Big Water Blues

Thirty miles from the lake, the straight gutter we'd been following came to an abrupt end, and suddenly the old Kissimmee River reappeared, braiding and coiling through its ancient floodplain. In an enormously significant reversal that advertises the folly of gutterization to the world, the Corps and the South Florida Water Management District are returning 22 of 56 miles to their original condition. Seven miles had been restored in just the past year, and already this section looked wild and natural. Part of the plan--set in motion by the Florida legislature in 1976, only five years after the Corps' drag-line took its last bite--calls for buying all the land in the five-year floodplain (the area that, on average, floods once every five years).

Not all the dead trees we flew over were victims of high water. Many had been injected with herbicide by the district. These were melaleuca from Australia, the bane of native ecosystems, which had been planted by the Corps to stabilize the flood-control dike. In the Everglades, melaleuca are out of control, but on Lake Okeechobee the district is winning. And last year the district, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and the Corps replanted the dike with 10,000 native trees--custard apple, red maple, and bald cypress.

Out over the lake the picture brightened even more. Blowing east across the newly exposed flats like shreds of black silk were small, tight formations of pintail, blue-winged teal, green-winged teal, and Florida mottled duck--the first push of pioneers. Far to the southwest, the marshes of Audubon's Lake Okeechobee sanctuaries merged with haze and horizon, regreening in the sunlight and newly dried soil or blackened by desperately needed prescribed burns. Farther out, where the lake turned silver, we could make out the chartreuse brushstrokes of surviving bulrushes and bulrushes planted by Fox and his volunteers. Now, for the first time in more than a decade, the bulrushes were producing seeds. "To go back and restore all the 18 million plants we lost on Little Grassy would cost $6.3 million," Fox had told me. "Now nature's doing most of it for us."

Last January, at its conference in Stuart, Florida, the Everglades Coalition, an alliance of 41 environmental groups, including the National Audubon Society and Audubon of Florida, predicted that if restoration is allowed to proceed on schedule, within 10 years roughly 50,000 acres of submergent plants and 100,000 acres of emergent plants will have returned to the lake's littoral zones, and with them most of the missing fish and wildlife, including at least 30 nesting pairs of snail kites.

Despite the explosion of life caused by the first low water in a dozen years, enormous problems remain. Lake Okeechobee gets 500 tons of phosphorus annually from dairy, citrus, and ranching operations in the north; and in the south, polluted flood and irrigation water is "backpumped" by the sugar industry--that is, pumped back into the lake so the sugarcane won't drown. Natural phosphorus inflow is roughly 100 tons. In 1987, about the time the lake began to blanch with massive, malodorous blooms of blue-green algae, Florida's legislature established an average phosphorus goal of 400 tons a year--300 tons more than the lake and the Everglades can handle. With luck, the treatment areas currently planned for the north shore will remove 90 tons of phosphorus per year, but an additional 310 tons will still need to be removed if the lake and the Everglades are to live. "If we don't restore the lake, nothing else will work quite right," said Gray. "We're spending $7.8 billion on the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, but only half a billion of that for the watershed north of the lake [mainly for additional reservoirs and stormwater-treatment areas and for dredging muck from streams], where most of the pollution comes from. That's not going to get the Everglades fixed."

Before humans messed with it, Lake Okeechobee had expanded and contracted like any other healthy heart and lungs. During the summer rainy season, the lake's shore would move six miles inland and the surface would rise to 20 feet above sea level, spilling over the southern rim into a 40-mile-wide, 100-mile-long swath of sawgrass. The Everglades, as English surveyors started calling this marsh 150 or so years ago, was like no ecosystem on the planet--a river of grass nourished by the lake. It filtered out solids, sucked up nutrients, and delivered sweet, soft water to aquifers and Florida Bay.

The contractions of Lake Okeechobee were as vital as its expansions. When the water receded, the organic muck that had built up on the bottom dried, decomposed, burned, and blew away. Dabbling ducks wobbled down onto shallows rife with seeds and young, succulent vegetation. Shorebirds scampered over wet flats, gorging on the aquatic larvae of dragonflies, damselflies, midges, mayflies, and caddisflies. Then these insects would grow wings, shuck their exoskeletons, and billow up in great clouds of beige and black that wafted like woodsmoke across lake and marsh, nourishing the whole food chain, from fish and frogs to the birds, turtles, and alligators that ate the fish and frogs.

In autumn, insect blooms would fuel the continent's largest migration of swallow-tailed kites and coincide with the arrival of insectivorous neotropical birds--warblers, tanagers, vireos, nightjars, and the like--all funneling down from half a continent through the tip of Florida, exhausted and desperate for energy to carry them across the gulf. In the spring they migrated the other way, again refueling on the lake's insects after the arduous gulf crossing. Then, during the 1990s, the flying insects crashed. Taking their place were sludge worms--useless to birds and virtually all the other life that had depended on the insect blooms.

The first major assault on Lake Okeechobee began in 1887, when humans connected it to the Gulf of Mexico via the Caloosahatchee River. Then, in 1926, they connected it to the Atlantic via the St. Lucie River. This way the lake could be flushed whenever bureaucrats supposed that it was "too high." In 1967 the Army Corps of Engineers finished girdling the lake with the 38-foot-high Hoover dike. All these manipulations shrank Okeechobee; desiccated the Everglades; sickened Florida Bay by depriving its flora and fauna of the brackish water in which they had evolved; and, in the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries, killed seagrasses, oysters, crabs, and other organisms intolerant of fresh water.

Yet the tweaking continued. In 1971 the Corps finished its "improvement" of the Kissimmee River, ripping it from the embrace of its wildlife-rich wetlands, yanking out its lazy curves, forcing it into a dragline-excavated ditch, dredging out its life and magic, even the magic of its name, which now became "C-38."