Ill Nature

by Joy Williams

  Ed Leedskalin himself may have come from the moon or somewhere farther. When he talked about “sweet sixteen,” which he did a lot, everyone presumed he was talking about Agnes Scuffs of Latvia, but in fact he was not. Sweet Sixteen was the spaceship he thought might find the Coral Castle and take him home, back home to the Mother Rock somewhere in space. But the spaceship never found the castle, and when he was sixty-four, he checked himself into a Miami hospital and died. Some say it was malnutrition, others leukemia. In either case his magnets failed him. Maybe it was because he had stopped moving those rocks around, carving out the chairs so soft and comfy, changing that coral rock’s hard, hard nature, hauling and shaping all those mutely calling-out things. Maybe the rocks didn’t like him stopping.

  There’s a Pizza Hut across the street from Coral Castle now. It might have the most direct harmonic relationship with magnetic forces of any Pizza Hut in the world. Or it might not. No one eating there has mastered levitation. And no one has mentioned seeing tiny Ed either, five feet tall and less than one hundred pounds, wearing his dark suit and tie. But why would they? He wanted to be cremated so that he would eventually turn into a rock. He had no desire to return as Ed Leedskalin. They say his secrets died with him. As will ours all.

  One Acre

  I HAD AN ACRE IN FLORIDA ON A LAGOON CLOSE BY THE GULF of Mexico.

  I am admittedly putting this first line up against Dinesen’s famous oneiric one: I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. When Dinesen first came to Africa, she confessed that she could not “live” without getting a fine specimen of every single kind of African game. The hunt, for her, was an eroticized image of desire, “a love affair” wherein the “shot was . . . in reality . . . a declaration of love.” She must have blushed to read this drivel later, for after ten years she found hunting “an unreasonable thing, indeed in itself ugly and vulgar, for the sake of a few hours enjoyment to put out a life that belonged in the great landscape and had grown up on it.” One could say her thinking had evolved, that she had become more conscientious. Still, when she was about to leave her beloved farm (her house, empty of furniture was admirably “clean like a skull”), she planned to shoot her dogs and horses, dissuaded from doing so only by the pleas of her friends. The animals belonged to her, as had the land, which she ceased to own only when it became owned by another and subject to that person’s whims and policies. Of course, it became hers again through the writing about it. She preserved it in Out of Africa. Once again, Art, reflective poesy, saves landscape.

  I had an acre in Florida. . . . This bodes no drama. For what wonders could a single acre hold, what meaning or relevance? Though the word Florida is oneiric too, and thus its own metaphor. It is an occasional place, a palmed and pleasant stage for transients. To hold fast to an acre in that vast state is almost neurotic. An acre is both too much and not enough. Its value lies in its divisibility. How many building lots are permitted by law? Four, certainly.

  I once saw a white heron on the sprawling outskirts of Naples, a city that crowds against the Big Cypress Preserve and Everglades National Park. The heron seemed to be beating its head against a tree knocked down by bulldozers to widen a road. Water still lay along the palmetto-dotted earth, but pipes would soon carry it away and dry the land for townhouses and golf courses. Cars sped past. The heron, white as robed angels must surely be, was beating his head against the tree. He was lost to himself, deranged, in his ruined and lost landscape.

  I have seen numbers of water birds struck down by cars. I used to take them home and bury them between the mangroves and the live oaks on my lagoon, though of course it was not my lagoon. It is only a mile and a half long. To the north, it cedes to a private road that gives access to the Sanderling Club, where the exceptionally wealthy enjoy their gulf views. To the south it vanishes beneath the parking lot for a public beach. This is on Siesta Key, a crowded seven-mile-long island off Sarasota that is joined to the mainland by two bridges, one of four lanes, the other two. The lagoon is named Heron, the beach, Turtle. Yes, the turtles still come to nest, and the volunteers who stake and guard the nests are grateful—they practically weep with gratitude—when the condo dwellers keep their lights out during the hatching weeks so as not to confuse the infant turtles in their night search for the softly luminous sea. But usually the condo dwellers don’t keep their lights out. They might accommodate the request were they there, but they are seldom there. The lights are controlled by timers and burn bright and long. The condos are investments, mostly, not homes. Like the lands they’ve consumed, they’re cold commodities. When land is developed, it ceases being land. It becomes covered, sealed, its own grave.

  Ecosystems are something large, to be saved, if at all, by the government at great expense and set aside to be enjoyed by all of us in some recreational or contemplative fashion. An individual doesn’t think of himself as owning an ecosystem. The responsibility! Too much. Besides, there’s something about the word that denotes the impossibility of ownership. Land, on the other hand, is like a car or house; it has economic currency. It is a marketable concept, far from Aldo Leopold’s definition of it as a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils plants and animals. It was over fifty years ago that Leopold wrote his elegantly reasoned essay “The Land Ethic,” but it has had about as much effect on the American conscience as a snowflake. Seven thousand acres are lost each day in this country to development. Ecosystem becomes land becomes parcel. The fountain of energy is shut down.

  On Siesta Key, so-called “open space” is being utilized by the county as beach parking or public tennis courts. “Raw” land no longer exists, though a few lots are still available, some with very nice trees, most of which will have to go (unfortunately) in order to accommodate the house that will be built on what is now considered a “site.” Hardly can get all ecosystem emotional over a site. Should a banyan tree be growing there, it will most assuredly have to go because it is in their nature to grow extravagantly and demand a great deal of space. Trees, of course, cannot demand anything. Like the wild animals who have certain requirements or preferences—a clutter and cover, long natural hours of friendly, concealing dark—anything they need can be ignored or removed right along with them.

  In 1969, I bought Lots 27, 28, and 29 on Midnight Pass Road, a two-lane road that ended when the key did. There was a small cypress house, no beauty, and an even smaller cypress cottage. They were flat-roofed single-story affairs, built on poured-concrete slabs. The lots together cost $24,000. In 1972, I bought Lots 30 and 31 for $12,000. Lagoon land wasn’t all that desirable. There was no access to open water. Bay land was more valuable, and, even then, gulf front, with its inherently “protected” view, was only for the wealthy. The view is “protected.” I could hear the gulf from my small acre; it was in fact only several hundred feet away, concealed by a scrim of mangroves. The houses that were to be built over there were grand but still never quite exceeded the height of the mangroves. I did not see my lagoon neighbors for my trees, my tangled careless land, though as the years passed, I put up sections of wooden fence, of shadowbox design, for my neighbors changed and multiplied. The little cypress houses so similar to mine were torn down in a twinkling, the “extra” lots sold. I put a wooden fence up along the road eventually. It weathered prettily but would shudder on its posts from a flung beer bottle, and sections of it were periodically demolished by errant cars. I don’t believe I ever rushed sympathetically to the befuddled driver’s aid. Streetlights went up at fifty-foot intervals on the dark and curvy road. The bay side got the lights, the lagoon side got the bicycle path. Home owners were responsible for keeping the “path” tidy, and I appeared out there dutifully with broom and rake, pushing away the small oak leaves from the trees that towered overhead, disclosing all that efficient concrete for the benefit of increasing streams of walkers and joggers. Bicyclists preferred to use the road. Any stubborn palmetto that fanned outward or seeded palm that once graced the strip of land outside my ricke
ty wall would be snipped back by a supernumerary, doing his/her part for the public way. The bottles, cans, and wee chip bags were left for me to reap. As owner of Lots 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31, I had 370 feet of path to maintain. I became aware, outside my fence, of the well-known Florida light, a sort of blandly insistent urban light—feathery and bemused—not insistent but resigned. Cars sped past. Large houses were being constructed on the bay, estates on half an acre with elaborate wrought-iron fences and electric gates. Palmetto scrub had given way to lawns. Trees existed as dramatically trimmed accents, all dead wood removed. Trees not deemed perfectly sound by landscape professionals were felled, the palms favored were “specimen” ones. Dead animals and birds appeared more and more frequently on the road. The cars sped past incessantly.

  Within my wobbly fence, I pottered about. The houses were built in the 1940s, and the land had the typical homesteaded accoutrements of that time—a few citrus trees, some oleander and hibiscus for color, a plot cleared for a few vegetables and shasta daisies, a fig tree left to flourish for shade, and live oaks left to grow around the edges. The ghastly melaleucas were available in nurseries then and were often planted in numbers as a hedge. The man I bought the land from was a retired botanist, and he had planted avocado and lychee nut trees, too, as well as a grove of giant bamboo from which he liked to make vases and bowls and various trinkets. There was bougainvillea, azalea, gardenia, powder puff, and firecracker plant, crotons, wild lilies, sea grape, and several orchid trees. Of the palms there was a royal, sabal, many cabbage, pineapple, sago—queen and king—reclanata, fishtail, sentry, traveler’s, and queen’s. There were cypresses, a jacaranda, and two banyan trees. There was even a tiny lawn with small cement squares to place the lawn chairs on. The mangroves in this spot had been cut back for a view of the idly flowing tea-colored lagoon. Elsewhere, they grew—the red and the black—in the manner each found lovely, in hoops and stands, creating bowers and thickets and mazes of rocking water and dappling light.

  This was my acre in Florida. Visitors ventured that it looked as though it would require an awful lot of maintenance, though they admired my prescience in buying the extra lots, which would surely be worth something someday. The house had a certain “rustic charm,” but most people didn’t find the un-air-conditioned, un-dehumidifed air all that wholesome and wondered why I kept the place so damn dark, for there were colored floodlights widely available that would dramatize the “plantings.” I could bounce more lights off the water; you could hardly even tell there was water out there, and what was the sense of hiding that? And despite the extraordinary variety, my land seemed unkempt. There were vines and brazilian pepper and carrotwood, there were fire ant mounds, rats surely lived in the fronds of the untrimmed palms. My acre looked a little hesitant, small and vulnerable, young. Even the banyan tree was relatively young. It had put down a few aerials but then stopped for a good decade as if it were thinking . . . What’s the use? I’m straddling Lots 29 and 30 and I’m not known as an accommodating tree. When the land gets sold, I’ll be sold too and will be felled in screaming suttee. . . . Or sentiments of that sort.

  As for the birds and animals, well, people didn’t want raccoons and opossums and armadillos, and their cats would eat the baby rabbits. Too disgusting, but that’s just the way nature was. And though I had cardinals and towhees and thrashers and mockingbirds and doves and woodpeckers, they did too; as a matter of fact, their cardinals were nesting in a place where they could actually see them, right near the front door, although that was getting to be a nuisance. As for the herons, you found them everywhere, even atop the Dumpsters behind the 7-Eleven. They were flagrant beggars. You had to chase them away from your bait bucket when you were fishing from the beach. Did I fish in the lagoon? There were snapper in there, redfish, maybe even snook. I could get the mullet with nets. Why didn’t I fish?

  The years flowed by. Some of the properties on the lagoon fell to pure speculation. Mangroves were pruned like any hedging material; in some cases, decks were built over them, causing them to die, although they remained ghostily rooted. Landowners on the gulf did not molest their mangroves. The lagoon to them was the equivalent of a back alley, why would they want to regard the increasing myriad of houses huddled there? I traveled, I rented the place out, I returned. There were freezes, we were grazed by hurricanes. An immense mahoe hibiscus died back in a cold snap, and two years later, a tall, slender, smooth-barked tree it had been concealing began producing hundreds of the pinkest, sweetest, juiciest grapefruit I have ever tasted. The water oaks that had reached their twenty-year limit rotted and fell. There were lovely woodpeckers. All through the winter in the nights the chuck-will’s-widow would call.

  That would drive me nuts, several of my acquaintances remarked.

  The sound of construction was almost constant, but no one appeared to be actually living in the remodeled, enlarged, upgraded properties around me. I had cut out sections of my side fences to allow oak limbs to grow in their tortured specific manner, but my neighbor’s yard men would eventually be instructed to lop them off at the property line. This was, of course, the owner’s right. There was the sound of trimmers, leaf blowers, pool pumps, pressure cleaners, the smell of chemicals from pest and lawn services. Maintenance maintenance maintenance. Then the county began cutting back the live oak limbs that extended over the bicycle path even though one would have to be traversing on a pogo stick to bump into one. Sliced sure as bread, the limbs, one at least five feet in diameter and green with resurrection fern and air plants, were cut back to the fence line.

  It was then I decided to build the wall.

  The year was 1990. The wall was of cement block with deep footers, and it ran the entire length of the road footage except for a twelve-foot opening that was gated in cedar. It cost about $10,000, and two men did it in two months. The wall was ten feet high and not stuccoed. I thought it was splendid. I didn’t know many people in the neighborhood by then, but word got back to me that some did not find it attractive. What did I have back there, a prison? To me, it was the people speeding past the baby Taj’s on the animal-corpse-littered road who had become imprisoned. Inside was land—a mysterious, messy fountain of energy—outside was something else, not land in any meaningful sense but a diced bright salad of colorful real estate, pods of investment, its value now shrilly sterilely economic.

  Behind the wall was an Edenic acre, still known to the tax collector as Lots 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31. Untransformed by me, who was neither gardener nor crafty ecological restorer, the land found its own rich dynamic. Behind the wall was neither grounds nor yard nor garden or park or even false jungle but a functioning wild landscape that became more remarkable each year. Of course there was the humble house and even humbler cottage, which appeared less and less important to me in the large order of things. They were shelters, pleasant enough but primarily places from which to look out at the beauty of a world to which I was irrelevant except for my role of preserving it, a world I could be integrated with only to the extent of my not harming it. The wildlife could hardly know that their world in that place existed only because I rather than another owned it. I knew, though, and the irrationality of the arrangement, the premise, angered me and made me feel powerless, for I did not feel that the land was mine at all but rather belonged to something larger that was being threatened by something absurdly small, the ill works and delusions of—as William Burroughs liked to say—homo sap.

  Though the wall did not receive social approbation, its approval from an ecological point of view was resounding. The banyan, as though reassured by the audacious wall, flung down dozens of aerial roots. The understory flourished, the oaks soared, creating a great, grave canopy. Plantings that had seemed tentative when I bought them from botanical gardens years before took hold. The leaves and bark crumble built up, the ferns spread. It was odd. I fancied that I had made an inside for the outside to be safe in. From within, the wall vanished; green growth pressed against it, staining it naturally brown an
d green and black. It muffled the sound and heat of the road. Inside was cool and dappled, hymned with birdsong. There were owls and wood ducks. An osprey roosted each night in a casuarina that leaned out over the lagoon, a tree of no good reputation and half dead, but the osprey deeply favored it, folding himself into it invisibly each nightfall. A pair of yellow-crowned night herons nested in a slash pine in the center of Lot 30. Large birds with a large hidden nest, their young—each year three!—not hasty in their departure. A single acre was able to nurture so many lives, including mine. Its existence gave me great happiness.

  And yet it was all an illusion too, its own shadowbox, for when I opened the gates or canoed the lagoon, I saw an utterly different world. This was a world that had fallen only in part to consortiums of developers; it had fallen mostly plat by plat to individuals, who, paradoxically, were quite conformist in their attitude toward land, or rather the scraped scaffolding upon which their real property was built. They lived in penury of a very special sort, but that was only my opinion. In their opinion they were living in perfect accord with the values of the time, successfully and cleverly, taking advantage of their advantages. Their attitudes were perfectly acceptable, they were not behaving unwisely or without foresight. They had maximized profits and if little of nature had been preserved in the arrangement, well nature was an adornment not to everyone’s taste, a matter really of personal tolerance and sympathy. Besides, Nature was not far away, supported by everyone’s tax dollars and preserved in state and federal parks. And one could show one’s appreciation for these places by visiting them at any time. Public lands can be projected as having as many recreational, aesthetic, or environmental benefits as can be devised for them, but private land, on this skinny Florida key and almost everywhere in this country, is considered too economically valuable to be conserved. Despoilation of land in its many many guises is the custom of the country. Privately, one by one, the landowner makes decisions that render land, in any other than financial terms, moot. Land is something to be “built out.”