Stop bleeding Lake Okeechobee!

My husband and I left south Florida in 1987, and never planned to return. But a trip to visit family in 2009 accidentally brought us to the Treasure Coast, and we fell in love with the area. In 2010 we came down to find a home. After two weeks of looking and not being able to decide where to live, we decided to pack it in and try again another time.

We reached this decision as were driving south over the Roosevelt Bridge. As we crested the bridge, I looked to the west at the beautiful boats at Sunset Bay Marina, the late afternoon sun shimmering across the river, and the wide expanse of green beyond the river. “This is where I want to live,” I announced. I had never been more sure of anything in my life. Little did we know that from that vantage point, we could see the dock of the house that we would find the next day.

We spent the summer of 2010 exploring our wet backyard - the South Fork, the North Fork, the wide water between downtown Stuart and Rio, Manatee Pocket, the sandbars, the inlet, and the lagoon north to Ft. Pierce and south to Jupiter. This was truly the Treasure Coast, and the waterway was its mother lode. 

I started volunteering at Florida Oceanographic and became fascinated with local marinelife. We took up snorkeling and explored the mangrove islands in the lagoon, delighting in the nursery of fish, crabs, and birds that lived there. On one particularly stellar day at high tide off Sailfish Point, the water was as clear as our swimming pool. A green turtle swam past our boat, and then we spotted a manatee with her calf. We quietly pulled our boat onto the beach of a nearby island, careful not to disturb a flock of roseate spoonbills that rested in the mangroves.

In the summer of 2011, we were surprised when the Corps of Engineers started releasing water from Lake O into the river. The Lake O releases were something we had heard about after we moved here, but we were under the impression that it happened rarely, usually in anticipation of a hurricane. 

We had no desire to swim in water laced with fertilizer and pesticides, and would sit on our dock in the eerie stillness. The baitfish were gone, the birds were gone, and the dolphins, rays, and manatees we often saw from the dock were gone. The oysters at Shepard Park across Frazier Creek were no longer spitting water. It was as quiet as a graveyard.

And now the Corps of Engineers is bleeding the lake again, and every rainy summer promises to bring more of the same. We have only been in the water once this season, and now we have a sickening neon-green algae in the shallows by our dock where our Great Blue Heron used to feed. The view from the Roosevelt Bridge today is one of devastation and loss, laced with a sickening brown foam.

We have to stop the bleeding. As stewards of the most bio-diverse ecosystem in the country, we have a responsibility to protect it.

What can we do? Start by writing a letter and sending it to every one of our Florida legislators. Tell them that it’s time to stop protecting the sugar industry and time to start protecting a unique natural resource. Let our governor know that it’s time to stop ignoring what is happening to our state. It doesn’t have to be eloquent or lengthy. Just put it in an email and send it. It’s time. 

Contact information is on the FOS website (www.floridaocean.org). Click on “Get Involved,” and then “Contact Your Legislators.”

Living well is the best revenge

Living well is the best revenge (George Herbert)

I grew up in a game-playing family, and one of our favorites was a game called “Mille Bornes” (pronounced Meel Born). It is a unique card game that mimics a road race. Each player or team tries to be the first to accomplish 1000 miles or, in French, mille bornes. Accumulating mileage cards up to 1000 points would quickly grow monotonous if not for the extra excitement in the way of hazards a player can throw at one’s competition to slow them down, such as a red light, a speed limit, an empty gas tank, a flat tire, or a traffic accident. Corresponding safety cards are also included, only four per deck: Right-of-Way (which makes you impermeable to red lights and speed limits), Extra Tank (which ensures you never run out of gas), Puncture-proof Tire (enough said), and Driving Ace (the ultimate in defensive driving). Then, and here’s where it gets really exciting, they (those crafty game designers) added the coup fourré (pronounced coo foo-ray). 

The words alone are magic. (As an eight-year-old, I was throwing this phrase around like I spoke French fluently.) When a player draws one of these superhuman safety cards, she has the option of not playing it on the table right away. It can be played immediately to prevent ever having to deal with such a hazard in the future or, more strategically, retained in the hand until an opponent unwittingly throws the corresponding hazard on you. Not only does the owner of the safety card get to shout “Coup fourré!” and disrupt the normal flow of the game by playing out of turn, but also play the card horizontally (as opposed to the non-coup fourré way of playing it vertically), remove the offending hazard while rendering herself forever impermeable to it, AND take an extra turn. The coup fourré is the highlight of the game, and adds beaucoup de points to your score  when tallied at the end.

Originally coup fourré was a fencing term used to describe a fencer fending off an opponent’s attack AND counter-thrusting in the same maneuver - a twofer. I’m not sure if it’s a phrase commonly used in the French language today to describe any act of recovering from a blow by bestowing a bigger (or at least more satisfying) blow on your adversary, but that’s what it came to mean in Mille Bornes. Right back at ya, buddy!

My husband and I were making the thousand-mile journey (coincidence? I think not) from Connecticut, where we had just closed out one chapter of our lives, to Florida, where the next one was to begin. On the three-day journey we had lots of time to reflect on the happenings of the past year. My husband’s job had been eliminated, we chose to adjust to our new financial situation by selling our house and boat in Connecticut and moving to Florida to eliminate a mortgage and unnecessarily high property taxes, and my boss had arranged for me to move my job to Florida. I would be working out of our home. I was feeling pretty good about the turn our lives had taken, and I told my husband as much. He gave me a fist bump and said, “Good for you!” only I misunderstood him and thought he said, “Coup fourré!”, a term I hadn’t heard in years. The return of this nostalgic phrase with all its delightful connotations was as serendipitous as our new life. 

Our move to Florida was the coup fourré of a lifetime. Sometimes what seems like just an attempt to keep your head above water can be the perfect counter-thrust. Right back at ya, buddy!

The bottom falls out from under you, and here you are.

What could possibly motivate two people, who at mid-life are not so enthusiastic at the thought of a major life change, to leave a home they had known for 23 years for the relative outback of Florida? We had lived here before, right out of college, so we had an idea of what we were getting into, at least with the weather. We got married down here, and this is where we started our family. And then we gladly moved up North. We found the heat and mosquitos oppressive, the vegetation without beauty, and the lack of cultural opportunities uninspiring. Why then did we come back?

Well, first of all, we are not back where we were in the truest sense. Martin County, where we live now, is a different animal than Palm Beach County, the county to our south where we lived when we were starting out. After we left Palm Beach County in 1987, we continued to visit family in the area. We witnessed a dramatic change in the development of the county over the years, and each time we visited I repeated my vow never to live there again. Palm Beach County has become part of the greater concrete-and-asphalt whole of Southern Florida. Martin County has somehow managed to escape the tourism trappings and stay true to its Old Florida beginnings. We love our quaint little town of Stuart. How it can reside just 15 miles north of the county line and manage to retain such a delightfully different character astounds me. In my heart they are worlds apart.

Martin County may still have heat and mosquitos, but it has more green space per capita than any other county in the country. It takes pride in its unique habitats and promotes its natural beauty. What I once considered ugly scrub I now see as part of a thriving ecosystem. The vegetation may be unusual, but so are the amazing animals who rely on it for sustenance and shelter. There’s an environmental world out there just teeming with intrigue and wonder and waiting to be explored. I’ve explored museums, theaters, and galleries around the world, and continue to do so when I travel; at home I’m exploring my own backyard. 

When I first visited and fell in love with Stuart four years ago, before I knew how close to retirement I actually was, I began to think for the first time about the possibility of retiring in Florida. Until then, Florida was to me where people go who have no better idea of what to do with their retirement  years. It was the default. Somehow the mentality of “Well, I’m retired now. I guess it’s time to move to Florida.” escaped me. Then I met Stuart and realized it is very possible to choose to retire in Florida.

Okay, I won’t lie. It wasn’t the thrill of living in Stuart that caused us to move here and retire at the age of 53. We weren’t planning on retiring so young. But suddenly my husband found himself without a job, we needed to redefine our lives, and here we are. Although I had my doubts after the first year of living here, when the dust began to settle, as to whether or not we made the right choice, it began to dawn on me about six months ago that we had. I don’t look upon it as a particularly enlightened decision. In many ways it seems more like fortunate happenstance. But one thing I know for sure: everything that happened from the time my husband’s job was eliminated until now was meant to happen. I look back now on the life we were living before that fateful day and realize we are so fortunate to be here in this wonderful place. As my husband and I always say at times of severe bliss, and with a little fist-bump, “Coup fourré!”

In 2010 we found ourselves, not entirely by choice, retired and living in Florida. This is an account of our struggles to survive in a place in which I never envisioned us.

Okay, maybe “survive” is too strong a word, but for the first six months I felt like I was barely getting by. Everything had happened so quickly. I thought I wanted to move to Florida, and I was trying to be spontaneous for once in my life, so I jumped on the swiftly spinning merry-go-round before it slowed to a halt and everyone went home. Then one day I found myself sitting in the downstairs bedroom/office of my new home, working a job I hated, and I realized I didn’t want to be there. This is why I’m not spontaneous. I’m a little slower than most to realize what I’m getting myself into.

It was mid-summer, and the heat was oppressive. I had lived in Florida at two other times in my life and knew what I was getting into with the weather. There really should be another word for the season from June through September in Florida. Summer, a season that I relished in New England, was not an appropriate name for the abysmal soup pot outside our door. I told myself, before I moved here, that I could choose to stay indoors in summer, just as I chose to stay indoors in winter in New England. Well, my house in Connecticut had a dog door. The house in Florida, being built to hurricane standards of impenetrable concrete block, stucco, and shatter-proof glass, is not amenable to such conveniences, and we were required to walk the dogs daily - five times daily, on average. 

Our choice. We realized it when we found the house, but we also realized our dogs wouldn’t be with us much longer. One was terminally ill when we left Connecticut, and the other aging. If I thought the summer heat here unbearable, at least I wasn’t walking around the block in 95-degree heat and 95% humidity wearing a fur coat. Connecticut was rapidly becoming the place where I left behind my friends, my beautiful house and yard, and any memories of healthy and happy dogs. And Florida eventually became the place where I lost my dogs to liver disease and stroke. But as I discovered, as the silver lining of all those summer thunderheads began to expose itself, it is also the place where we found the most amazing, compassionate vet. It was inevitable that I would lose my dogs. I was so fortunate that it was at his gentle hand.

And so the tide began to turn. Stay tuned for more stories of happiness and light, as our hapless heroine comes to terms with her new life in the Sunshine State.