"Well, what can be done?"
"Well...to tell you the truth, nothing. You have to understand that Sunderland has had a very successful history in just this kind of land acquisition and development. And Nokobee is shaping up as a big deal for them, maybe a make-or-break deal for the company. Scooter, look at me. I know you love the woods there, and it is a beautiful place, and it's your mom and dad's favorite picnic spot, but if I were you I'd find another place to protect."
Cyrus paused for half a minute, which seemed a hundred times longer to Raff. He cleared his throat and rubbed the bald spot on his head with his middle three fingers, as he did in tight business discussions.
"Scooter," he continued, "I'm being frank with you about this matter, and for your own good. I worry about you a lot these days. I think you've gotten a little off the rails here. I was young and idealistic myself, trust me. I nearly got myself killed for it in Vietnam. I think I know how you feel. But you have to realize you've become a bit obsessive. You've lost the big picture. Now, no one wants to hurt you, Scooter, but I just happen to be on Drake Sunderland's side on this one. Nokobee and Jepson Counties are among the poorest places in Alabama, and believe me, that's really poor."
"Yessir, that's true enough," Raff agreed.
"The woods up there for the most part are scrub, not much good except for chipping and pulp, and quail and turkey, I guess, and rattlesnakes. A few people, like the Millbrooks of Brewton, made a lot of money a hundred years ago, logging long leaf pine. Now that's long gone. And the counties are a little far away for Mobile to have much economic input. Your dad would tell you that much, judging from his own hardware business. And I expect you understand it yourself, now that you're taking college courses, that they need better schools in both those counties. Developing Nokobee, if it's done right, and I believe it will be done right, is going to give that area and especially Clayville an economic bump up. A lot of people down here will see real estate around Clayville as a good investment."
"Why would they do that?" Raff asked, perking up a little bit, thinking he'd found a crack in the argument. "It's still a long way from Mobile and Pensacola, and there are all kinds of recreation places around there and on down to the Gulf."
"Your problem, Scooter--and I don't blame you because you're young--is that you don't have vision. Nokobee's isolated now, sure, and its recreational facilities may never compete with the ones we have around Mobile and on over to Pensacola. That'll stay true even after the housing and lakeside docks are built at Nokobee. But this part of the Gulf Coast is filling up with people real fast. And they're not just sharecroppers coming out of the cotton fields either. They're mostly well-educated, hardworking people, with solid incomes."
Raff tried to widen the crack he thought had opened. "But why would just bringing in a lot more people be such a good thing?"
"Look at me, Scooter. You want Nokobee and Jepson Counties to just stay redneck heaven forever? Is that what you want? Please understand, nothing's going to stop progress on the Gulf Coast anyway. We're already a very important part of the Sun Belt. Mobile and Pensacola are expanding fast even by Sun Belt standards. Am I right?"
Raff hesitated. Then he spoke, almost in a whisper. "Yeah, I guess, yessir." He didn't want to agree with his uncle, but he couldn't think of anything else to say, and he had to be polite.
"Now just compare what used to be with what we have now," Cyrus bore in. "When Granddog was a boy, just about all the land south of Mobile was undeveloped woods and swamps. You could drive all the way from Dog River down to Cedar Point and see only a few houses here and there. The last stretch of the road wasn't even paved. And when you got all the way to Cedar Point, you could look over to Dauphin Island. It was a beautiful place, with beaches and the old Civil War fort at one end, but you had to rent a boat to get there. A lot of that island was simply vacant land. Now most of the area between here and Dauphin Island is developed. It's a thriving part of the economy of Alabama. There's a bridge to Dauphin Island, and you can drive across it in a few minutes. Now, that is progress, Scooter. That is real progress. Don't you see that?"
Raff's battle with his uncle was lost. "Yessir," he said, looking down at his knees and then back up.
Then he was surprised to see that his uncle hadn't finished. He was getting excited. Cyrus had stubbed out his cigar on the tray. Now he removed his glasses and waved them at Raff.
"Scooter, America didn't become great by sitting on its ass. We had to be tough and we had to work hard. We thrived on war, to be perfectly frank about it. Just look at American history, and I don't mean the girlie left-wing version they give students in school. We had to push back the Indians to get what God meant us to have. We went to war with Mexico to double the size of this country. That took us to the Pacific. I won't say the way we did it was right and good but that just happens to be the way the world works. Grow or die! We, especially the Semmeses and the Codys and the other old families around here, were the winners, and that means there had to be losers. We didn't win by sitting around writing poetry in nature parks. You're a Semmes, Scooter, and I know you have the stuff of one. I'd hate to see you wander off into some liberal never-never land."
Raff raised his hand like a student in class and said, "But--"
His uncle was not to be interrupted. "I'll tell you where this whole part of the Gulf Coast is headed, Scooter. Pensacola is bound to keep expanding its suburbs and little satellite towns to the west until it meets developments coming out from Fairhope and the rest of Baldwin County. Mobile is going to spread north way past Satsuma and west on across the Mississippi border to include the Gulf Coast there. In fifty years Mobile and Pensacola will be one single urban area surrounded by well-to-do suburbs. I like to think we'll be a metropolis like the Gold Coast on the other side of Florida and the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis."
As Cyrus was finishing this oration, his secretary Cindy Sue Lauchaux tapped lightly on the door and entered the room. She was a tall brunette, in her mid-forties, dressed in light tan slacks and a frilled white blouse. Her double first name had been bestowed in Southern accordance with her stature as second daughter in the family. Her last name suggested Cajun or, less likely, Old French Mobile. She spoke slowly in a soft, alto voice.
"Excuse me, Mr. Semmes, but your trainer called. He wants to know if you'll make your four o'clock appointment today?"
Cyrus glanced at his watch and rose from his chair. "Tell him I'm on my way.
"Gotta go, Scooter. I'm getting fit by taking boxing lessons. Best kind of workout there is, boxing. I try to do it like the professionals."
Raff made one last try as he followed his uncle to the door. "Won't there be any room for natural history reserves in the new Twin Cities?"
Cyrus halted, turned to face him. "Well, of course there will be, if we plan all this the right way. There'll be plenty of parks, with easy access, where families can go to relax and see some nature. We can arrange guided tours like the ones at Disney World. There'll be a lot of gardens as beautiful as the one down at Bellingrath. I'm hoping that right here in Mobile we might expand the Azalea Trail, and make it the big deal it once was. The impact on tourism will be just great."
"But won't there be any real wild areas for the native plants and animals?"
Cyrus paused, marinating that concept a bit, and resumed his explanation. "Look, Scooter, I think you're mature enough to understand that what we've got going here is big, and it's wonderful. Drake Sunderland and I, and some other business and political leaders in Mobile and Pensacola, have a nonprofit group we call the Gulf Gateway Coalition. Our aim is to help guide the growth, make it long-term and in the right direction and the right pace, of course. We'll keep the nature lovers happy. Frankly, I've always hoped that you yourself might play an important role in that effort."
With that, he spun around and walked out the door. "I'll be back first thing in the morning," he told Cindy Sue. She waggled her fingers at him but did not look away from her computer
screen.
Raff started to follow him. Then he hesitated in order to look up for a moment to the space above the door, as he always did when he visited this office. There hung a stuffed five-foot alligator his uncle had shot during a hunting trip in the swamps of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. The reptile stared back at him with a yellow glass eye.
Raff thought of Frogman's fourteen-foot-long Old Ben in the Chicobee River. He murmured to the specimen on the wall, "Sorry you got cut down in your childhood."
As he stepped out of the granite-rimmed entrance of the Loding Building, Raff looked down Bledsoe Street for his uncle, and spotted him fifty yards away walking briskly in the direction of the city center. He had no desire to catch up, so he stayed where he was for a short while. Feeling the afternoon sun bearing down through the hot humid air, Raff walked across the narrow street to stand in the shade of a large magnolia tree. When he looked down Bledsoe Street a second time, farther beyond the Loding Building, and from this new angle, he could see a row of small houses built in the mid-1800s and occupied continuously thereafter by Mobile families. Each bore a small medallion next to the front door denoting the house's historical significance. Raff walked on down to them to sit in the shade on a bench next to the first one.
Just as he was settling he heard a chittering sound above his head. He looked up to see a squirrel on the telephone line that crossed the street, balanced like an acrobat on the wire, trying to work its way to a tree canopy on the opposite side. From the thick vegetation there came the same chittering of a second squirrel. Raff focused on the two animals. What was this all about?
He remembered quickly: territory! The two squirrels were engaged in a territorial dispute. Raff knew that sound from the Nokobee tract. The squirrel on the wire was the invader, the one in the canopy the defender. Raff rose from the bench to watch more closely, and his mind connected to the conversation he'd just had with Cyrus. The ownership of land, and the power and security it provided: that was what drove the battles of squirrels. And the cycles of the ant colonies. And that was what Cyrus Semmes was trying to tell him too, in a tragic sense, about what runs the world.
These were no defenders for reserves like Nokobee. No territorial threats emerged from the inhabitants to halt their enemies. The land was falling unopposed to the developers. If the vanishing life within that area was mute, who then would speak for it? Raff started to walk toward the city center again. Now at last he had an idea of where to go and what to do.
29
HE REACHED THE five-story office of the Mobile News Register and walked into its green-walled lobby. With the eye of a naturalist entering a new habitat, he looked about to take in the scene before pressing on. Across the room, in a glass-fronted trophy cabinet, were two rows of plaques and statuettes. To the left on the same wall hung a framed front page of a Mobile News Register, pale yellowish brown with age, with the banner headline "NAZIS INVADE POLAND." Another next to it, in an identical frame, announced "JAPAN SURRENDERS!"
Between the trophy case and elevator was the reception desk and switchboard. Raff asked the young woman there if he could speak to Mr. Bill Robbins. He was connected at once to the environmental reporter and natural history essayist. Before the journalist could say more than "Robbins here," Raff declared, with the kind of urgent tone used by an accident witness calling the police, that he was from Clayville, and a student at Florida State University, and he had a serious environmental problem he wanted to talk about.
Robbins walked into the lobby five minutes later. He ushered Raff into the elevator and up to the main pressroom floor. Sitting across from Robbins's desk, Raff took a first close look at the journalist he had read avidly since he was a freshman in high school. Robbins was about what he expected: medium height and average weight, probably in his late thirties, with a short Lincolnesque beard and neatly combed dark blond hair. He was dressed in chinos and a taupe outdoorsman's shirt with two pockets, one of which was stained at the bottom by a leaking pen. He wore no tie. Good. A tie would have had a disorienting impact on the younger man.
Robbins listened intently as Raff poured out the whole story of Nokobee, up to and including the session he'd just had with Uncle Cyrus. He remained impassive, leaning slightly back in his chair, eyes half closed. He slowly rotated a pencil like a parade baton through his moving fingers.
By the time Raff finished his account, he had worked himself into a tone of despair. His tension was close to dissolving in tears. "I just don't know what to do. I thought I could turn to my uncle for help, but that's been a great big disappointment. I'm sorry I didn't know you personally coming here, but I read all your columns, and I thought you might want to know about all this, and help me decide what to do. I don't think Uncle Cyrus understands the issue. Or if he does, he doesn't care. That's even worse. He doesn't have any idea of what natural environments are all about, and he seems so set on what he's doing I don't think he would help even if he did understand."
Raff's anger subsided a bit as he spoke. It was now diluted by a suffusion of guilt. He sure didn't want Cyrus to know about this conversation. So in afterthought he added, "May we keep this confidential?"
Robbins nodded and said quietly, "Of course." Then he put the pencil down and lifted his hands, fingers spread in a placating gesture.
"Listen, ease up, fella. You've taken this business all on your own shoulders, and it's going to break you down if you keep on going like this. Let me tell you for starters that you're not alone, Raphael. May I call you Raphael?"
"Well, I kind of prefer Raff."
"Okay, Raff. Surely you don't think you're the only conservationist in Alabama. What I need to tell you in particular and right now is that a lot of people care about Nokobee. They're aware that it's one of the last and best stands of old-growth long leaf forest left in this part of the state. And in case you didn't know it, there are a few endangered species living there. In other words, it's a biodiversity hot spot. And Lake Nokobee adds a lot of aquatic biodiversity. We need to protect all that. Everybody who knows the situation agrees." Then he paused.
Raff kept silent, looking down at the floor, waiting for the journalist to say more.
"But in spite of all that," Robbins continued, "your Uncle Cyrus is right on one thing. The whole Nokobee tract could be wiped out in a heartbeat. All it would take would be one of those big circular timber saws and a couple of bulldozers. Put in an experienced crew, and the place could be gone almost before you could get up there. Those of us who've been following the story hoped that the Jepson Trust might donate Nokobee to the State of Alabama as a reserve, and take a big tax deduction. But the members don't live around here anymore, and they don't care enough at a distance to do anything, unfortunately. What's more, I've heard that a couple of the key people are hurting from bad investments. They need as much cash up front as possible, and as quick as they can get it."
Raff's new good feeling was subsiding as quickly as it had risen. "Then who does care?" he said.
"A lot of people, a lot of people, Raff. It happens you've come to the right person to get information about this subject. I wrote a pretty detailed article on the tract last fall, and it really had some effect. I'm surprised you didn't see it. But I guess you were over at FSU. It won a prize from the National Association of Environmental Journalists. I also mention Nokobee whenever I give my 'Last Great Places' lecture here in Mobile and elsewhere along the coast. Then you've got several private organizations with a special interest in protecting Nokobee. There's the Alabama Conservancy, the Longleaf Alliance, the Delta Protection Alliance. We need to introduce you to them. There are also a few wealthy individuals in this area and over on the Panhandle who are on top of the situation and might buy in if they thought the whole tract was at risk."
"If everybody helped, could they come up with the price? It seems pretty big to me."
"I'd say all things considered the whole deal is about fifty-fifty at this point. The biggest problem is that there are so many land developer
s circling around, waiting to pounce. They've got the money, and they can move fast. To be frank, they're like a bunch of buzzards waiting for Nokobee to die. The key player is Drake Sunderland. You mentioned him. He's the worst threat, and what's more, he got a foot solidly in the door a few months ago when he bought the parcel at Dead Owl Cove."
Robbins began tapping the tabletop with an index finger as though pointing to the hard reality of the situation.
"He's also got the support of the Gulf Gateway Coalition, which your uncle told you about. The members of the coalition are all big players in business and politics around here, and they've got something else as important as money going for them. They've got a vision--or at least what they call a vision. It's sort of like a religion. In fact, it is a kind of religion with them."
"My Uncle Cyrus seems really fired up about it."
"Yeah. They think they have a plan. When people in the future list the great cities of the Deep South, they want it to be Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Atlanta, maybe Birmingham, and--don't laugh--the Mobile-Pensacola Twin Cities. They're even talking to Jet Blue about making it a new airline hub.
"Their philosophy," Robbins went on, frowning and slightly shaking his head, "is that the earth was created for man, and dominion over nature mentioned in the Bible means replacing nature with people. They separate the world into two parts. Here is where we live, and away from us out there is nature, the place where critters, bugs, and wild plants live. Nature is fungible, in their view. I actually had a local banker say to my face what price he thinks will buy Nokobee, 'It'll be twenty million dollars, and a couple of endangered species aren't worth that,' he said."
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