract tropical animal sounds of ticking and cheeping and crying—all the sounds were clear but blunted, like sounds inside a covered bowl. I don’t know how long we just stood there before the nursery owner drove up in
one of those little golf carts that nurserymen use to survey their property. When he saw Laroche he looked mildly pleased. “Well, John,” he said. “My goodness, if it isn’t John.” He turned off the cart, cracked a few of his knuckles, and stepped out. He was a bald, muscular guy with a pruned beard and a cashew-colored tan. Laroche said hello and that the nursery looked terrific and that I was hanging around because I was writing a book about him. The nursery owner looked alarmed and said he didn’t want his name in any book about Laroche. Laroche chuckled and then motioned toward the plants and said that for sentimental reasons he wanted to visit them. The man fished around on a key ring and then unlocked the shadehouse. A toucan sitting on a perch near the door glared at us with a yellow eye and then without opening its beak it yelled like a jackhammer. Laroche stepped into the shadehouse and twirled one of the long hoya vines. “By the way,” he said, “I’m here to get my plants back. I’ll even buy them back or whatever.”

“Not interested,” the owner said, stroking a leaf.

“I’ve come back for them,” Laroche repeated. “Hey, come on, buddy.”

The man stroked another leaf and then said, “No, John. I love them now. At this point they’re really mine, not yours.”

They quarreled for a few minutes. Finally Laroche persuaded him to give him some cuttings in a couple of months, and that seemed to satisfy both of them. We left the shadehouse and walked through another one that smelled like ripe bananas. The nursery owner petted each plant as we passed. “Hey, John,” he said. “You know, I have hardly any orchids anymore. You know, I decided that orchid people are too crazy. They come here and buy an orchid and they kill it. Come, buy, kill. I can’t stand it. Fern people are almost worse, but the orchid people are too—oh, you know. They
think they’re superior.” He looked at Laroche. “You collecting anything now, John?”

“Nah,” Laroche said. “I don’t want to collect anything for myself right now. I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I’ll see something and then suddenly I get that
feeling
. It’s like I can’t just have something—I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it.” He shook his head and scuffed up some gravel. “You know, I’ll see something, just
anything
, and I can’t help but thinking to myself, Well, Jesus Christ, now
that’s
interesting! Jesus, I’ll bet you could find a
lot
of those.”

You would have to want something very badly to go looking for it in the Fakahatchee Strand. The Fakahatchee is a preserve of sixty-three thousand coastal lowland acres in the southwestern corner of Florida, about twenty-five miles south of Naples, in that part of Collier County where satiny lawns and golf courses give way to an ocean of saw grass with edges as sharp as scythes. Part of the Fakahatchee is deep swamp, part is cypress stands, part is wet woods, part is estuarine tidal marsh, and part is parched prairie. The limestone underneath it is six million years old and is capped with hard rock and sand, silt and shell marls, and a grayish-greenish clay. Overall, the Fakahatchee is as flat as a cracker. Ditches and dents fill up fast with oozing groundwater. The woods are dense and lightless. In the open stretches the land unrolls like a smooth grass mat and even small bumps and wrinkles are easy to see. Most of the land is at an elevation of only five or ten feet, and it slopes millimeter by millimeter until it is dead even with the
sea. The Fakahatchee has a particular strange and exceptional beauty. The grass prairies in sunlight look like yards of raw silk. The tall, straight palm trunks and the tall, straight cypress trunks shoot up out of the flat land like geysers. It is beautiful the way a Persian carpet is beautiful—thick, intricate, lush, almost monotonous in its richness.

People live in the Fakahatchee and around it, but it is an unmistakably inhospitable place. In 1872 a surveyor made this entry in his field notes: “A pond, surrounded by bay and cypress swamp, impracticable. Pond full of monstrous alligators. Counted fifty and stopped.” In fact, the hours I spent in the Fakahatchee retracing Laroche’s footsteps were probably the most miserable I have spent in my entire life. The swampy part of the Fakahatchee is hot and wet and buggy and full of cottonmouth snakes and diamondback rattlers and alligators and snapping turtles and poisonous plants and wild hogs and things that stick into you and on you and fly into your nose and eyes. Crossing the swamp
is
a battle. You can walk through about as easily as you could walk through a car wash. The sinkholes are filled with as much as seven feet of standing water, and around them the air has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet. Sides of trees look sweaty. Leaves are slick from the humidity. The mud sucks your feet and tries to keep ahold of them; if it fails it will settle for your shoes. The water in the swamp is stained black with tannin from the bark of cypress trees that is so corrosive it can cure leather. Whatever isn’t wet in the Fakahatchee is blasted. The sun pounds the treeless prairies. The grass gets so dry that the friction from a car can set it on fire, and the burning grass can engulf the car in flames. The Fakahatchee used to be littered with burned-up cars that had been abandoned by panfried adventurers—a botanist who traveled through in the 1940s recalled in an interview that he was most impressed
by the area’s variety of squirrels and the number of charred Model T’s. The swamp’s stillness and darkness and thickness can rattle your nerves. In 1885 a sailor on a plume-collecting expedition wrote in his diary: “The place looked wild and lonely. About three o’clock it seemed to get on Henry’s nerves and we saw him crying, he could not tell us why he was just plain scared.”

Spooky places are usually full of death, but the Fakahatchee is crazy with living things. Birders used to come from as far away as Cuba and leave with enough plumes to decorate thousands of ladies’ hats; in the 1800s one group of birders also took home eight tons of birds’ eggs. One turn-of-the-century traveler wrote that on his journey he found the swamp’s abundance marvelous—he caught two hundred pounds of lobsters, which he ate for breakfasts, and stumbled across a rookery where he gathered “quite a supply of cormorant and blue heron eggs, with which I intend to make omelets.” That night he had a dinner of a fried blue heron and a cabbage-palm heart. In the Fakahatchee there used to be a carpet of lubber grasshoppers so deep that it made driving hazardous, and so many orchids that visitors described their heavy sweet smell as nauseating. On my first walk in the swamp I saw strap lilies and water willows and sumac and bladderwort, and resurrection ferns springing out of a fallen dead tree; I saw oaks and pines and cypress and pop ash and beauty-berry and elderberry and yellow-eyed grass and camphor weed. When I walked in, an owl gave me a lordly look, and when I walked out three tiny alligators skittered across my path. I wandered into a nook in the swamp that was girdled with tall cypress. The rangers call this nook the Cathedral. I closed my eyes and stood in the stillness for a moment hardly breathing, and when I opened my eyes and looked up I saw dozens of bromeliad plants roosting in the
branches of almost every tree I could see. The bromeliads were bright red and green and shaped like fright wigs. Some were spider-sized and some were as big as me. The sun shooting through the swamp canopy glanced off their sheeny leaves. Hanging up there on the branches the bromeliads looked not quite like plants. They looked more like a crowd of animals, watching everything that passed their way.

I had decided to go to the Fakahatchee after the hearing because I wanted to see what Laroche had wanted. I asked him to go with me, but because the judge had banned him from the swamp until the case was over I had to look around for someone else. I suppose I could have gone alone, but I had heard the Fakahatchee was a hard place and even a few brave-seeming botanists I’d talked to told me they didn’t like to go in by themselves. At last I was introduced to a park ranger named Tony who said he would go with me. I then spent the next several days talking myself into being unafraid. A few days before we were supposed to go, Tony called and asked if I was really sure I wanted to make the trip. I said I was. I’m actually pretty tough. I’ve run a marathon and traveled by myself to weird places and engaged in conversations with a lot of strangers, and when my toughness runs out I can rely on a certain willful obliviousness to keep me going. On the other hand, my single most unfavorite thing in life so far has been to touch the mushy bottom of the lake during swimming lessons at summer camp and feel the weedy slime squeeze between my clenched toes, so the idea of walking through the swamp was a little bit extra-horrible to me. The next day Tony called and asked again if I was really ready for the Fakahatchee. At that point I gave up trying to be tough and let every moment in the lake at Camp Cardinal ooze back into my memory, and when I finally met Tony at the ranger station I almost started to cry.