No one expects a plane on approach to that sunny climate to crash. But it does, and when it does, it fragments and sinks, everyone dies from impact or fire or drowning. No one will ever know for sure. Some bodies float. Others disappear. The swamp absorbs what could have been a catastrophe on solid, populated ground.
The headlines read: NO SURVIVORS LIKELY.
Breathing fuzzy swamp waters through green darkness, lurching at the crackle of every blade from the worm-infested sod or the howl of unseen creatures in the sawgrass, a young woman crawls. Her parents beg her not to go, not to leave the safety of their midwestern spring fields for the wild Florida coast.Â
She crawls, but her eyes are foggy, and the mosquito bites itch, and the fire ant bites from a day ago burn and blister. She wants to sink to the bottom of a cool ocean, to let waves lick her wounds, purify them with sea salt and burn the pain right out of her. She crawls on through the curtains of strangler.
She crawls through the black dirt, rich with stinging nettles, collecting beneath her fingernails, carrying its micro-organisms along, free-riders to be scraped out and washed away.Â
She crawls, daylight dripping through the bald cypress – the open sky from which the plane falls, spilling her into nature’s lair to live or die one more time. An hour, a minute, or a second from now, she might conjure up hope out of the confusion.Â
That might be helicopter rotors whipping the wind above and the grasses around her. No, it’s an airboat.
The headlines read: MIRACLE IN THE EVERGLADES.
