I’m accustomed to waking up within the silent arms of sweetgums, oaks, and pines, but this morning the trees’ boughs move differently, brush tentative fingers against my windows; the light is oddly muted. Jeanne, the state’s fourth hurricane in six weeks, arrives today. Her predecessors Charley, Frances, and Ivan have exhausted me, a fifth-generation Floridian who’s never before seen a season like this. I am drained by my collectings of candles, matches, flashlights, batteries, Walkman, propane stove, tuna, peanut butter, cheese, crackers, 25 jugs of water. The gas tank is filled, there’s cash in my wallet, emergency phone numbers at hand. ;

I wasn’t drawn to the tannin-tinted Suwannee for hurricanes. I came to write and, as I said, for the deer, also the venation of the Red Maple’s leaf, the shimmying tracks left by diamondback rattlers, the delicate and seldom-noticed flower of the Spanish moss, and the appearance in summer of the sage-green, hand-sized silkworm moths. Retreating from other people’s stereos, leaf blowers, and the staccato reports of news anchors, I came seeking beauty and a place I could work. This sounds simple enough, but there’s a learning curve. Unanticipated challenges have enlarged my perspective, forcing me to consider it just may be that whatever is, is beautiful: the river’s steady climb toward my house, this morning’s coral snake heading for higher ground, my nearest neighbors down the road who don’t understand my enthusiasm for any of this and, whenever the river threatens to flood, lock up their house, take off in a large blue and white recreational vehicle, and don’t come back for weeks, sometimes, months.

Long after this hurricane has slipped from the headlines, the people it happened to will still be installing new windows and digging out cars. My absent neighbors miss this part, forfeit a fuller understanding of flood: dead and blackened small trees, wax myrtles, huckleberries, palmettos; the conglomeration of styrofoam ice chests, plastic bags, and whole doors left hanging in the tops of trees. These neighbors avoid the hassle with contaminated wells, the stench of rotting vegetation as water recedes, the ubiquitous ants. They also miss a land transmuted by flood into silver, crystal, and gold. They miss the return of the birds, the miraculous light, reminders of the enduring continuity of natural cycles. With the Suwannee, just as with human loves, commitment begins first with attraction, deepening gradually into a knowing that embraces, also, the difficult.

When in late 1996 I first dragged an ancient 8 x 32-foot travel trailer to this spot, I found the two-toed tracks of white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus, those gentle creatures who see everything I can’t. At the next bend down river, a group of Muskogees (called “Creeks” by the English) practiced ritual singing and dancing that invariably ended with the climactic barking of dogs. At the edge of the water on full-moon nights I flipped open my plastic lounge chair, lay back, and watched the river turn into glossy ribbon flanked by paper-white beaches.

My journal says I came for the glitter in Orion’s Belt, the ever-changing sky of a thunderhead building out of its “anvil” base and letting loose lightning, hail, high winds, and tornados. I got all that and much more: although my first admiring sight of the river birch’s peeling pink bark decided my purchase of the property, only afterward did I learn this birch is characteristic of wetlands. Later, I came to understand why wetlands should be left wet and resisted other people’s advice to change that by hauling in fill, which is why for days after heavy rains the driveway is impassable.

The spring rains of 1997 introduced me to the hairy, wild azalea and also dozens of cracks through which water found its way into the trailer. When thunder boomed, I set out my pans. In the fall, I dropped to the floor when hunters’ rifles sounded alarmingly close. A local sheriff’s deputy who came to reassure me about the hunters’ marksmanship said not to worry about getting shot, “More’n likely, hid in these woods, it’s rape you set up for.”

In early 1998 the river left its banks, forcing me to haul the trailer to an RV park from which I returned each day to canoe in and out near the river’s bend, over drowned trees and above dirt foot paths turned silver. In spite of warnings about the river’s dangerous currents, I loved how it rustled and sighed through the tops of trees and thought that now I could live on a bayou, or in Venice. Over time I lost that romantic high, conceding that computers won’t operate in waist-high water and that without the security of a house on legs I might again find as I did, returning home late one moonless night, the trailer wrenched open with a crowbar, its door hanging at an angle.

I retreated 100 miles west to Tallahassee, and when the state capital’s sirens and traffic became unendurable, I’d drive Interstate 10, park on the river’s lip, drape myself over the Honda’s hood, and count stars. One Christmas Eve I walked the entire lot in the dark, hands outstretched before me, in the light of only a single star and the crescent moon under which it dangled. It seemed that contentment could be had only here. I was gone five years, but each night away I dreamed myself back, safe in the air above this sacred ground.

I say sacred because I live near a legendary white sulfur spring where Native Americans once recuperated from illness and rested after war. Within a seven-mile radius of the spring, all peoples were welcomed, protected and guaranteed safety within the parameters of the “peace ground.” Here, everything comes right. Sometimes I wonder if all points on the globe aren’t sacred and it’s only a blunted perception that allows us to imagine otherwise. It just may be that I so seldom see white-tailed deer--those nearly-mystical creatures who have leapt over my car and outrun it—because of some unrecognized personal failing. Perhaps I have lost the ability to see what is omnipresent and heralds the numinous. When I first came to the floodplain, I often saw white-tails in twos and threes in the middle of the night. Once, driving in dense fog, they came at me like pop-ups on a computer screen.

At this moment on my computer screen Jeanne, manifesting in radar images of orange and green on my computer screen, is poised to strike, her winds teasing at roofs in West Palm Beach. Jeanne is implacable, fierce, twisting her relentless way in my direction. At 7:00 p.m. it’s so black I can scarcely see the marks of my pen. After an entire Sunday lying in bed watching trees flail one another under an overcast sky, finally I am interested in getting my mother’s crystal goblets off their glass shelves in the south windows. Remembering the Emergency Management man’s warning that if a window breaks, air pressure might peel off the roof, I jump out of bed, poke around and locate two boards, six nails, and a hammer.The electric’s gone and without a/c or fans, the house is a sauna. I count out candles, flashlights, matches. I’m not worried only about high winds and rain of Jeanne; I expect the Suwannee to flood, spread north all the way to County Road 25A which acts as a levee, and take my lot.

I am trimming the wick on an oil lamp, when the phone rings. My neighbor who has lived here 20 years longer than I, suggests I move the car out. “The river,” he says, “can do surprising things.” On either side of the driveway two trees snap in half before my eyes, but I get into the Honda and drive toward the lot’s entrance. My neighbor is right; the whole place is going underwater. Blocking the driveway is a downed log I’d hoped was old and lightweight. Instead, I find an entire river birch that needs two men with a chain saw. On the car radio: “Remember when/I was young/so were you/time stood still/remember when.”

Kicking at the long, uneven crack in the log doesn’t budge it and the water’s getting deeper. Because I wear glasses, backing the car is problematical, particularly up the serpentine driveway. I take it in short spurts, manage to avoid three trees that appear out of nowhere, but hit a fourth, off to the left where a patch of water lilies recently bloomed.

The Honda’s transmission growls, notifying that the car is stuck, but the radio’s jaunty guitarist keeps me company: “Joy, there was hurt/remember when/live and learn.” I finally get turned around and proceed along the river’s edge, hoping I can remove two fallen trees I saw earlier in order to cross onto adjoining property. One tree’s easily pushed aside; with my hands I break the second tree in half and am back behind the wheel as the song finishes up: “Stepping stone to where we are, where we’ve been/Said we’d do it all again/remember when.”

Dark as the depths of a sewer, County Road 25A has lost its usual reference points. Through the passenger window my flashlight’s beam distinguishes the mailbox, so I park parallel to and 15 feet above it, lock the car, and slowly make my way down the embankment. I am wearing a lime green bathing suit, Levis, boots, and carry an umbrella. I am wearing a straw hat to guard my eyeglasses from the pouring rain. When the toe of one boot catches in a snarl of grapevine, I splatter in front of the mailbox, throwing all my weight onto my right shoulder. I need ice, but there is none.

It’s 10:30 p.m. when I reach the house and my Walkman. SKY Radio, which has pledged to stay on the air until Jeanne leaves us, breaks in for a listener’s call from Gainesville, where 700,000 people are out of power; a caller says four trees are on her car and why can’t the driveway be unblocked right now. SKY urges patience, adds that there is not enough power line in existence to answer the need; more must be manufactured.

A tornado has hit a mobile home where two people in wheelchairs live. Florida’s grapefruit crop is ruined. Snakes and raccoons will be moving to higher ground. More listeners are call in, berating the storm as if, out of malice, it targeted their particular homes, cars, and electric lines.

Two days ago when I suggested to my normally loquacious insurance agent that the state’s terrible damage is not the storm’s fault, she answered as though translating hieroglyphics: “Not . . . the . . . storm’s . . . fault?”

“No,” I said. “Jeanne didn’t build houses on barrier islands, drape the state in power lines, spread concrete over wetlands.”

“Oh.”

“Practice patience and safety,” SKY says. “Get ready for mosquitoes.” I jerk the earphones from my head. Bellowing from the area of the river previously considered “driveway” are thousands of froggy tenors, basses, and sopranos. Already, three to five inches of rain. Along with a spurt of fear come perverse and happy thoughts: the earth is showing us her claws; I want her to win.

At 3:00 a.m., Monday, I awake from a dream of gentle initiation, thinking of deer, creep halfway downstairs, and see that if the car hadn’t been moved to higher ground it would now sit beneath the house in six inches of water. Because the driveway’s completely gone, no rescue vehicle would have been able to get in. Water is taking the land, taking me; this must be what my neighbors don’t want to feel. They don’t want to realize that although we hold deeds to these lots, we humans comprise only one portion of the natural world.

Encircled by the melodious frogs for whom I and my house are aberrations, I go back to sleep. Surrounded by all that dark water, I re-enter my dream and find myself swimming beside the sleek shape of an 8-point deer who stops, lowers his rump, and allows me to scoot high enough up his back that his antlers frame my view. We head downstream, surrounded by logs, limbs, the dead body of a dog, half a chair, and one red and yellow plastic child’s toy. Oddly unconcerned about what comes next, I grip the deer’s bony antlers. A full moon shines at the horizon.

On Tuesday morning’s 8:00 a.m. news, NPR announces that in Florida’s Martin and St. Lucie Counties, the Florida Power Company must completely rebuild its power lines with assistance lent by 10,000 tree cutters who have come from out-of-state and Jeanne’s “eye” is now near Atlanta. The flooding is manageable, if only I can get squared away downstairs where small armies of spiders, ants, and roaches appear on floating trash they quickly abandon, if they possibly can, for me. In the river up to my waist, I am carrying to the house’s third stair chairs, boards, plants, and my collection of cow bones, a temporary fix. Tomorrow I will haul them further up.

After I lift a few more pots of amaryllis above the high water mark, I would like to take a nap. First, though, I must locate window screens so I can open the house for air. The mounded septic tank is nearly under water, which dictates the use of a temporary toilet, one five-gallon can lined with a heavy-duty plastic bag. For collecting water, I will need more five-gallon cans. A mama spider guarding a large white object I assume to be progeny floats by on a short length of 4 x 4 and I attempt rescue by shoving the 4 x 4 against a tree onto which I hope the spider can heave herself and her brood. My headache has let up.

Upstairs, I see that my feet are as grimy as those of a child who has played all day long in dirt. I am sweaty and tired and in need of a bath--two jugs of hot water heated on the borrowed propane stove and poured over myself on the front stairs. If the electric isn’t on by this time tomorrow, a friend will deliver a canoe and I’ll start hauling water. There’s a fifty-pound bag of birdseed waiting. Okay, go. I install the window screens, drift toward the bed, and out the window see, only feet away from where I was recently standing, the broad snout of an alligator.

On the 5:00 p.m. news I hear that statisticians are tracking an increase in Florida’s domestic violence these past six weeks, beginning with Hurricane Charley, the same pattern noted after Andrew in 1992. Major erosion has affected almost every inch of Florida shoreline.

After I bathe, I put on a loose dress, sit down with a glass of white wine and cheese crackers. Sundown, and I am breathless under a full orange moon in a world of blown glass. Unless visitors want to swim or boat in, my previous privacy--stolen when a developer ripped out a screen of trees--is suddenly restored. And there are new sounds: a spirited medley of cricket and bullfrog, the lapping of waves muscled by currents moving across the river floor.

It took some time to comprehend the implications of falling in love with a floodplain lot, three-quarters of which sits in water for days after heavy rains. I now recognize wetlands when I see them and realize my original, innocent pleasure in these surroundings was made possible by a stupendous naiveté. When building regulations forced me to cut the stand of trees I knew best, I wept, and when I first looked into the deep pits where the house’s foundations would fit, I was ashamed. To proclaim that I love the Earth and yet sink thousands of pounds of metal rebar and concrete into her, is idiocy. The presence of the house has, in fact, destroyed a lot of what I came for.

The local builder who frustrated me regarding the house, also infuriated me with regular demonstrations of tree hatred, damaging tree after tree. “They’ll grow back,” he said, of a half-dozen 75-foot tall river birch he’d slashed to the ground. When I protested that he’d even cut trees on the next door lot that didn’t belong to me, he answered, “Who cares?” I joked with friends by long distance phone, telling them that, heretofore, anything that disturbed me as much as the house builder “either died, or I divorced it.” But there was even greater disturbance ahead.

As it turned out, the developer who’d purchased the adjacent lot didn’t care about his dead trees. Two weeks after a certificate of occupancy was granted for my dwelling, this man turned up with bulldozer and bush hog, announcing he planned to clear adjacent Lot 23 all the way to the river’s edge, an action prohibited by rules of the water management district. While I sought out environmental officials, he plowed right on. Because of the indifference of government agencies supposedly established to protect the natural world, the experience was especially nerve-wracking. In order to come to terms with this desecration, I wrote it all down:

August 19, 2002:

Outside my green window
late afternoon voices describe
the work of machines arriving tomorrow.
Its owner says of the next door lot, “I want those filthy palmettos out.
We’re going for manicured.”
My jade world trembles,
light glancing off silvered leaves, gilding
the gnarled arms of the trees
twisting against blue sky
roofing the channel
of this old river
from which yesterday
I plucked
a stone scraper chipped
by some Muskogee who
once, like me, squatted here at water’s edge.

Evening comes on, lacquering the cypress roots exposed
all this hard dry year. Dusk,
and a green moth the size of my hand
bats out a summer night’s jazz
on the Suwannee.
Petula nigra, Quercus laevis, Pinus taeda, Actias luna. Serenoa repens.

* Tuesday morning, August 20, 2002:

Cereal, vitamins with extra B, and now
a long truck comes, disgorging heavy machines.
The dozer’s loud girth tears through birches, oaks:
a cardinal’s nest tumbles into the palmettos.
Grape vines, slung and gnawed, scatter in thick coils
across the torn ground.

Strix varia. Tyto alba. Vitis rotundifolia. Bubulcus ibis.

I work the phones: County Zoning, Audubon,
State Game and Wildlife, the Corps of Engineers,
an unsympathetic attorney, Water Management, the Sheriff.
The Department of Environmental Protection.

At my north window, trees fall
as gently as soldiers,
taking with them
the nest of the wheezing owl
who one spring evening
spoke to me
from the heart of Lot 23.
When I fastened a flashlight beam
on his shallow-bowled face, he held my eyes.
And once, at sunset, I entered these woods
under his spread wings
as he glided from Lot 23 to 21.

The back hoe grinds on. Friends arrive,
try coaxing me away, say they can’t watch,
and depart. A white cattle egret trails the back hoe,
flicking for grubs with his orange bill.
I tack a bath towel over the kitchen window.

When the racket quits in late afternoon
I walk the property line,
searching for salvage, some remnant
of vine or bark I can save
to honor what’s ground to powder, plowed under.
Green screen gone, the traffic on our county road
thunders past. Passersby can count
the buttons on my shirt.
Surely, I must leave this place.

* Wednesday, August 21, 2002:

I transplant a mango sprung from seed
and hang a line of whites, finishing
just as the back hoe roars. Trees snap
like kindling for fires.

No birds came for seed this morning.
There was only the screech owl’s cry.

Surely, I must sell this house and go away.

Otus asio, Colaptes auratus. Parus bicolor. Parus carolinensis.

* Thursday afternoon, 22 August 2002

A friend calls, comments that the entire planet
is a burn pile now.

“Our whole world,” he says,
over the groans of beloved trees.
“The whole world is lost,” he repeats,
but I will not listen, not
while the hot afternoon light
makes a molten silver sliver
of the river.

Before we die
under the onslaught of bureaucrats
in power boats, I tell you, Suwannee, that I
will never let you go, not without first
learning you all through. In the winter nights,
I will twine my arms and legs about you
and whisper the names
of those we have lost. I will know you
so well that whatever is tight and small
in either of us
will loosen
and love what is.

We will miss nothing, not a freckle or a fish, a sigh
or splash. Know my resolve: I will stay
here where the Muskogee walked
in peace and love
under full moons
and woke to mornings tinged
with titmouse and chickadee, cardinal,
woodpecker, screech owl,
and frogs mating in the ditch. I will stay
while the black gum reddens
and the scuppernong yellows into lace.
If the wheezing owl does not return,
I will love him, too,
wherever he is.

During the rape of Lot 23 I also wrote, “I have lost what deer represent. Up here in a manmade house I do not have the privacy and mystery, the wooded space I once had, and I do not know if I can go on living here. I wonder if the sense of wilderness can ever come back.” (Later on, a sympathetic friend acting as my agent bought the ravaged lot, giving me the opportunity to guard it from further damage.) The attitude of the house builder and the developer/owner of the lot next door, as well as the general indifference of my neighbors regarding environmental issues have been far more difficult than all of the Suwannee’s alligators.

I’ve survived the storm and five weeks flooded in, and am a better canoeist than I was before. At the edge of the Suwannee in late November the wind is a real presence, swirling in and out between the limbs of the oaks opposite the window where I write. On the ground is a thick litter of glossy orange pine needles, slippery to walk on. The gnarled limbs of the oak appear individually sculpted out of a cold, silver sky and, although major roads are no longer underwater, many other places (including parts of Lots 22 and 23) are still impassable, except by boat.

For weeks, while the last yellow leaves flung themselves from hickory trees all along Hamilton County’s dirt back roads, I’ve been hearing the cracking of rifles. I heard them yesterday, Thanksgiving Eve. My own son hunts, yet until recently I shuddered at the thought of eating an animal I’d only hours before seen chewing grass. I’ve put out corn and planted herbs, hoping I might pull the deer toward me--and out of the way of hunters. I’m not much interested in eating meat but, if I were, I’d have considered supermarket portions neatly sized in clear plastic more desirable than dealing with the gristle, bone, and hair of a whole dead creature. My son, who hunts in another state, has tried to explain the misunderstood dimensions of hunting, but I didn’t appreciate his words until I saw for myself. In this Hamilton County floodplain laboratory where I’m called “tree hugger” (the working equivalent of “Yankee”), I am forced to struggle against my own aesthetic and intellectual elitism. The locals, who won’t commiserate with me about our endangered environment have, nevertheless, given me priceless gifts, among them the memory of a butchered deer.

Last night in the kitchen at a nearby farm, three generations of women were busily making pies--squash, pecan, sweet potato, pumpkin, and, also, puddings and cakes. The turkeys and hams were already done, also potato salad, butter beans, and garden peas. A buzz of voices from the backyard pulled us to the door where, in the midst of a group of older men we saw a teenage boy, one of the grandsons, looking quietly pleased with himself. It was Doe Day and the grandson had got a deer.

Before the butchering, I was allowed to examine the doe. She had legs reminiscent of the largest grasshoppers I’ve ever seen--delicate, strong, dancer’s legs. I ran my fingers over her forelegs, smoothed the short orange-brown hairs that covered the tendons at her ankles. Her legs looked made for flight, rather than for running or walking.

The men were gathering ropes and buckets, preparing to hang her from a tree. They were about to rip into her and I didn’t want to see what came next. I went back into the kitchen, but then I thought how I had no right to my repugnance for hunting if I couldn’t even look. I opened the back screen door, and stepped out.

Animals were once thought to be divinities; even stones were believed to possess souls. Some people find this preposterous, which only tells how far out of oneness we have fallen. I am in thrall to the natural world--however much of it we have left. I love it as I loved my mother on her deathbed, slack-jawed in the face of certain loss.

In the backyard, the deer was strung, head-up. Standing very straight in front of her, the family’s stately great-grandfather bore down with a sharp knife, opening the doe from throat to belly, then flinging her jacket of hide onto the ground. The other women had seen this a thousand times. In fact, I think they had all helped butcher deer and, certainly, had cooked the flesh as steaks and stew.

In Lascaux, France, there are paintings on cave walls thought to be drawn by hunters prior to their hunts, representations of what they were after. Deep inside those caves the hunters made pictures of what they hoped first to capture with their minds. Those drawings were their prayers.

The deer’s tongue hung out of her closed mouth, her head untouched, but the great globes of her eyes open wide, as though to take in each person there and encompass us all. She was Aphrodite, alpha and omega, the first and the last, and I was in a cave thousands of years ago, partaking of a wild animal to whom I owed the gift of life.

A sack-like membrane held the neon blue and red organs inside the deer’s body, a glistening of blood and flesh unlike any I’d ever before seen. My breath quickened and I turned to the family’s great-grandmother who had also come out and was standing beside me. I remembered that she had trained as a nurse.

“Inside, do our bodies look like that?”

She nodded, yes.

Someone--I remember only a fist with a knife--split open the creature’s abdominal wall. Her organs bulged, then dropped into a pan. Inside the clear bag of that second skin, this creature, even without her hide, had seemed inviolable; now blood poured, carnelian. Her dark eyes held more than I can write of cycles and necessity, need and gift.

Mornings, I scout this land at first light, coffee cup in hand, searching for the tracks of night visitors. A fox comes often, as do armadillo, raccoon, and, once, even a baby alligator. When I approach the fat river birch at the far edge of the lot, a red-shouldered hawk flies like an arrow from its top. Tramping through grasping smilax and slipping into water-filled ditches, I am more thoroughly placed than in childhood when I rode my horse in the most distant fields of my father’s farm.

I love living here, waking at sunrise, working on the upstairs deck. The river side of the house is all windows, and the Suwannee never stays the same. Its level rises and falls; its waters and banks are the homeland of catfish and brim, as well as the flirty fox, cottonmouth moccasins, and the canebrake rattler I know by the thin red line down his back. All share this hallowed space. On dark nights when the moon shines full, I attend.

One morning shortly after the recent floodwaters receded, I discovered along the highest reaches of snow-white river bank the two-toed hoof prints of a deer whose face I have not yet seen. Somewhere nearby, in the lush woods webbed with vines and scratchy palmettos, where snakes twist and otter run, a deer camouflaged by smilax and wax myrtles is watching. In this gentle but easily startled and startling creature are unknowable worlds, inner and outer. Astride the deer of my dreams, I am carried into the unknown places I need to dare, into a sphere larger than idea, opinion, or belief, a space where my neighbors and I commune. Standing here together, my neighbors may someday recognize the deer in me and I, the deer in them.

Sudye Cauthen’s work has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Florida Review, Kalliope, The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature, International Quarterly, etc. Cauthen directed Florida’s first Folk Arts in the Schools Program, received a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, earned an M. A. in Southern Studies from The University of Mississippi, and is author of the forthcoming (from The Center for American Places in 2006) SOUTHERN COMFORTS:Rooted in a Florida Place. In 1997 she founded The North Florida Center for Documentary Studies in White Springs where she lives and works in a house overlooking Florida’s famed Suwannee River.