Forgotten Workers of Early Homestead II

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A Look at the Uses of Oral History

by Jeff Blakley

In this post, I am continuing to explore the lives of ordinary working stiffs in early Homestead. The subject of this post is Willie Alonzo King.

Susan Dryer, the owner of Ages Ago Antiques in Homestead, donated a booklet to the Town Hall Museum entitled, Hand-Me-Downs. It is a collection of stories that were written by the sophomore class of South Dade High School in 1997 when they were members of the English Honor Society. The sponsor was Judy Hood.

In reading the stories, I was intrigued by one, Battling Nature’s Obstacles, written by Scott Richards, who was the grandson of a Mr. King, who told the story in 1994. The story is about the harsh winter of 1933 in Homestead, when the story-teller, Mr. King, stated that there was a hard freeze and the temperature got down to sixteen degrees. Scott wrote about the “smugpots” used to protect the trees in the groves and also described a fierce mosquito plague during the summer of 1933 when he wrote that one “local farmer lost 26 cows in one night because the cows inhaled mosquitos (sic) through their noses when they tried to breathe.”

According to Scott, “Mr. King was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina, on November 9, 1907. He had five brothers and one sister. He was the oldest boy, but his sister was older than he. He went to a small unnamed school on ‘Pace Hill’. Since he was the oldest boy, he often had to stay home and plow. Eventually, his dad became sick and he quit school and stayed home to work. He quit in the fifth grade.”

I found this essay fascinating because historians often use oral history as a starting point to discover more about the past. The essay has a few errors in it (temperatures dropping to 16 degrees and an incorrect name) but such is the nature of oral history.

I want to use this essay to show how I discovered who Mr. King, who is not further described in the essay, was.

Using the birth date given, I did a search in the census records available on Ancestry.com for the surname “King”, born in Hendersonville, NC in 1907. I found a WWII draft registration card in the name of Willie Alonzo King who worked at the Parman-Lehman Packing Company. I then found a memorial for him on Find A Grave, which listed his siblings and his parents. He was the oldest of five boys and had an older sister, Marie Louise King. I had found the right person because Willie died in 1996. The details about him in the essay matched what I had discovered.

I clicked on the link for the 1920 census and found that Willie’s parents were William A. and Ann E. King, 44 and 36. In 1920, they had 5 boys and one girl. Louise was about 2 years older than Willie and his brothers, Ernest, Guy, Craig, and Otto were all younger than he.

I then went back to the 1910 census and found just three children: Louise, 4; William, 2 and Ernest, 1.

Clicking on a link in that census for the father, William A. King, produced his death certificate. He died in 1928 at the Mission Hospital in Asheville, NC, which explains why Willie quit school to help support the family when his dad became sick. A link to a memorial for William Alonzo King on Find A Grave produced the fact that his mother was Margaret Pace (1853-1940), which explains the name of the school Willie, one of Margaret’s grand-children, went to on “Pace Hill.” The memorial also produced the name of the 6th son: Judge Dick King, who was killed in action in France shortly after his unit landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Guy King, the other son named, may have died as a youth.

In about 1929, he married Dorothy Sue Stepp and they had four children. Dorothy Sue died in Dade County in 1943 and Willie then married Beatrice Pace in Hendersonville on August 24, 1944. The Pace family is an old one in the area of Hendersonville – it goes back to at least Burrell Pope Pace, who died in the area in 1816.

In 1931, Willie A. King got a job working for W. K. Waldin, according to Scott – he wrote that Willie was an expert in grafting avocado trees. Scott is in error here – “W.K. Waldin” was William K. Walton, who owned a nursery business in Homestead. The names “Waldin” and “Walton” are often confused because they sound so much alike. During WWII, he worked for the Parman-Lehman Packing House. When it opened in the spring of 1935, it was located “in the warehouse building of the Lehman Transfer Co., opposite ‘Fertilizer Row’ on S.W. Flagler avenue,” according to a front page article in The Leader Enterprise of April 19, 1935. The company was founded by Lee H. Lehman, an early pioneer in Florida City and Clarence J. Parman, who was the architect who designed the Lily Lawrence Bow Library, a wing of James Archer Smith Hospital, a number of houses in the area and the National Guard Armory, among other buildings. His house still stands – it is located at 27250 S.W. 177 Avenue. Lehman homesteaded west of Detroit (now Florida City) on what is now S.W. 212 Avenue and S. W. 344 Street in 1911. Later in life, Willie started his own grove but retired after Hurricane Andrew and sold it, according to Scott’s re-telling of his grandfather’s story.

The statement in the essay that there was a freeze here in Dade County in 1933 when the temperature went down to 16 degrees is a wonderful case of how facts get distorted in oral history. There was a severe freeze in Florida on December 12-13, 1934, not in 1933. In that freeze, temperatures went down to 25 degrees in Belle Glade and 29 in Miami, the closest official weather station in Dade County at that time. It probably got down to 25 in the Homestead area, too, but that is still warmer than 16.

Interestingly enough, the Future Farmers of America chapter in Homestead had a field of tomatoes 3 miles from Biscayne Bay on the south side of the Florida City canal. People driving out to the FP&L plant at Turkey Point now would never guess that tomatoes were once grown that close to the Bay.

The statement that cows died from inhaling mosquitoes is difficult to believe but it does happen rarely. A documented case occurred in East Naples as recently as 1988 and the story was carried by both the Ocala Star Banner and the Chicago Tribune. There were quite a number of cows in the Homestead area in the 1930s as there were at least three dairies here – Pioneer (owned by H. H. Ewing) was west of Florida City, Alpine (owned by O. B. Parker) was north of Homestead on Krome Avenue and there was also a dairy owned by Harley Core in Silver Palm.

Oral history offers valuable insights into the past of any community but has to be used with caution because it is often wrong. However, it provides clues to what really happened, but discovering that truth requires documentation.

Willie was not a wealthy man nor did he figure prominently in Homestead history – he was just a working man raising a family, like so many other forgotten people in the history of this area. In the 1970s, he worked as a nurseryman for Harold E. Kendall and lived in a modest home west of Krome Avenue on Epmore Drive.

It is good to remember that when writing history, these “forgotten people” vastly outnumber the figures that history so often focuses on.

Postscript: I wrote this article in May of 2017 and recently had the good fortune to sit down and speak to Ardel Parman Price, a daughter of Clarence Parman. She confirmed for me that Willie King managed the groves of her father.

1912 Homestead Area Telephone Subscribers

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By Jeff Blakley

I was recently sent a series of photographs taken in Detroit in 1911. I’ve managed to identify some of the people in the photographs. One of them, I think, is that of Alice M. Graves, wife of Thomas L. Graves, who came to Detroit in 1911 from Pontiac, Illinois, where he was a teacher. In researching Thomas, I came across this most interesting advertisement in the South Florida Banner for the Dade County Telephone Co. in Homestead.1 It lists the number of rings to call other subscribers. Click on the title below the image to view a larger and more readable image.

Dade Co Telephone Co Ad

Dade County Telephone Co. Advertisement

What intrigued me about the advertisement is that a company called “Morrison & Graves” is listed in the Detroit Local section. Roy A. Morrison and his wife Lura B. were from Pontiac, Illinois also. Like so many other pioneers in this area, he moved to Miami by 1920 and became a successful real estate broker, sending his twin daughters to college. It is reasonable to assume that the Morrison & Graves company was involved in real estate in Detroit. Edward Stiling and the Brookers were not the only people involved in real estate in Detroit by any means.

There are a number of spelling errors in the advertisement. “Brooker and Layman” should be Brooker and Lehman, “A. C. Horn” should be A. C. Horne, “Hamlin’s Mill” should be Hainlin’s Mill, Otto Fanup” should be Otto Froriep and “Gosman & Sons” should be Gossman & Sons.

I have published posts on E. H. Ring, the Brooker family, Walter Tweedell, J. U. Free and the recollections of Charles Gossman.

Note that Tom and Henry Brooker lived in Detroit, not in Homestead, in 1912. Note also the presence of pay stations, where customers would go to make long distance calls. It is interesting to see that there were no telephone numbers in the Homestead area at this early date.

By June 15, there were at least three more subscribers: Roy A. Marsh, the surveyor who lived in Longview (4 longs, Longview local); Virgil Grennell (3 short, 1 long, Redland local) and Barney Waldin (2 long, 1 short, Redland local).

In 1912, there were approximately 1,500 people living in the area south of Goulds so this very short list of telephone subscribers indicates how uncommon telephones were in this area at that time. Presumably, people who did not have telephones in their homes had to go to a pay station to make a call. There was another telephone company in the area at the time, the People’s Telephone Line, owned by Walter Frazeur, but it primarily served the Redland area.

The Story of Baile’s Road

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by Jeff Blakley

If you grew up in Goulds or Princeton, you know where Baile’s Road is. For those who never ventured far from Homestead as a child, Baile’s Road joins U.S. 1 at about S.W. 224th St., where the NAPA store is located.

Screen Shot 2018 01 20 at 10 08 55 PM

For years, I drove by the intersection and occasionally turned on to the road and ventured east but I never knew the story behind the road. A small patch of pine rockland has been preserved just east of the highway, which makes for an initial scenic drive. The road angles south and east and then merges with Silver Palm Drive before it reaches Allapattah Road.

Viewing the past from our small nuclear families in 2018 prevents us from understanding how important the network of kinship ties that governed life on the frontier in early Dade County was. In this post, I hope to show you some of those relationships as they pertain to Baile’s Road.

Baile’s Road is named after John Charles Baile, who was born on December 27, 1859 in West Alexandria, Preble County, Ohio. He was the son of John and Sarah Lovina Williams Baile. In the 1900 census of Warrensburg, Johnson County, Missouri, he was enumerated with his wife, Rosie, 28, their daughter Hilda, 6, and their son Kenneth, 4. He was a farmer, like the vast majority of his neighbors.

Also living in Warrensburg were John Collins Christopher and his wife, Minnie Claire. She was a sister of John Charles Baile and her husband was a prominent real estate investor. Another person of interest in Warrensburg was Nancy Jane Baile Roop, the wife of Ezra Roop. Nancy was the older sister of John Charles (J. C.) Baile and the mother of John A. Roop, who figures into the story after J. C. came to Miami.

J. C. apparently came to Miami in about 1907 with his cousin, John A. Roop. They immediately started investing in real estate, buying the Richardson Grove in January 1908 from Charles O. Richardson, who was nearly 91 years old, for the very low price of $500. That sale caused a bit of a controversy at the time. The real estate agent in charge of the sale was J. H. Tatum, one of the Tatum Brothers who were behind the Miami Land & Development Co., the developers of Detroit (later Florida City) and who was a third cousin, once removed, to Russell F. Tatum, the first mayor of Homestead. By 1910, the former Richardson Grove was known as the Musa Isle Fruit Farm and it was owned by Baile & Roop. Baile’s brother-in-law, Joseph C. Christopher (husband of Baile’s sister Minnie) came to visit in 19081 and no doubt invested some of his money in Miami real estate and probably staked J. C. in some his ventures.

J. C. Baile hit the ground running when he arrived in Miami. He solicited funds from Miami businessmen to build a highway from downtown Miami up through the Gen. Samuel C. Lawrence estate, past the pumping station at the head of the Everglades and then connecting to the Allapattah Road.2 There was an Allapattah section in Miami before there was an Allapattah Road in South Dade. Baile, who lived in Lemon City, north of Miami, agreed to furnish the poles and place them if the Miami electric utility would furnish power to his part of town.3 In 1908, J. C. and Florence Haden of Cocoanut Grove (of Haden mango fame) worked together to send fruits and vegetables to the Michigan State Fair, held in Detroit from September 3 – 5.4 By the summer of 1909,5 J. C. was a director of the Subtropical Laboratory Association, which was formed to support the research station in Miami that had been supported by the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry. Funding for the station was eliminated after the 1906 hurricane that struck Miami and a severe freeze in December of that year. Another director of the Subtropical Laboratory Association was Walter Waldin, a prominent real estate investor and the brother of Bernhardt “Barney” A. Waldin of Homestead.

During this time period, J. C. acquired a tract of land east of Goulds from the Model Land Company that is variously given as anywhere from 400 to 1,000 acres. There were at least three people who were partners with Baile in this venture: William H. Owens, William L. Burch, and Thomas E. Cheatham. Who is associated with J. C. in his Baile Farm venture depends on which source is consulted. William H. Owens was a truck farmer who boarded with Charles W. Smith, who lived on 9th street in the 1910 census of Miami. Smith was a wealthy automobile dealer from Lawrence, Kansas who had 300 acres of tomatoes on the Baile Farm. William L. Burch was a truck (vegetable) farmer, who had retired from the Benner line, a merchant shipping line based in New York City. He built the launch Sallie and in 1903 “began regular excursions” up the Miami River. Thomas E. Cheatham owned a tailoring business in Miami and was the brother of J. Hubbard Cheatham, a wealthy merchant. They were natives of Viriginia and had come to Miami from Bartow, Florida in 1898 to serve the needs of the Spanish-American War soldiers in town at that time, according to an article by Howard Kleinberg published in the Miami News as the “363rd in a series of articles about early Miami.” The Cheathams lived in South Side, which, before it was taken over by the building boom of the early 2000s, was a wealthy residential area with numerous mansions west of Brickell and south of S.W. 8th St.

Baile very likely did not use much of his own money to finance his ventures, a tactic that was (and still is) very common.

By late 1909, the Campo Rico Trucking Company was advertising in the Miami Metropolis:6
Campo Rico

Farmers rented the land owned by J. C. Baile and his partners and grew tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes, celery, beans and other crops for the Miami market and for shipment to the North. Among the farmers were William Ira Peters, a brother of tomato king Thomas J. Peters; Leon M. Fornell, who was born in France; Anderson Lee Allen, who was killed in 1922 in a train/truck accident; Charles W. Bush and John Strange. John Strange was an iron worker from Brooklyn who quit his job on the Key West Extension after the 1906 hurricane and settled in Goulds to become a supervisor for Campo Rico.

Campo Rico Tomatoes Peters Crew

A crew picking tomatoes for William I. Peters
Photo courtesy of the Florida Pioneer Museum

J. C. Baile built a packing house at the corner of Baile’s Road and the County Road. The road was completed by late 1910 and just waiting for the County road roller to compact the surface.7 Baile’s packing house burned down in the 1920s. The packing house is shown on this plat of Goulds, from 1912. Click on the link under the image to download a larger version:

1912 Goulds

Plat of Goulds in 1912

The Baile Farm was in the East Glade, roughly between S.W. 248th St. on the south and S.W. 216 St. on the north. Baile built a 1.5 mile long narrow gauge tram line before 19118 to carry the produce from the field packing house at about Allapattah Road and Silver Palm Drive to the packing house near the depot in Goulds.

This is a photograph of the packing house on Allapattah Road:

Campo Rico Engine 1
Engine No. 1 was powered by a 5 1/2 horsepower Ferro marine engine, according to the October, 1911 issue of the magazine Motor Boating.

Photo courtesy of the Florida Pioneer Museum

The packing house shown in this photograph was at the intersection of U.S. 1 and Baile’s Road:

Packing House

Photo courtesy of the Florida Pioneer Museum

People were very resourceful in those days – this photograph shows Engine No. 2, which apparently was a converted automobile:

Campo Rico Engine 2 Depot

Photo courtesy of the Florida Pioneer Museum

The Baile Farm struggled to be a successful farming venture. According to an article that appeared in The Country Gentleman in 1911,9 Baile had installed two drainage plants, each capable of moving 12,000 gallons of water a minute. But heavy rains overwhelmed them and destroyed farmers’ crops, a lesson not lost on the Tatum Brothers, who invested heavily in digging the Florida City and North (Michigan Avenue) canals from 1912 – 1914 to drain the land that their Miami Land and Development Company owned east of their planned community, Detroit.

0375 Baille Farms Pumping Plant

Photo courtesy of the Florida Pioneer Musuem

J. C. Baile was involved in many other ventures besides his farm in Goulds. He had an interest in the Biscayne Bay Company, which purchased land on Miami Beach that was later developed by Carl Fisher. As a County Commissioner, he was the prime mover behind the creation of the Goulds Drainage District, which funded the construction of the Goulds Canal. He was also in charge of the construction of what is now known as the McArthur Causeway.

Goulds, like Princeton, Naranja, Modello, Homestead and Florida City, has a very rich and complex history. This post and the two posts on Lyman B. Gould and the Beginnings of Goulds barely scratch the surface. It is not generally known, but two African-Americans, William Randolph and William Johnson, each claimed 160 acres that is now the heart of the African-American community in Goulds. Nor is the story of what is now Cauley Square very well known. It is a puzzle to me why the history of the area between Miami and the Keys has been ignored for so many years.
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The Glades of Youth

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I’m pleased to publish this piece about growing up in Homestead in the 1950s. The author, Paul McHugh, is the son of George and Delphine McHugh and he grew up in an oak hammock not far from South Dade High School. His father, George, was a general contractor, a member of the Homestead Power Squadron and a real estate assessor for Coral Gables Federal Savings and Loan. He was the brother of Julia McHugh Morton, a well-known authority on tropical fruits. Paul has written four books and many articles on the environment. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area. — Jeff Blakley

Glades of Youth

By Paul McHugh

Simply to recall the sounds that bled out of our woods at night is to summon a tiny hint of South Florida’s botanical and biological grandeur. I don’t mean now. I mean the way it was back then, in the Fifties, as I grew up in a rural area dubbed the Redlands. This region is located roughly midway between Miami and Key Largo.

On our full moon eves during summer, frogs would ratchet with abandon, insects whirr and click, night birds call, breezes sigh. Our entire biome seethed with a mingled panoply of “critter” music that soared beyond the symphonic in its delectable, sensual complexity.

Sometimes, moved by a mysterious prompt, one segment of that native orchestra would fall utterly silent. Thus signaled, all other parts also quit, whereupon a heavy stillness unrolled across the landscape, like a vast and humid caul. This suspenseful silence often lasted through more than a few of my heartbeats. Finally, faintly, off in the distance, some big boss frog would emit a bass rurp! And the whole whirligig calliope of swamp noises erupted, flooding in once more through the glass slats of an open jalousie window. This revived geyser of sound poured in with such vigor and vibrancy, it felt as though it could float me right up off my bed…

My family dwelt in a live oak hammock, a sort of grove or islet of higher terrain mainly peopled by moss-draped hardwoods. It was surrounded by pine forests, themselves bracketed by a few long, marshy arms of swamp. To say that we were just three or four miles away from the town of Homestead might render the level of wildness I describe seem ludicrous now, perhaps unbelievable.

I would remind a skeptic that back then Homestead was a mere pioneer village of just a few thousand souls. The dominant inhabitants of the region were its animals of air and grove, of slough and bay. The drive up to Miami required a lengthy run on a narrow road that wove through thirty miles of critter-thronged brush.
Our swampland cornucopia poured forth an abundance of bird life, with its overall character tailored to each season. In autumn, I recall a chorus of whippoorwills echoing through our woods. And in winter, we enjoyed the coo of doves by day, and the sonorous hoots of great horned owls by night. In early spring, migratory northern songbirds awakened with the dawn, then serenaded us also into wakefulness. Summer brought dense clouds of dragonflies, whereupon nighthawks made their roaring dives down through the sky to snatch them in their beaks and gobble ‘em up.

A major boyhood pastime for me was “conquering” all major oaks in our woods by seeking to climb to their upper branches – a project to which I applied the grit of a mountaineer intent on knocking off a menu of Himalayan peaks. That led to one of my major entertainments. I found that if I made my ascents just after sunrise or just before sunset, I could perch on thin branches jutting above the forest canopy and watch vast flocks of birds flying into and out of the Everglades. The most spectacular moments came when they flew right at me. I could see them coming in a dark feathered sheet that undulated just above the treetops. A seam ripped open in the flock’s fabric as the birds whizzed past my head, slightly altering flight paths no more than they would for a bark-rooted orchid. They didn’t expect to see a human being way up there, and consequently did not treat me as though I might be one. Exhilarating!

Other remarkable swampland denizens visited us on the forest floor; some a bit more welcome than others. I recall my father shotgunning a rattlesnake out in front of the house when I was four, and when I was six, I went into the bathroom to find a water moccasin coiled around the base of our toilet. He dispatched that intruder with a fireplace poker. When I was ten, I and my brothers opened the front door, and a highly venomous coral snake dropped down from its top jamb. A swiftly delivered boot heel solved that particular problem.

Far more benign were our giant blacksnakes. These serpent gods seemed ultimately regal, yet amazingly gentle. They writhed through the woods with authority and grace. Whenever I spotted them, it seemed they were journeying – focused on a far distant goal. We kids would caper around these immense, indigo snakes in a sort of dazed awe. They never really bothered us, nor we them. Instead, they’d pause in their travels while briefly fixing us with an obsidian eye.

For me, that glossy black bead staring back at me was an aperture to an alien world, one in which I thought I saw a tiny glint of amusement.

If I attempt to tell modern biologists how giant these blacksnakes were, they scoff. Yet I do vividly recall one individual who stretched all the way across a two-lane road, with both ends of it disappearing into the brush.

No portrait of wildlife in South Florida back in the day can be complete without a paean to our bugs. To explain how abundantly and persistently and avidly we got bugged, here’s my top metaphor. If you saw a person strolling down a pathway in summer, he’d always resemble an exclamation point or question mark. The small dot was the person, and all the rest of the symbol would be a cloud of bugs above and around him. Most of our outings were accompanied by gnats, sandflies, ants, spiders, ticks, wasps, native bees, flies, chiggers, scorpions, a near-infinite supply of mosquitoes, and yet more fellow-travelers also eager to bite, but far too numerous to cite. Back then, I leaked trickles of blood and lymph as if my lumped hide were as holed as a colander, both from the bug nips, and my attempts to apply first aid to them with the sole tools I had available – my fingernails.

However, now, perhaps I should try to extrude some gratitude. Throughout my boyhood, I got bitten, stung, scratched, soiled and muddied so extravagantly by my environment that today I seem to enjoy a rather robust immune system. (I hear kids today, interacting mainly with their smartphones while doing diddly-squat in the outdoors, fail to enjoy a similar advantage – hence their soaring rate of allergies.)

But the most important legacy from halcyon years in Florida’s then-lush biome was my durable veneration of nature’s beauty and her potency. That force has inspired and guided and instructed me throughout life.

Due to it, I’ve long made war – in the strongest yet most peaceful manner I’ve been able to devise – on those who poison, raze, exploit and pollute or otherwise proceed to heedlessly trash our precious natural home. A few times I did that in direct action campaigns. However, mostly I did so by wielding a pen, reporting for decades on ecological and resource issues. So as to avoid being a total scold, I also sought to celebrate vigorous sport activity and adventuring in what was left of our natural realm.

Did I make a difference? Hell, who knows! Perhaps a small, yet a measurable one. No matter the result, I feel all right about honoring and remaining true to my early and most profound sentiments – acquired at an early age in that live oak hammock.

Meanwhile, humanity races madly onward to its evolutionary bottleneck. And we drag countless other species along with us toward a time of rigorous accounting, and of potential calamity. To me, that moment of terrible reckoning now seems too close for comfort.

I seldom return to my home hammock (which my dad, in one of his rare fits of grace, named Acrux, after a star in the Southern Cross). When I do, each visit provides me with a vision of what once was, and what could be again. It also offers a swift and sobering reminder of how many natural wonders have already been subtracted with such ruthlessness from our world.

The rich wildlife zone I felt privileged to live within, today’s young can scarcely imagine.

On a visit back to Acrux, on an October night in the mid-1990s, I stood outside our old house, considering that far too many years had passed since I’d managed to hear even a single whippoorwill’s song. And as I pondered that, amazingly, one did call. (Most likely I’d heard it first subliminally, which is why I’d even gone outside and had begun meditating upon the topic.)

The night bird’s ritual trill seemed almost the cry of a ghost. It came from so far away, it was so isolated. No other whippoorwill answered, as they did in times past. Me, I didn’t hesitate to respond. I set out upon a shadowy forest path I still knew from my youth, left the hammock behind, went through one of the last belts of scrub pines and palmettos, came out onto a roadway, crossed a canal bridge. I walked for more than a mile in the darkness as the call waxed louder and louder.

Finally, I homed in on the bird itself. But I drew so near that it grew wary and ceased to call. Didn’t care, I felt I had a good and worthy plan. I sat, leaned my back against a scrub pine’s rough and scabby trunk and simply waited. Minutes ticked by, can’t say how many. But, no worries. All the world’s time lay cupped right there, at rest in the palm of my hand.

And the whippoorwill began again to sing. Its cry was so pure, so clear, so lovely and so close that shivers rippled along my spine. I could take its song into my mind and soul with the avidity of a wanderer who after a string of sweltering days crosses a shaded oasis and is able to gulp from a miraculous well of cool water.

This last, lost call of a solo night bird afflicted me with great sadness. I mourned the whippoorwill’s loneliness. Oddly, though, its cry also gave me hope. For I saw right then, and I also think now, that our wild world is far more durable and resilient than any one set of its forms. If humanity should vanish into a jumbled heap of ash and mendacity and greed and bone fragments, our earth will collect herself, brood for a bit, and then emit many new lives in fresh shapes.

One day in the future, something like panther tracks may again be found in the rain-softened marl of a swampland path. Or of an evening, galaxies of fireflies may drift again under dense beards of something that resembles Spanish moss. And once more, whippoorwills call to one another across a shaded landscape.

When that happens, I hope highly aware younglings of some other species will also be present, to hear and see and deeply value all of it.

Copyright 2017 by Paul McHugh

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