Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Still Life: A Suburban Canal in Miami

Tens of thousands of motorists drive past this suburban Miami canal every day.  Busy people with busy lives never give this water a second glance.

They don't see anything of value - just weeds, water and trash.

When I was a kid, this canal was my saving grace.  It was a place where my friends and I encountered wild creatures and explored the natural world.  Some days we experienced the worst aspects of city life - like the time we found two bundled corpses in the weeds during Miami's drug war era - but most days we caught fish and created great memories.

I fished my old neighborhood canal again today for the first time in decades.  It felt great to see my childhood haunt still harbors a remarkable underwater world - a far more interesting place than the surrounding sanitized suburbs.