I live on the South Fork of the St. Lucie River. The river is my backyard with the shore of Palm City in the distance. My backyard view includes the mooring field of Stuart. I often hear the people who live on their boats playing music or just speaking to each other. Funny…people don’t seem to understand how sound carries over water depending on wind and other weather variables. And, I need never go to Sailor’s Return to hear their bad bands playing because my back porch has excellent acoustics especially for amplified bass. I often say to Polly, my wife, that if I hear another lousy rendition of “Proud Mary,” I am going to commit suicide.
The old and the new Roosevelt Bridges and the infamous railroad trestle spanning the river are also part of the scene. Sometimes, I think I am in New England with the tall masts of sailing ships anchored right behind my yard. I enjoy the ospreys that perch in the masts of ships and tops of trees waiting for the right moment to swoop down catch a fish in their talons and then often eat that fish while sitting on one my pilings. There are cranes and turns, pelicans and storks. Once, Polly saw a Great Blue Heron catch a rat in the rocks that line the beach and swallow it whole, seeing it go down its long neck.
Dolphin families swim by and jump in and out of the water. Mullet, snook and other fish silently lurk beneath the surface and sometimes splash out of the water. There used to be an old catfish that lived at the end of our dock. I would always point visitors out there and they would inevitably catch the old man and then release him back for the next visitor to do the same.
That catfish is gone now as are the mullet sailing into the air. There are many fewer dolphins. There are less ospreys and other birds. But the water still flows depending on the tide either out to the ocean or toward Lake Okeechobee. It is just stiller now, less vibrant, with more sediment in the water, muck on the bottom and less life.
I often try to picture what the river was like before me. My neighbor, who has lived here for decades, tells me that the river was clear and you could see the bottom when he first moved to his house. Even when I first saw the river from my mother-in-law’s condo, which was a few doors from my current home, I remember the waters clearer. But was it really? For as Proust wrote: “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
What was the river to the settlers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries? I am told that where my house now stands was part of a pineapple plantation. The river was both a highway and supermarket. Oyster and crabs were plentiful as were all variety of fish. Deer, bear, beaver and otter made their homes on the bank, as did panthers and bobcats. Mother Nature provided a bountiful treasure that man, of course, ravenously did its best to eliminate.
Native Americans lived on the banks of our river and lagoon for thousands of years and still managed to bequeath to us a wonderful and diverse eco system. Those earliest of settlers made peace with the harmony of the waters treating them as sacred and holy…reverence and wonder. They knew the larder would remain inexhaustible if the balance was maintained. It lasted at least a millenium until us.
For we, as Americans, believed we could bend the will of God while praising His name. My South Fork was not so much a river as part of an estuary. Whatever fresh water that flowed into the river was only runoff from the savannahs along its banks. Since there was no farming, there was no fertilizer to raise the phosphorous and nitrogen levels. The river could remain in its natural brackish state. The fresh mixing with the salt waters as the tides ebbed and flowed was what gave life to the Indian River Lagoon.
But, not being content with the perfect, we thought it better to build the Okeechobee Waterway known affectionately as the C-44 Canal. We added the C-24 and C-23 drainage canals to create farm and pasture instead of savannah and swamp. It was the end of God and the beginning of Mammon. Paradise was being lost for the unsustainable changing of our ecology.
At first we believed that draining and stopping the natural flow of our waterways would give us lush farmland and kill the mosquitos. We built towns in places that Native Americans never lived for they knew better. Crops were planted in soil believed to be lush until the water stopped flowing. We needed to keep all the new western settlements safe from flood so a dyke was built around the lake to prevent the natural flow south of the water.
We decided to connect the lake to the St. Lucie to further a navigational passage to the west. Now there was no problem in sending billions of gallons of fresh water rich in phosphorous and nitrogen from farms and septic tanks down past where my house stands. The fish, animals and plants (not to mention we, the residents,) are not as important to the politicians in Tallahassee or Washington as are the sugar barons around a lake that was made into a reservoir.
The Saint Lucie is fighting for survival. We attack at the edges and pray for deliverance from our sins. We use jargon cloaked in abbreviations such as CERP and BAMP to mask how utterly powerless we are. Green algae are on our shores and yet the obvious solution is locked away. The key is held by the subsidized rich and their sycophantic elected cronies in our state and national capitals.
I have always lived by a body of water. The East River or the Hudson River has been just down the block from where any of my apartments have been in New York City. I owned a country house on the banks of the Delaware River. Long Island Sound was at the end of my street in Connecticut where I lived for a decade. When I first saw the Saint Lucie, I knew I would live here one day.
The river still flows past my house. It is calming and seemingly beautiful in its majesty. I imagine that if and when the water continues to flow in a hundred years, it will seem on the surface much the same. However, will it bring the seeds of a future bountiful life or the barren silhouette of what was in the past? We have it in our power to save the river and the lagoon. 75% of the voters have said yes to our salvation. It is only the few in Tallahassee doing the bidding of the greedy that prevent it from actually happening.