Bone Valley by Claire Matturro Read Free Book Online Page B

Wallow Road, dropped down to Duette Road, and then turned onto an unnamed road with pavement apparently left over from the FDR era. We crossed a bridge, over a tea brown river framed by water and live oaks, and Miguel said, “That’s the east fork of the Manatee River.”
    After bumping along, Miguel finally stopped the truck by a gate across a little driveway, but kept the engine running. Behind the gate and fence, a dense hammock of slash and loblolly pines, saw palmettos, cabbage palms, and live oaks stretched before us, dappled with shades of green and yellow in the afternoon sunlight.
    “This is one of the last remaining big wildernesses in the area, outside of the park system,” Miguel said. “The mining company owns about ten thousand acres all together, three thousand of it in Manatee County, in this tract. Wetlands from forks off the Manatee River and Horse Creek run through it. Isn’t it beautiful?”
    It was. We all made little noises of appreciation.
    “You know what it’ll look like if they get to mine it?” Angus asked.
    Yes, thank you, I’d managed to get outside of the Sarasota city limits in my lifetime, and I’d driven through the nearby moonscaped phosphate-mined areas in other counties. Reclamation claims aside, this pretty little subtropical forest would never be the same once the phosphate miners were done digging the ore from beneath the surface. I sighed, sadly, and said, “It’ll be ruined.”
    “Well, it ain’t over yet,” Angus said. “They don’t have their permits. You wait and see.” And he grinned, lifting the moroseness that crept into the truck cab as we thought about the potential destruction of the land in front of us.
    “Let’s hide the truck and take a walk,” Miguel said, and drove the pickup off the road until a clump of trees more or less hid it, that is, if you weren’t looking right at it. He grabbed a sack from the back of the truck, and I thought, Oh, good, a picnic.
    As we walked along the fence, I counted nine “No Trespassing/Violators Will Be Prosecuted” signs before Miguel held the barbed wire apart for me and I scampered through the opening in the fence, with Angus on my tail.
    Though a perfectly good trail presented itself to us, Miguel led us away from it, and some thrashing was involved as we stumbled through the thick undergrowth. A wild blackberry bush, with its clinging thorns, attacked me, and I was glad I’d worn the long jeans, though I wished I’d been a little more liberal with the citronella. We went through a sandy patch of scrub before we passed into a low-lying area, with ancient-looking cypress trees guarding a wetland scattered with the white petals of wild lilies and sedge.
    Angus brought us to an abrupt stop to point out a jack-in-the-pulpit, a green and maroon flower, saying, “You can eat the corm, a bit pungent raw, but good boiled.”
    None of us seemed inclined to pluck it for a snack, so Miguel took the lead, and had us traipsing back toward a drier wooded area. As small, flying things lit and bit, I watched Miguel’s butt to keep my mind off Lyme disease and West Nile.
    In short order, but not before I’d begun to sweat in a totally nonsexy way, we came to a creek with a slow current of brown water. “The famous Horse Creek, I presume,” I said.
    “Yep, but it’s the west fork of it. Most of the existing mining on Horse Creek is on the main branch in Hardee County. Now they want to start mining on this part of it.”
    Miguel opened the sack and pulled out a stick thing with something round and oddly shaped at the end of it, and then still another stick thing with the same thing on the end, and then a Baggie of what looked and smelled like big-cat poop.
    It suddenly occurred to me that Jimmie’s fatherly advice might have been well offered. I mean, come on, I was miles from other people, I had no weapons, I was with two men I hadn’t known before yesterday, and they had poop in a bag and weird stick things.
    It did