“Everglades is one place I shall not forget. Miguel meanwhile might be my last human link with the place” Neil said.
They were walking out of the car park towards the arrival gate in Vancouver international airport, to receive Miguel. Neil explained how unique the everglades were in Florida, as a river that lost its way and meandered through a vast swamp of sawgrass. The water slowed down so much that it would travel a few miles every month, till it eventually reached the ocean. That vast swampland created an unique eco-system not to be duplicated anywhere.

“I have never been to Florida. I hear much about it though, as a vacation spots, and some friends who have been there in the winter.” Mabel commented ruefully.
“I know. Florida is a popular destination for folks living in the colder parts of USA and Canada and even Europe. It is also a hub for the cruise ship industry. I am not particularly fond of the tourist industry though. To me Florida is unique for the eco-system.”
Mabel snaked her arm around his waste. She was as tall as Neil and liked holding him while they walked. She apparently liked being seen in public with him. Neil was not too fond of public display of personal affection. He did not relish the thought of kissing, or being kissed, by anybody in a public place. He was more orthodox than Mabel, he guessed.
“What makes Florida special in your eyes ?” Mabel asked.
They crossed the street and walked into the airport building. A giant electronic screen flashed information on which aircraft had landed and which had not – in english and french. Neil glanced at it. It would be another five minutes before Miguel would land. It might take another half hour, depending on traffic lines at the customs, for him to collect his bags and walk out.
“Lets take a coffee while we wait”
They sat at the coffee shop adjacent to the passenger arrival gate, with two paper cups of coffee.
“It was corals that started it” he said, stretching his legs.
“Corals ? What ?”
“Corals that were the works of dying micro-organisms that deposited their skeleton on top of each other in the warm oceans of the US gulf. This process built slabs of coral from the shallow  seabed up to the surface, and then spread sideways like a table top of white porous slab of soft rock composed mostly of calcium and dirt, going miles and miles in all directions. That was the platform over which the mangrove trees with their unique root system created massive filters in the  shallow ocean. Passage of the moon around the planet and the resulting tides and ocean currents brought floating debris that would be caught by the sieve of the mangrove roots. Slowly, a thin layer of soil would form. As hundreds of thousands of years pass, the process allows local trees to find ways to encroach into this oceanside swampland, and miniature versions of the tree that could withstand brackish water begin to form a kind of watery forest.”
Neil took a sip of coffee. Mabel was listening. She nodded but did not interrupt.
“Fish, birds and animals adopt this specialized land. High rainfall and depressions in this newly created land makes for gigantic fresh water lakes. Resulting rivers that would drain the land and lead the run off to the sea gets trapped by high growth sawgrass. Over time  the dense sawgrass slows the flow of fresh water and turned it all into a gigantic fresh water marsh that grew like a long slice of land that connected up with the continental north America, and was once claimed by Spain and is today known as Florida, one of the states of USA.”
Neil said that in one breath, and with a touch of drama. This brought the customary smile in Mabel. She liked Neil explaining things, and was same time amused as the way he explained, almost like a school teacher. She should have known that Florida or many of the southern states were claimed by Spain, or France of Mexico, at some point or another. She did not know how Florida came to be a landmass though.
“Let’s go there sometime together. Forget the cruise ships, and lets spend time at the Everglades.” Mabel suggested. She had a way of tugging his shirt sleeve to emphasize her point.
Neil had not known much about Florida’s geologic or geographic history, when he first landed there as an immigrant. He considered himself to be a reasonably well read person with a reasonable curiosity about the planet. But he had no idea how curiously unique the state of Florida was, and how much of that uniqueness was already gone, thanks to modern human civilization. He had fallen in love with the Florida Everglades the first time he visited the place, within a week of his arrival at Miami. He remembered sitting amazed at a quiet spot by the water, watching the fallen logs and the shadow cast by the overhanging low branches, and fish occasionally leaping out of the water surface. The splash of its fall back would break the tranquility, alerting him that this was a living eco-system. He saw alligators catching fish and get their heads off the water, to eat the fish with relish. He could hear the crunch of their teeth crushing the bones of the fish.
He saw darters sunning themselves on low branches by the water and herons standing still like a statue. He saw nesting Ospreys. This was a world he would return to, again and again, during his seven year long stay in Florida.
He would see the great blue heron even here British Columbia, as well as white crowned night herons. He would see sandhill cranes. He would see plenty of Ospreys and a hundred times as many bald eagles as he saw in Florida.
But there were no alligators here in BC. Neither any ibis or darter. He did not see blue jays in Vancouver, although there were Steller’s jays, equally colorful. He even saw many hummingbirds, something he had a hard time spotting in Florida. He remembered the beautiful scissor-tailed flycatchers that he found even in Dade county within site of the urban developments.
Mabel tugged her hand. “You are lost in thought.” she said.
“Yes. Was thinking about scissor-tailed Flycatchers of Flroida.”
Mabel did not know what a Flycatcher was, but could guess it was  a bird and that it had a tail like scissors. In time, he would tell her about them, she was sure.
He looked at his Timex watch. It was sort of old fashioned and an inexpensive model. It had a conventional dial but with numbers for the hours, instead of the original style of writing them in Roman letters. The main reason he liked this watch, was that it showed day of week and date of month side by side. Most other watches, he had been presented with, some of them quite expensive, showed either only the date, or nothing more than the time. He liked to see the day of week. It had gotten to be a sort of habit for him. So, he preferred the inexpensive but functional watch more than the more fancy ones in his drawer. In fact, his other watches were all dysfunctional since he never even changed their battery, in the last two decades. Perhaps he should try selling them off in eBay or Craigslist.
It may be another fifteen minutes before Miguel emerged. They had a good view of the area and could see the trickle of travelers coming out, either meeting with loved ones or heading out for a taxi.
“I want to see them too, some day, and you are going to show me. Yes ?” Mabel responded, finishing her coffee.
“What?”
“Florida, and the Flycatchers”
“Ohh, OK. We can take a vacation sometime, say for two weeks. Its a long drive from here, so it’d be better to fly there and rent a car. The place is full of history – geologic, geographic, as well as in paleoanthropology, not to mention of recent human interactions of the post-Columbian era.”
Mabel looked at him with mock wide eyes and grinned. She had a wide mouth which opened up when she grinned.
“Yes, sir, professor Dusty.”
Neil laughed. “Did you know some of the terror birds of South America had actually crossed the land bridge and ended up in the southerns states including in Florida ? That was before the better evolved mammalian feline predators could push them back and enter the south American continent. South America did not have a killer cat till rather recent times, you know.”
“I did not know. Whats a terror bird?”
They got up, put the used cups into the trash and sauntered down to the arrival area. Soon, Miguel should arrive through the gate. He did have a cell phone but was not going to use it here because of roaming charges. So he would not be to announce his arrival to Neil. He had said so before leaving. Besides, he was a simple man and did not know how to send text messages through phones. He was also a poor man, relatively speaking. Apparently, his mobile phone was a gift from his grown up daughter, who wished to be able to check up on her dad time to time. The charges for the phone was being paid by his daughter.
How Neil came to know Miguel and befriend him, was itself a strange story. But, come to think of it, perhaps it was not that strange. Florida had been a melting pot of different kinds of people coming across each other for a long time. Everybody was a sort of visitor to the place. No one really was a native there. Neil came through legal and high end channels of immigration. Miguel came differently. Neil moved on. Miguel did not, or could not. Somehow, fate made them unlikely friends. And the friendship endured, even through the decade since Neil left Florida, never to return there again.
“A terror bird was a giant flightless bird in similar lines to the Rhea of south America, Ostrich of Africa or a Cassowary of Australia of today, or the now extinct Moa of New Zealand. The only difference is, that giant bird was a fast running ground hunter that liked chasing down early pigs and horses and swallow them limb by limb. It had a massive head and even more massive beak designed to tear limbs from animals. A terrifying creature. It became extinct as the ancestors of leopards and others of the killer cat family evolved and crossed the land bridge, and entered south America. It could not survive the feline competition.”

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I wrote this much, and stopped. It was Friday late evening. I had been checking on a few old VHS tapes that was converted to digital. Average rate of success was around 80%. This meant, out of every five tapes of home video I had shot twenty years ago, four were salvageable and one would be deteriorated beyond recovery. I had been peering at the latest batch, scene upon scene.
I remembered the large eared male African elephant standing tall in Ngorongoro crater, in Tanzania, back in January of 1991. I had not seen that scene on screen for so long. And now, it was there before me. I remember the night spent at Tree Tops, the famous spot in Kenya were you can see wild animals up close from the wooden house on top of a tree, while elephants, buffalo and even rhinoceros came to drink at the waterhole.
Tomorrow I had planned to go outdoors to photograph nature and wildlife as one can find in these parts of southern British Columbia. I had a new gimbal head for the long lenses for my camera. It was made by Manfrotto of Italy. It should help keep the heavy lens and camera assembly centered on my tripod as I swung the camera rapidly to follow a moving object, such as a bird in flight.
I wished to write about Miguel. But then, I wished to write about so many other things too. Miguel was an immigrant from Ecuador that worked as a caretaker in the office building where I worked in Miami so many years ago. He had been in Miami for almost twenty years when I first arrived. And yet, his world was small and he almost never went outside of town. He did not know about the existence of The Everglades. I found it hard to believe.
Okay, I too did not know much about it myself before I arrived. But my curiosity made me aware of the place within a few days. I realized that I enjoyed some privileges Miguel did not have. I had computer, and access to internet although internet itself was just a handful of years old in the public space. I had money in my pocket and interest enough to walk into book stores to look up travel books on Florida. I had a car and a driving license. I could go where I wanted. Miguel did not have any of that. Also, he was not very literate in English, although he could speak a little.
Finally, he did not have friends or associates that were excited about the Everglades, till he met me. So he did not learn about it from his usual friends. In that, we had a common theme. I too did not have a friend that was interested about the Everglades. I had lots of friends through my work, and I met more folks through them. My circle of friends and associates were wide and very different from that of Miguel. And yet, we both shared one theme – we did not learn about the Everglades from our friends.
But I had virtual friends already through internet bulletin boards. I was advised to check a few things as I went to Florida. The Everglades was one of them. I was privileged to have these sources available where Miguel was not.
And about British Columbia, are things much different?
Well, I know folks that have been here for thirty years and did not know about Reifel migratory bird sanctuary, or what makes British Columbia geographically unique. They did not know of the contribution of glaciation in carving the landscape of British Columbia, nor the phenomenal work that simple animals like beavers did to transform this landscape. They did not know how the salmon evolved itself to take advantage of a new niche as the glaciers retreated over newly exposed land. Nor did they know about the evolution of polar bears to take advantage of winter sea ice to hunt a protein rich diet – the thick blubber of fat on marine mammals out in the open arctic ocean. Many had never been into the arctic circle in Canada or knew about the issues of the warming oceans there. Most of my compatriots did not know about the snow geese arriving here from Siberia at the onset of each winter.
In some ways, Miguel in Miami and myself in Vancouver lived in compatible parallel worlds. We were surrounded by global villagers and residents of nowhere. It did not matter which continent or geographic region you lived in. There was a Pizza hut round the corner, a department store that sold the latest fashion imitation, a pub, a night club and MTV channel. What did it matter where you lived. It was all standardized by the globalized economy, did it not?

James Lovelock's portrait

But there are also other issues on my mind.
Take James Lovelock, the scientist that once worked in California’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Still alive at 90, he was one of the last free spirits of science, one that pursued the subject without being a representative or any institution, unlike the hordes of quasi-scientists of today that only work to bias public view towards whatever or whoever was paying them. The world today had a decreasing number of real politicians, real social reformers, real anthropologists, free thinkers or real scientists. Every one worked to promote either a their employers or their doctrine. Few were willing to think through issues from outside their proverbial box.
The issue of increasing population was one pet peeve. More I asked famous people, more I got disenchanted with their vague and evasive response.
Well, at least James Lovelock looked at issues straight on and without a tinted glass, except a few isolated issues of his nationality. He is a British. In his latest book he takes example of Winston Churchill as a great person worth quoting. I, on the other hand was born in India. I read through his by now well documented dislike of the Indian people. I knew of his derogatory comments regarding India and Indian people, as well as his actions and inactions during the Bengal famine that happened in his watch, killing about four million people. I knew how much of Indian national output and wealth Britain was sucking out of India right through the war years while it watched millions of Indians die out of a man made famine. All this was reasonably well documented today. To me, most all politicians are double faced, and Churchill is merely a great example of his class. But I forgive James Lovelock to be biased towards CHurchill. I guess I am biased a bit towards Gandhi and Tagore. Perhaps more than a bit.
Anyhow, I had read James Lovelock a few times and thought a lot about the Gaia hypotheses. I was aware of the fact that his notions were partially supported by different groups, while some of his notions were vehemently opposed by others. I found the notion very very intriguing and quite believable in a thoughtful way.
I had also read Gwynne Dyer a few times. It was interesting to note that Dyer mentioned Lovelock in one of his later books named “Climate Wars”. I found an electronic version of the book and bought it. I have gotten a bit wary of buying printed books which fill up my shelf and become a burden after I have read it once. Nobody else has an interest to read them anyway. Its such a waste of paper and resources. An audio book is my first preference. If that is not available, then an eBook that I can read through a reader such as iPad is the second choice. And so, I was reading “Climate Wars” by Dyer on my iPad. I was tickled to note Dyer mention James Lovelock and his books on the Gaia theory. I myself had read The Revenge of Gaia by Lovelock. Besides, his most recent book, as a final warning to mankind, had come out. It was called The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A final warning. I had that book too, in audio format. I was simultaneously reading both, sort of. I read Dyer at lunch time and time to time at home. I listened to Lovelock while driving to work or returning from work. It was normal for me to pursue two or three different books side by side in parallel rather than in series, through the course of a few weeks.
Thoughts covered in those books engaged me. In fact I bought those books because I share a common interest in those themes. So it was nice to find noted journalists such as Dyer mention James Lovelock and the notion of the earth acting as an organism. I too considered the planet in those terms, like a colony of mutually reactive organisms – like a Portuguese man-of-war, the famous poisonous colony of self cohabiting organisms that unsuspecting humans are known to mistake as a benign jelly fish. It is neither jelly, nor fish, nor jelly fish. It is not even an “it”. It is a colony of many creatures, and deadly for any human wanting to play with it.
Anyhow, I had a wish to write about this thing too. No, not about jelly fish or a Portuguese man-of-war, but about Gaia and how humans are spoiling the planet at a breakneck speed. Lovelock had written his previous book, Revenge of Gaiga, where  Gaiga, the living planet, takes revenge against humans for spoiling the planet. It makes human life miserable, and forces humans to die in large numbers or change their living habits totally. One way or another, Gaia was not the passive environment merely responding to changes imposed on it. Gaia was able to trigger unexpected reversals of climate and accelerate the process of change that fell outside of all the human engineered climate models on computers. Gaia was going to kick humans in the rear.
And then he wrote the next one, the most recent, which I was now reading. It was not inconsequential that a slowly growing number of scientists were beginning to look at Lovelock more seriously.
I was taken by his clear sightedness when he compared climate change through carbon emission, and the issue of generating power through alternative means. He cuts through a lot of bull – especially about the so called renewable energy debate, of bio-fuel coming from food crops, and wind farms. His views on nuclear energy is fundamentally different from proponents of green peace and sustainable living.
These issues deserved great deal of thinking and debate. The problem is, there were not many that I knew, who were even remotely concerned about the future which went past their individual lives.
Also, very few experts wished to look towards a solution to the climate crisis that did not provide a financial benefit to the promoter of the solution. Everything had to be profit oriented. Save the world and become a millionaire. Thats the only motto that the Governments, corporations, economists and the media understand.
I might write about my general frustration at people around me for being nonplussed, and for providing a lip service to various causes, and for being so disappointingly trivial and uncaring.
My dilemma was, like in this blog, to decide if I should write all this as a personal journal or as part of a series of short stories, or as a novel, or what.
But, having a bit of a stubborn streak in me, I am also tempted to write in ways that breaks conventional wisdom and challenge the reason why one should write anything.
Could it be a rant ?
Anyhow, I decided to keep the title of this blog unchanged – Miguel, the Everglades, and Lovelock’s warning.
The title had no place for Mabel.
But then, it had no place for me either.