There is a genre of fishing content on Instagram that has perfected the golden hour. You know it when you see it. Drone footage. A dog on the bow of a skiff. Redfish that are always copper. Light that is always amber and backlit and the water is always shin-deep and the whole production is so beautiful it makes you want to throw your phone into the Indian River, which would be fitting, because the Indian River is filthy and so is your screen time report.

These accounts run a hundred thousand followers or better. The dog never moves. The fish are always lit like they’re auditioning for a Patagonia catalog. Every frame looks like a beer commercial directed by Terrence Malick. And somewhere behind the camera is a guy who has figured out that the fastest route between a fly rod and a following is to make loneliness look expensive.

I don’t hate these guys. I want to make that clear.

I just think Nessmuk would be confused by them. Kephart too. Horace Kephart was a librarian who drank himself half to death and then walked into the Great Smoky Mountains with an axe and a blanket and came back sober with a book. He wrote that it is one of the blessings of wilderness life that it shows us how few things we need to be perfectly happy. His whole deal was reduction. Strip it down. Carry less. Need less. The man had opinions about mosquitoes that ran three paragraphs long and they were funnier than most podcasts.

I was a photographer in the outdoor industry for 15 years, which means I was carrying too much gear, which Nessmuk and Kephart would have frowned upon, and I left carrying even more, most of it emotional. For a long time it was good. I shot assignments in the Everglades and the Keys and along the marshes of Louisiana and I was young enough to believe that the quality of the work would sustain the career.

Here is what I learned instead. The outdoor industry does not want quality. The outdoor industry wants volume. The outdoor industry wants fifteen deliverables by Thursday and a reel that performs and a carousel that converts and a story that drives traffic to the landing page where the wading boots are on sale for Presidents’ Day, and if you could tag the boots in the photo, that would be great, and also could the angler be smiling because the last angler wasn’t smiling and it tested poorly.

Harrison said the danger of civilization is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.

I pissed away several good years on nonsense. I just did it on a skiff.

In late 2015, early 2016, I started one of the first fly fishing podcasts. Fly Fishing After Dark. Ten thousand monthly listeners, which was a real number back then, back before every guide and shop owner and rod builder and fly tier had a podcast, back when the form still felt like talking to a friend instead of performing for a demographic. The premise of FFAD was simple and it was this: nobody cares about your fly pattern. They care about the morning. They care about the coffee that was too hot and the ramp that was too dark and the buddy who told the same story about the same fish for the fourth time and how everybody laughed anyway because the story wasn’t the point. The story was never the point. The being there was the point.

McGuane understood this better than anyone alive. He wrote that the best angling is always a respite from burden. He also wrote that angling is extremely time consuming, and that this is sort of the whole point, which is so perfect a sentence about fishing that it makes me angry I didn’t write it myself. McGuane fished permit in the Keys when the Keys still had a sustainable permit population and a few bars where you could get into real trouble, and he wrote about both with a precision that made you feel the line tighten and the marriage strain in the same paragraph. He treated his fishing essays with the same seriousness as his novels, and that was the permission slip for the rest of us. If McGuane says you can write about bonefish like it matters, then it matters.

Except now it doesn’t matter, or it matters differently, or it matters in a way that has nothing to do with writing and everything to do with reach.

I want to talk about this carefully because I’m not trying to get into a fight on the internet, which is a sentence I am aware sounds like the opening line of every internet fight. But listen. The outdoor industry used to be built by people who went outside and then came back and wrote about it or painted it or photographed it and the work was the product. Nessmuk went to the Adirondacks in a canoe that weighed less than a Labrador and he wrote about it for Forest and Stream, which eventually became Field and Stream. Kephart went to the Smokies and the writing was the thing. Roosevelt went to the Badlands as a broken man and came back with a philosophy. He wrote that there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness. And then he spent the rest of his life trying anyway, which is basically what all of us are doing, except now we’re doing it in sixty-second increments with a royalty-free soundtrack and a swipe-up link.

Hemingway wrote a story called “Big Two-Hearted River” about a kid named Nick Adams who comes home from a war and goes fishing alone in Michigan and never once mentions the war. The entire story is about making camp and catching trout and the war is underneath everything like water under ice. You can feel it. Hemingway was twenty-five when he wrote it and he did it in a Paris cafe with a map of northern Michigan pinned to the wall. He stripped the thing down to nothing. No drama. No revelation. No high-fives on the bow of a skiff. Just a man in a river, and the river was enough.

That was 1924. A hundred years later, if Nick Adams went fishing in Michigan, he’d have a GoPro chest mount and a TikTok strategy and a coupon code for ten percent off a wading jacket and someone in the comments would tell him his backcast sucked.

I’m being unfair. I know I’m being unfair. The people making content right now are doing what the market rewards and I did the same thing for years. I photographed products I didn’t care about. I made images that were technically correct and spiritually vacant. I took the check because the check was the point and the point was feeding my kids, and I can’t stand here or sit here or wherever I am with this keyboard and pretend I was above it. I wasn’t. I was in it. I was one of the people drowning the thing I loved in commerce, and I knew it, and I kept doing it, and one morning I woke up and the thing I loved had turned into a thing I resented, and the resentment had turned into a kind of low-grade spiritual nausea that no amount of golden hour could fix.

So I left. Not loudly. I just stopped returning emails.

Harrison wrote somewhere, I think in Off to the Side, that the world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions, and that’s why he ran to the woods. I didn’t run to the woods. I ran to a desk job that paid better, which is less romantic but equally effective if what you’re trying to escape is the sinking feeling that you’ve turned your vocation into a transaction.

Here is what I want to say, and I want to say it without hedging, which is hard for me.

The outdoor industry has become an industry of aspiration rather than participation. The content is no longer made for the person standing in the river. It is made for the person who wants to look like the person standing in the river. The gear reviews are not helping someone choose a rod. They are helping someone choose an identity. And I understand why. Identity is marketable. Aspiration converts. The angler waist-deep at dawn with nobody watching and no camera and no hashtag is not a useful consumer demographic because that person already has what they need, which is the river and the temporary silence from his bitch wife and whatever’s left of the morning.

You can’t sell a man what he already owns. So you sell to the man who wants to own it but hasn’t gone outside yet.

Brautigan wrote an entire book called Trout Fishing in America that had almost nothing to do with trout fishing. The trout fishing was a lens. A way of looking at everything else. The book is about America and failure and beauty and the distance between what you hoped for and what you got, and the trout are in there, underneath, in the cold water, doing their own thing regardless of what you think about it.

I think that’s what the industry has forgotten. The trout don’t care. The river doesn’t care. The marsh and the flat and the timber and the ridgeline and the morning and the weather don’t care whether you have a following or a brand deal or a signature series rod with your name on the blank. Nessmuk knew this. He was dying of tuberculosis and he paddled a canoe that modern ultralight guys would consider dangerously small and he wrote sentences that are still in print a hundred and forty years later. Kephart knew this. He was a drunk who found God in the Smokies, or at least found sobriety, which in some cases amounts to the same thing. Roosevelt knew this. He buried his wife and his mother on the same day and went to the Badlands and punched cattle until the grief became something he could carry.

These men didn’t have audiences. They had experiences. And then they wrote about the experiences, and the writing was so good that it created audiences, which is the correct order of operations, and we have reversed it entirely.

Now the audience comes first. Then the content. Then, if there’s time and it performs, maybe something resembling experience.

I didn’t come back to anything. I never left. I left the industry, which is a word I’ve come to hate because it turns rivers into content calendars and sunrises into brand assets, but the outdoors never went anywhere and neither did I. What I did was start writing. Fiction, specifically. Short stories about fishing, wild places and Florida and the kind of people who live close to the water because they can’t figure out how to live anywhere else. McGuane is still publishing in the New Yorker at eighty-six and Harrison wrote poems about rivers and dogs and bourbon until the week he died and Brautigan, God rest his weird beautiful soul, wrote a book about trout fishing that was really about everything else, and these men made me believe that the work was worth doing even when nobody was paying for it. Especially when nobody was paying for it. Nobody in the outdoor world remembers my name. Best thing that could have happened. No reputation to protect. No audience to feed. Just the work, and if someone sees enough value in it to invest, so be it.

I never stopped making photos, and I never plan to. But only for the work that matters to me. The people. The landscapes. The light on a hull at five-thirty in the morning when nobody’s awake. Not product shots. Not lifestyle content. Not deliverables. Images. The kind Kephart might have taken if he’d had a camera and wasn’t busy writing three paragraphs about a mosquito’s drinking habits.

The pendulum swings. The guys I talk to, the ones who’ve been at this for twenty or thirty years, they’re tired. Not of fishing. Never of fishing. They’re tired of the performance. They’re tired of the feed. They want to read something that takes twenty minutes and stays with them for a week. They want to feel the way they felt the first time they read McGuane or Harrison or Hemingway and realized that someone had taken this slow, boring, obsessive, glorious thing they loved and made it mean something beyond itself.

That hunger is still there. It never left. It just got buried under volume and velocity and the relentless, exhausting pressure to produce, produce, produce, until the thing you were producing had no relationship to the thing that made you want to produce in the first place.

Dalva is asleep at my feet.
A north wind keeps my mind off fishing.
I have nowhere to be.

When he hit the Florida coast in April 1513 there were 300,000 souls already living there. They had inhabited the land for ten thousand years. The Calusa had built canal towns on the southwest coast with a chief who collected tribute from every tribe south of Tampa Bay. They had a warrior class and a government and a civilization that did not need a single thing Ponce de León carried on his ships. He looked at all of it and called it a discovery. He took captives for guides, smashed Calusa canoes, and raped their women. Then he sailed to a scrap of coral called the Dry Tortugas. There, he ordered his men ashore to kill the first living thing they saw: fourteen seals lying in the sun.

The seals did not run.

They had never seen a man before. They were only curious, lifting their heads the way a dog does at a new sound in the driveway. It was an innocent gesture, and the last one they ever made. Around a Spaniard in 1513, curiosity was a death sentence for anything that breathed.

Picture the scene at the Tortugas. A low sandy island. Fourteen animals hauled out on the shore, eight feet long, six hundred pounds, brownish gray with algae growing on their backs so they looked like the reef itself had learned to breathe and drag itself into the light. They lay in groups of twenty or forty or a hundred, stacked on the sand like sunburned tourists at Cocoa Beach, except they had tenure.

There were 300,000 of them in the Caribbean then. Columbus had already killed eight on a beach near Hispaniola the year before. That was the pattern. You land. You slaughter what doesn’t run. You render its body for parts. You write it down in a logbook and call it history.

By 1688 Jamaican sugar plantation owners were sending hunting parties out at night to slaughter hundreds of monk seals per session. They boiled them down for oil to grease the machinery. A man named Sloane wrote in 1707 that Bahamian fishers could take a hundred seals in a single evening. By 1850, commerce had abandoned the hunt; there were not enough animals left to turn a profit. The final slaughter was left to science. In 1886, a northern expedition sailed to a reef off Mexico and killed forty-two of the last monk seals on the planet, not for oil, but for display cases in London and Cambridge. Scientists. Naturalists. Enthusiasts. That is the word the record uses. The same word you might use for a man who collects rare stamps, except these men collected the last of a thing, boxed it in sawdust, and called it scholarship.

The pattern set on that beach in the Tortugas became the story of Florida itself: a history of loss written by men from somewhere else who always showed up with a plan.

In 1890 Key West was the largest and wealthiest city in the state. Miami was a mosquito camp with 300 people. The entire population of Florida was 391,000. Egrets and herons and roseate spoonbills nested in rookeries so thick that John Audubon said the flocks blocked out the sun. Flamingos ran in the thousands through the shallows of Florida Bay. The reefs that had fed those 300,000 monk seals held four to six times more fish than any Caribbean reef holds today. That is not poetry. That is a peer-reviewed number. The sheer weight of life needed to feed a quarter-million predators created an underwater kingdom so rich that scientists searching the modern Caribbean have found nothing that even comes close. The Florida that existed before the railroad was a biological kingdom that would be unrecognizable to anyone reading this on a phone in a Publix parking lot.

Then Henry Flagler showed up from New York.

He was a Standard Oil man who saw a tropical wilderness the way Ponce de León saw the Calusa: as raw material. He built hotels, naming one for the slaver himself. He drove his railroad south, city by city, cutting through swamp and bedrock until all that stood between him and Key West was 156 miles of open sea. So he laid the railroad over the ocean itself, a feat the press called the Eighth Wonder of the World. As the first train steamed over the reefs and into the keys, no one thought to call the railroad by its true name: the end of everything that had been there first.

While Flagler was laying track, the plume hunters were killing Florida from the air down. Northern women wanted egret feathers on their hats, and the fashion industry obliged by sending men with shotguns into the Everglades to shoot nesting birds and strip the plumes from their bodies while the chicks starved in the nests above. By 1900 ninety-five percent of Florida’s shorebirds were dead. Ninety-fucking-five. Snowy egret plumes were worth more per ounce than gold, and every ounce of it was shipped north, to New York, to be sold in shops to customers who had no idea what a rookery looked like and no reason to care. In 1905 a game warden named Guy Bradley, America’s first, heard gunshots from his cottage in Flamingo and sailed out to stop a poacher. The poacher, Walter Smith, shot Bradley dead and set his body adrift. A grand jury refused to indict. Years later, a hurricane washed Bradley’s grave at Cape Sable into the sea. In Flamingo, the Audubon Society never hired another warden.

That same decade, 1908, a small group of monk seals was spotted at the Tortugas. The last handful. They were left unprotected. In 1915 fishermen captured six and shipped them to Pensacola. They were released into water that no longer had enough fish to feed them. In 1922 a fisherman killed the last Caribbean monk seal ever recorded in Florida waters, off Key West. The same Key West that had been the largest city in the state thirty years earlier. The same water Ponce de León had sailed through four centuries before with blood on his hands and a royal patent in his pocket.

The species held on in the deep Caribbean for another thirty years. The last one was seen in 1952, on Serranilla Bank, a remote reef in the western Caribbean, drifting between Honduras and Jamaica, closer to nothing than to anywhere. Then, silence. It was the only seal ever hunted to extinction by human hands. NOAA spent five years searching before writing the word extinct in 2008 and closing the file. A parasite that lived only in the seal’s nasal cavity, a mite called Halarachne americana, went with it. An entire organism whose address was the inside of a nose, evicted because its landlord was boiled for lamp oil.

Within eighty years of Ponce de León’s landing, most of Florida’s indigenous population was dead. Slavery, disease, combat. The Calusa, builders of canal towns that commanded tribute across the peninsula, were so thoroughly erased their civilization is now known only through fragments. Their last recorded act was to put an arrow through Ponce de León’s thigh when he returned in 1521 to finish what he started. He crawled back to Havana and died. It is the only satisfying paragraph in five hundred years of Florida history, and still, they hung a fairy tale on the slaver’s corpse: the Fountain of Youth, a myth to make the conquest romantic for the people who showed up later.

Florida’s population in 1900 was 528,000. By the 1920s it was a million. After air conditioning and the interstate highway system, it became a conveyor belt. Today it is twenty-three million and climbing by nine hundred people every single day. Nine hundred more arrivals from somewhere else between one sunrise and the next, piling onto a peninsula that used to hold monk seals and Calusa and clouds of egrets so dense they turned the mangroves white. The reefs are dying. The springs are drying. The Everglades is half the watershed it was a century ago. But the tax code has no state income tax and the winters are warm, so the conveyor belt keeps running.

The monk seal was not afraid. It lay on the sand in the sun, and it did not understand what was walking toward it.

Neither did the Calusa. By the time they understood, it was too late.

Florida still does not understand. It just keeps lying on the beach, waiting.

Patrick Smith came down from Mississippi in 1966, which was already late for a state that had been selling itself to strangers since Flagler ran the first rail south. He took a job in public relations at Brevard Community College, a position that must have suited him like a saddle suits a sailfish. He had other plans.

He’d already written The River Is Home at twenty-one, a book about the river-rat people of his childhood, and it was good enough that you could see what was coming. What was coming was Florida. Not the Florida of Mickey Mouse and travel-slop and the relentless, stupefying machinery of coastal development, but the other one. The one underneath. The one that was there before the air conditioning and would be there after; the scrub and the hammock and the black water and the terrible silence of a place that does not care whether you make it through the night.

A Land Remembered came out in 1984. It follows three generations of MacIveys from 1858 to 1968. A century’s worth of a family clawing its way up from nothing in the Florida interior, driving wild cattle to Punta Rassa, surviving freezes and hurricanes and mosquitoes that could drain a man like a tap, and then, inevitably, selling it all off to developers in exchange for the kind of money that makes you forget why you wanted it. The arc of the book is the arc of the state. Smith understood that these were the same story.

They nominated him for the Pulitzer three times. They nominated him for the Nobel. The Florida Historical Society invented an award, the Greatest Living Floridian, and gave it to him, and he was only the second living writer to make the Artists Hall of Fame, the first being Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, who had the Everglades on her side. Smith had only the truth, which is a less photogenic constituency.

He wrote six other novels. Forever Island and Allapattah dealt with the Seminoles and the long, familiar American project of pushing people off land they didn’t know they were supposed to own. Angel City was about migrant workers and became a CBS movie, which is a particular kind of afterlife for a serious book. None of it made him rich. None of it made him famous, Florida famous, which requires at minimum a boat, a criminal record, or a cable news appearance.

What Smith had was accuracy. He married a woman named Iris whose family had been in Florida for three generations, and he used the details, names, places, the way people actually talked and moved and died, with the care of a man who understood that the historical record is not improved by decoration. The character of Tobias MacIvey came from Iris’s grandfather’s name. This is how real books get written. You sit at the table with people who were there, and you listen, and then you go to work.

He lived on Merritt Island for nearly fifty years. He died there in January of 2014, at eighty-six. There was no great national reckoning, no rediscovery, no prestige television adaptation. The book just kept selling. It is taught in Florida schools, where I first read it as a mandatory read in 9th grade. It has been voted the best Florida book so many times that the poll has become a formality.

I believe the writers who matter are the ones who make you unable to drive through a place without seeing it differently. Even a place that exists in your bones. After Smith, the Florida interior is not empty. It is full of the ghosts of cattle drives and Seminole camps and freezes that killed the oranges and the people who depended on them. The strip malls and the subdivisions are still there, but now you know what’s underneath, and you cannot unknow it.

They should put that on the lunchbox causeway sign: If you haven’t read Patrick Smith, you’re still a tourist.

We were standing around a skiff, working through the deck layout together, and my coffee had gone cold sometime during the conversation about chines. His coffee cup left a ring on the bare fiberglass. A perfect brown circle on white gelcoat. I remember thinking even that looked like art.

We couldn't agree on the deck layout. I said what I thought, which cost me something to do. After that, Flip treated me differently. It was a small education: men who spend their lives surrounded by agreement don't respect the agreeing. They're waiting for somebody to push back, and most never do. Flip built the deck his way, of course.

Worth
He never asked you to prove anything. That was the problem. You just wanted to. You wanted to walk into a room with Flip Pallot and have something to offer besides your presence, which was already more than he required.

I think the redfish sitting in Mosquito Lagoon mud feel the same thing but I can’t confirm this.

The Fly Shop
He recognized me at a fly shop event years before the skiff. I was standing in a room full of people who had more right to be there than I did. Flip looked across the crowd and said my name. Just my name. Not loud.

The room changed. I could feel it. People who had been looking through me started looking at me. Not because I had done anything different between one second and the next, but because Flip Pallot had aimed his attention in my direction and attention from Flip Pallot was a currency nobody in that room could counterfeit.

I didn’t earn it. That’s important. I hadn’t caught the right fish or poled the right flat or published the right article. He just remembered me from some prior intersection that I had assumed was forgettable, and he chose to say my name out loud in a room full of people who would have given anything for the same.

That’s a kind of power most men don’t know exists. The kind that doesn’t diminish when you hand it to someone else.

A Skiff That Still Sells Today
We designed a skiff together. I use the word “together” like a man holding a flashlight for a surgeon uses the word “we.”

The skiff still sells. I see it at boat ramps sometimes and feel something I don’t have a name for. It’s not pride. It’s more like seeing a dog you raised living in someone else’s yard, happy, not looking for you.

Mentor
People will call him my mentor. He wasn’t. People will say I must miss him terribly. I don’t. Not in the fashion they mean.

This is not a sad thing. This is actually the better thing.

What He Did
He put effort into everything. He wrote his name on his belongings in bubble letters that should be a typeset. The simple flies he tied belonged in a frame. His knots were deliberate. His skiff was organized. None of this was performance. It was just the baseline.

And that same attention, that refusal to be careless with small things, was how he treated a flat. A shoreline. A grassbed. A creek mouth that hadn’t been named yet. If you watched him long enough, you understood that the flies and the bubble letters and the organized skiff were the same act as protecting a fishery. There was no separation. You either cared about all of it or you were faking the parts that mattered.

The Push Pole
A push pole is a simple object. A long stick. You stand on a platform above the water and you push the boat through water so shallow it has almost given up on being water.

Flip made his mud foot from a guava tree. Found a Y-shaped branch and lashed it to the bottom of his pole. I’m convinced it didn’t work any better than the plastic ones that come affixed from the manufacturer. But after he showed me how to find the right branch and make one myself, something about pushing a boat with a piece of a tree that a man like Flip handed you always made it feel better. Lighter, maybe. Or more honest. I still can’t tell which.

Photographing Him
I took hundreds of photos of this man. Through all of them, across years, not a single frame looks bad. Most people give you one good shot out of thirty. Flip gave you thirty out of thirty. He just carried himself like someone who understood that a camera was always possible, except it wasn’t that either, because he looked exactly the same when no one was pointing one at him. A professional who never clocked in.

The clouds were doing something complicated the last time I shot him on the water. They looked like a painting you’d find at an estate sale in Titusville, priced at forty dollars, and you’d think, no one should sell that for forty dollars, and then you’d look up and the real sky was doing the same thing for free.

What Lasts
A man can leave a television show. Books. Interviews. Voiceovers for companies that sell things to people who fish. Flip left all of that.

But the thing that outlasts the footage and the pages is harder to describe. It’s a kind of paying attention. You can’t put it in a museum. You can’t frame it. You can only catch yourself doing it one morning, standing on the bow of a skiff in January, watching a wake that might be a fish or might be the wind, and caring about the difference.

He’s not here anymore but that particular need to care about the difference is still everywhere and I don’t think it knows how to stop.

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The coast behind us ran on forever. No condos, no seawalls, just mangrove and limestone and the kind of light you can't sell because nobody's figured out how to put a meter on it. Out ahead, between us and the run home, a single black cloud was building across the whole horizon, wall to wall. We both knew it would have us before we made the dock, and part of me wanted it to. Sitting ducks. Nowhere to go but through it. The other guides had turned in hours ago. I pointed out a large group of Tarpon rolling on the horizon, but without words, decided we would just watch. We had the whole bay to ourselves, and it was quiet — the kind of quiet that gets loud, that rings in your ears and dares you to break it. He said it without taking his eyes off the fish,

“How could anyone want to fuck this up.”

It wasn’t a question. We both already knew the answer. Somebody always finds a reason. A good one, on paper. With a feasibility study and a jobs number and a man in a clean shirt who’s never had plough mud dry on his forearms explaining why the thing in front of you was never really worth anything to begin with. They’ll do it, and they’ll do it without ever once standing where we were standing and looking at what they’re about to kill straight in the eye.

That was years ago. Back when artificial intelligence was something only P.K.D. and Asimov muttered about. A paranoid whisper, not a line item in a county budget.

Here’s the part most people have already forgotten, if they ever knew it.

We already did this. The whole state used to be water. The Everglades ran clear from Okeechobee to the bay, and a hundred years ago men just like the ones in the clean shirts stood up and called it swamp. Wasted land. They said draining it was progress. They said it was inevitable. They said the only sensible thing was to stop whining and figure out how to do it responsibly. A governor named Napoleon Bonaparte Broward ran on it and won. We liked him so much, we named a county after him.

So they drained it. Dug the canals, ran the dredges, sold the lots. Progress.

And it broke the aquifer that every one of us drinks from. Salt water crept into the wells. The bay started dying. The fish you and I chase got pushed into the last clean corners. We are right now, today, spending north of twenty billion dollars trying to un-ring that bell, to put back a fraction of the water those visionary bastards drained, because it turns out the swamp was the thing keeping us alive the whole time.

Inevitable. Responsible. Progress. We have heard every word of this sermon before. We are still paying for the last one.

Now they want to do it again, except this time they don’t even need the land. They need the water and the power.

The hyperscalers are coming south because Virginia’s full. A single one of these data centers can drink five million gallons a day to keep its machines from cooking. Pulled out of the same wounded aquifer we’re spending a fortune trying to nurse back. The state signed a bill this spring to make sure your power bill doesn’t go up to pay for it. Good. Real considerate. They’ll protect your wallet. Read it close and you’ll see what it doesn’t protect: the water. The actual water. The thing the Everglades makes and the thing you can’t make more of.

So we close the circle. We drained the swamp for progress, broke the water, spent twenty billion trying to fix it, and now we’re going to pour what’s left into a windowless building so a server farm in another time zone can answer somebody’s email faster.

And there will be a “Floridian” who tells you this is fine.

He’ll say it’s progress. He’ll say it’s inevitable. He’ll say we should just regulate it and get our piece while the getting’s good. He’ll talk about the tax base.

I want to be clear about this man, because I’d rather not be misunderstood. He is not one of us. He has no graves in this ground. He is not teaching a kid to set a hook or read a tide chart or sit still in a duck blind in the cold dark and call this place home. He doesn’t have anything here he’s planning to hand down. He’s a tenant. He lives on Florida the way mold lives on bread. And when he tells you the destruction of the only home you’ve got is inevitable, what he means is that he gave up something you never will, and he’d like company in the surrender.

Don’t give it to him.

There is nothing inevitable about a swamp. We proved that once already, the hard way, with a dredge. The water doesn’t belong to the man in the clean shirt and it doesn’t belong to a server. It belongs to the kid who’s going to stand on the bow of a Hell’s Bay someday with his line stripped and ready, looking at a coast that runs on forever… if there’s any of it left to look at.

We drained it once.

Not again