The argument started before I could pour my coffee. Two men at the counter of a place on Copeland Avenue that does not have a sign you would notice from the road, both of them with the particular look of people who have been having the same disagreement for so long it has become a form of conversation. One of them was talking about permits. The other one was talking about permits. The difference between their positions was a question of whose permits, and who had gotten them, and who had made certain phone calls to make sure somebody else did not.
I had been in Everglades City for four days by that point and I had heard some version of this conversation every one of them.
The airboat industry in the Ten Thousand Islands and the surrounding Everglades is not, from the outside, an industry that appears complicated. You see the boats at the launches, flat-bottomed and loud, propelled by aircraft engines mounted behind a cage, and you understand immediately what they are for: they go where other boats cannot, over water too shallow and grass too thick for anything with a conventional hull. What you do not see, standing at the ramp watching them load, is the infrastructure of grievance and leverage and inherited advantage that determines who is running one of those boats legally and who is not, and who gets to operate in which waters, and which federal agencies have jurisdiction over which decisions, and how long a permit application can be delayed by the right kind of bureaucratic friction applied by the right kind of interested party.
One of the men at the counter, the one I will call Raymond without using his name, had been operating airboat tours out of Everglades City for nineteen years. He knew these waters the way his father had known them, by feel and depth and the sound of the bottom when you were about to touch it. He had a federal permit, a state permit, and a county license, and he renewed all of them every year, and every year the renewal process required slightly more documentation and slightly more money and slightly more time spent on hold with offices in Tallahassee or Miami or Washington that had never sent anyone down here to look at the water they were regulating.
What had happened, in the months before I arrived, was that a larger operation had acquired a tour company at the northern end of the Tamiami Trail and was in the process of expanding its territory southward, toward the Gulf Coast waters that operators like Raymond had been working for decades. The expansion was technically legal. The permits were in order. The legal structure behind it involved a holding company that was not from here, had never been from here, and had no employees who lived within fifty miles of the town.
I am describing a situation that exists everywhere in American tourism, the consolidation of small-scale local operations into larger entities that can absorb the regulatory cost and the insurance overhead and the marketing expense that the single-owner operator cannot. I am not describing it as though it is unusual. What is unusual about Everglades City is the degree to which the airboat industry is not incidental to the local economy but is, for a significant number of families, the local economy, and has been for generations. The stone crab matters. The fishing guides matter. The airboats are the thing people come here to do who would not otherwise come, and the money from those rides circulates through the town in ways that are direct and visible: the mechanic who services the engines, the fuel dock, the woman who does the bookkeeping for three different operators out of her house two streets from the waterfront.
Raymond took me out one afternoon in October, the light going bronze over the sawgrass by four o’clock, the air finally losing some of its summer weight. We ran south toward the mangrove islands and he cut the engine at a wide spot in the channel where the water was shallow enough to show the bottom grass moving in the current, and in the sudden silence after the engine stopped, the birds came back: an anhinga drying its wings on a dead snag, two white ibis working the shallows, and then, further out, the pink improbability of a roseate spoonbill standing in water up to its knees and sweeping its spatulate bill through the water in a motion that no photograph has ever quite justified. Raymond watched it with the expression of someone who has seen this many times and has not stopped seeing it.
He told me, with the engine off and the water lapping quietly against the hull, that what he was most afraid of was not losing the business. He was afraid of losing the reason for the business. That the waters would be the same but the context around them, the economy of small decisions and local knowledge and inherited attention, would be replaced by something more efficient and less specific, the way every place that is genuinely itself eventually gets replaced by a version of itself that is easier to scale.
I did not have an answer for that. I am not sure there is one.
The airboat industry in Everglades City is not a picturesque side note to the national park next door. It is a system of human knowledge about a particular piece of water, built over time and maintained at cost, and the question of who owns it is also a question of whether that knowledge survives or becomes a brochure.
Donald Reeves writes about Everglades City the way the place deserves to be written about: without the brochure language, without the manufactured wonder, and without pretending that a town of 400 people sitting at the edge of a swamp is something it is not.
He has spent considerable time in Collier County’s oldest settlement, arriving during stone crab season when the waterfront smells of brine and work, and returning in the off-season when the tourists are gone and the town goes quiet in the particular way that only genuinely remote places can. He has paddled the mangrove tunnels of the Ten Thousand Islands, eaten at places with no hours posted on the door, and spoken at length with fishing guides who navigate these waters by memory rather than chart.
His writing on Everglades City FL covers everything from tidal fishing conditions and kayak trails to lodging, local history, and the complex past that most Florida travel content carefully avoids.
He writes to give readers the honest version.
