“Not much water to manage at the moment,” Jack said as the pavement ran out and became a dusty, rutted dirt road bed.

“Even when there is they mis manage it. All the development north of here, it’s screwed up the Everglades—screwed it royally.”

Jack sensed anger in Anya’s voice. And something else…

“You sound as if you’re taking it personally.”

“I am, kiddo. I am. No decent person can feel otherwise.”

“Pardon my saying so, but isn’t it really just a big swamp?”

“Not a swamp at all. Swamps are stagnant; there’s constant flow through the Everglades. It’s a prairie—a wet, saw grass prairie. This whole part of the state runs downhill from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. The overflow from the lake travels all those miles in sloughs—”

“Whose?”

“Slough. It’s spelled S-L-O-U-G-H but pronounced like it’s S-L-E-W. The sloughs are flows of water through these prairies that keep things wet. We’re near the Taylor Slough here. The Miccosukee Indians call the Everglades Pa-hay-okee: river of grass or grassy waters. But look what’s been done in the past fifty years: Canals have been cut and farms have been put in the way, leaking all their chemicals into the water—or should I say, whatever water reaches here. What the farms don’t take is ‘managed’ by so many canals and dikes and dams and levies and flood gates that you’ve got to wonder how any of it gets where it naturally wants to go. It’s amazing anything at all has survived here. Just pure dumb luck that the whole area’s not a complete wasteland.” She glanced at him. “Sorry, kiddo. End of lecture.”

“Hey, no. I learned something. But I’d think that since Florida is just an overgrown sandbar, all of the water in the sloughs would just seep into the ground.”

“Sandbar? Where’d you get that idea?”

“I heard somebody describe it that way, so—”

She wagged a finger at him. “He was talking out his tuchus. Florida is mostly limestone. It’s not an overgrown sandbar; if anything, it’s a huge reef. There’s sand, sure, but dig down and you hit the calcified corpses of countless little organisms who built up this mound back in the days when all this was under water. That’s why the water runs downhill to the Everglades: Because it must.”

“How’d you manage to learn so much about these problems?”

“It’s no secret. You just have to read the papers. Supposedly the government is going to spend billions to correct the mess. We’ll see. Shouldn’t have let it happen in the first place.” She glanced down at the map. “We should be coming up on it soon.”

“On what?”

“The intersection.” She pointed through the windshield. “There. That must be it.”