Voyager by Russell Banks

Author:Russell Banks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

PRIMAL DREAMS

When you fly into Miami International Airport from Newark and drive south and west for two hours on Florida’s Turnpike, you travel through the early twenty-first century in North America. Condos and malls and housing developments like orange-capped mushrooms spring up from horizon to horizon. Fast-food outlets, trailer parks, used-car lots with banners crackling in the breeze, and, in Homestead, the lingering wreckage of last year’s hurricanes—stripped live oak trees, decapitated palms, boarded-up buildings, temporary housing—give way to tomato and sugarcane fields where migrant workers from Jamaica and Mexico toil under the subtropical sun. It’s the inescapable present.

But then, suddenly, you drive through the entrance to Everglades National Park, and it’s as if you’ve passed through a gate into another time altogether, a distant, lost time eons before the arrival of the first Europeans, before even the rumored arrival of the Arawak in dugouts fleeing the Caribbean archipelago and the invading Caribs. Out on the Anhinga Trail, barely beyond earshot of the cars and RVs lumbering toward the lodge and marina in Flamingo, at the southern end of the park, the only sounds you hear are the wind riffling through the saw grass and the plash of fish feeding on insects and one another and the great long-necked anhingas diving or emerging from the mahogany waters of a sluggish, seaward-moving slough. You hear a hundred frogs cheeping and croaking and the sweet wet whistle of a red-winged blackbird. A primeval six-foot-long alligator passes silently through the deep slough to the opposite side, coasts to a stop in the shallows, and lurks, a corrugated log with eyes. An anhinga rises from the water and flies like a pterodactyl to a cluster of nearby mangrove roots and cumbrously spreads and turns its enormous wings like glistening black kites silhouetted against the noontime sun.

A rough carpet of water lilies—clenched, fist-size buds about to bloom—floats on the surface of the slough, while just below, long-nosed gars luff in threes and fours, and bass and bluegills collect in schools, abundant and wary of the next upper link in the food chain, but strangely secure, like carp in a Japanese pool, as if here they have no unnatural enemies. A large soft-shelled turtle hauls herself out of the water and patiently begins to lay her dozens of eggs in the gray limestone soil, depositing them like wet vanilla-colored seeds. Farther down the embankment lies the wreckage of an old nest broken open by birds, the leathery shells smashed and drying in the sun. A dark blue racer snake slides into the brush. Mosquitoes gather in slow, buzzing swirls. The sun is high and it’s hot, ninety degrees, with a slight breeze blowing from the east. It’s mid-May, yes—but what century?

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