Florida Weekly, September 5, 2024
With the possible exception of the boundary lands separating Canada and Minnesota, the Florida peninsula is a geographic fabric unlike any other in North America or even the world.
It’s a tapestry woven in both subtropical and tropical waters. It’s a child of oceans and rain. It’s sometimes as much a part of the sky as of the earth, with its shallow limestone shelves underlying clay and sand — especially during torrential summer downpours. Then, the world above and the world below seem to become a single dilution of water.
Unlike any other place on the planet, the 120-mile-wide peninsula is a mostly flat sheet tilted imperceptibly southward from Orlando and especially from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay, a total distance of about 250 miles.
Throughout the expanse, a 5,000-year-old ecosystem takes in all the water from sky and earth, sheds it in sheets to estuaries and oceans, filtering the rest in a slow crawl of 100 feet per day in some places all the way to the peninsula’s southern tip, where it can drift away toward Florida’s Keys.
Comments