(education)

A Fork in the River

Burke Uzzle

South Florida's watery path less traveled reveals a rare bit of Old Everglades--and its overlooked urban community. Finally, there's a plan to revive both.

By Keith Kloor
Photography by Burk Uzzle

 

Audrey Peterman can't help herself. The involuntary yelps come with each new sighting. "Look, look!" she blurts out, pointing excitedly at a great blue heron, all decked out in his breeding plumage and roosting in a pond apple tree. Her husband, Frank, alerts me to a sparrow hawk perched at the top of a swaying royal palm. "He looks like a weather vane," he says with a chuckle. Kevin Carter, a biologist with Florida's Broward County Department of Planning and Environmental Protection, steers our small motorboat toward a cluster of tiny tree islands and cuts the engine.

We drift past a green tangle of leather ferns, mangroves, and pond apples, all rooted in peat. The air this February morning is breezy and crackling with birdsong. More herons, strutting their colors, flap around the islands' edges. Audrey spies several kestrels and lets out another yelp. Frank's ears pick up whistling cardinals and thrushes. I sit wide-eyed between the Petermans--two community environmentalists on a mission and my guides for the day. Ten minutes ago I was in a rental car a mile away, fighting the morning's rush-hour traffic in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Now I'm heading up an urban waterway--a little-known ecological relic of the Everglades.

By any measure, this three-and-a-half-mile stretch of the North Fork of the New River is an improbable landscape. Largely hidden and undeveloped, it is the last section of the 25-mile New River that is still in its natural state. It also snakes through some of the grittiest inner-city neighborhoods in Florida. That a slice of raw nature exists deep within an urban core seems nothing short of miraculous. Still, decades of neglect and pollution have taken a toll. Manatees and river otters ply murky waters into which the city of Fort Lauderdale pumped sewage from 1962 to 1983. Years of accumulated street runoff have left a toxic layer of sediment on the river bottom; beer bottles, Styrofoam cups, and tires litter parts of the shoreline. And, like the rest of the Everglades, exotics have intruded: Brazilian pepper and Australian pine are increasingly crowding out native species along the river's banks.

All this spells big trouble for the river's future, but Frank and Audrey Peterman share a vision that charts a brighter course. Working with local officials, community activists, and Audubon, the Petermans are spearheading a campaign to revive the North Fork. The collaborative effort has built support through town meetings, educational field trips, and an interpretive photo exhibit of the river's history and ecology. "What I'm trying to do is help rekindle a connection between the community and the river," says Frank. "I won't be able to save the North Fork years from now, but the kids who learn about its birds, lizards, and plants will."

The rallying cry comes on the heels of current Broward County cleanup efforts, including the dredging of contaminated sediments from the river and the replanting of native wetland grasses. Civic leaders successfully pressed for the ecological restoration of the North Fork to be included in the landmark $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. "We've also been able to set aside funds from Broward's $400 million conservation bond that will go toward acquiring imperiled habitat along the North Fork," says Josephus Eggelletion Jr., a Broward County commissioner.

But the centerpiece for ecological preservation, local advocates agree, is the nature center planned for the river's east bank. Audubon has contracted to purchase a two-acre riverfront lot owned by Broward County. The nature center it will build on the site will be a cornerstone of Audubon's 2020 Vision, a plan to build 1,000 nature centers within the next two decades. When the North Fork center opens its doors in two years, it will provide educational exhibits, paths, picnic sites, and computers that connect to local schools for joint environmental projects. "What attracted us to this site is not just its significance to the greater Everglades ecosystem but also its significance to the community," says Vernita Nelson, director of education for Audubon of Florida. The North Fork area is home to one of the oldest African-American communities in Florida, dating to the 1920s.

"Here is a piece of pristine Everglades right in the community's backyard," Frank recalls thinking when he first spotted the site three years ago. He then pointed it out to Audubon, with which he and Audrey had recently forged a partnership to reach out to this much-overlooked South Florida population. "A nature center would engage people of color in the environment," he says, "and serve as a focal point for the North Fork's restoration and protection."

"I won't be able to save the North Fork years from now, but the kids who learn about its birds, lizards, and plants will."

Burke Uzzle

In the 1950s, when Joe Eggelletion learned to fish as a young boy on the North Fork, the New River was much wider and ran out into the original Everglades. "Sawgrass extended as far west as the eye could see," he recalls. "Mullet came into the river to spawn, and children swam in the waters." Today the loop formed by the New River's two forks is hemmed in on all sides by the 1.6 million people living in Broward County--the second most populous county in Florida. Various pump stations and levees have cut off the fresh water that historically flowed from Lake Okeechobee, altering the river's once brackish waters. The river splits into two forks--the South and the North--and although they're only minutes apart, the divergence reveals two landscapes that may as well be worlds apart. The South Fork, lined with million-dollar estates, manicured lawns, and docked cabin cruisers, retains--for all its exclusivity--few traces of its wild origins. The North Fork, on the other hand, is a curving sliver of raw nature that winds incongruously through one of the poorest and most heavily urbanized areas of the county.

The irony is not lost on Frank Peterman. "I hate to say anything good has come of racism and discrimination, but the reason this is all here," he says, gesturing to the North Fork's greenery, "is because it's in the black community." That paradox was cemented, in large part, by the arrival of Interstate 95 in the mid-1960s. In Fort Lauderdale, as in other parts of South Florida, much of I-95 was routed through minority neighborhoods. The North Fork area was no exception. Soon the river, once a source of recreation and subsistence fishing for area residents, had changed dramatically. In the following decade, as dollars and development passed by the North Fork, so did any concern for the river's health. "There were times in the 1970s," says Carter, "when over half the flow in the river was thought to be wastewater." Longtime residents remember when everything from cars to furniture filled the polluted waters. "As the river began dying," Audrey says, "so did the community."

The junglelike property is vintage Everglades, as well as the projected site of the future Audubon nature center.

Burke Uzzle

The high winds forecast for the day have already picked up, and it's only 11 A.M. By now the North Fork has revealed its disparate landscapes. Several pockets, where wading birds congregate and hundred-year-old cypresses curl their muddied roots, seem like portals to Old Florida. Other areas, with boarded-up buildings on weed-choked lots, are reminders of more recent urban decay. The emerging picture is a shifting canvas that is at once sublime and sullied. One minute I'm marveling at a pair of ibis taking refuge under a huge ficus; the next minute thunderous traffic roars over my head as our boat passes under the I-95 trestle, where, I notice, a sizable homeless contingent has taken refuge.

The Petermans, like the river, defy simple characterization. Born in Jamaica, Audrey is a 50-year-old social crusader who writes about environmental issues for South Florida's black press. Frank, 64, grew up in a segregated, rural area in Dania, about 10 miles from the North Fork. He worked as a lawyer before teaming up with Audrey in 1994 to form an environmental education company.

The couple, who married in 1992, share a passion for birding and social causes. But it wasn't until they took a cross-country trip in 1995 that their mutual interests merged to become a single-minded mission. Visiting 40 states and 14 national parks in two months, the Petermans were awed by America's rich natural heritage. They were also shocked to realize that by the end of their travels they had seen only two other African-Americans in all the parks they had visited. "When we returned to Florida," says Frank, "we started a newsletter to inform the black community about America's great outdoors and its crown jewels." Soon after, the couple started leading organized trips around the country, from Everglades National Park to the Grand Canyon.

At about the same time, a major plan for Everglades restoration was gaining momentum across Florida--and the nation. The Petermans recognized a chance to call attention to the plight of the North Fork, whose waterway is the last remaining stretch of original Everglades in Broward County. "We see the restoration of the Everglades ecosystem as an opportunity for the rejuvenation of the North Fork and its surrounding communities," says Audrey. "But," she cautions, "you can't do ecological restoration without also addressing the concerns of residents."

We dock on the east bank of the river, under a canopy of cypress trees. The four of us step out of the boat and into a marshy thicket of mangroves and pond apples. Frank points out flowering bromeliads on a live oak tree. The jungle-like property is vintage Everglades, as well as the projected site of the future Audubon nature center. As we amble farther into a knotty grove of ferns, vines, and more cypresses, it's not hard to imagine the crisscrossing trails that area residents will soon use for their own discovery and exploration.

The neighborhood kids, it turns out, are not waiting for the nature center to arrive. About 10 of them, all grade-schoolers, come skipping toward us through the woods. "We just saw a black bird catch a fish!" exclaims nine-year-old Jakalia Williams. The woods are directly behind a public housing complex, and the kids have tumbled out for an afternoon of play. Jeremy Hyman, also nine, who's clad in a Shaquille O'Neal basketball jersey, tells me they go down to the river every day to skip rocks. The kids take off again, running toward a clearing some 20 yards away, where churned-up rock, dirt, and trash is piled in a big mound. When we catch up with them, 10-year-old Brittany Webley tells us that their tree house was recently torn down. "But we can build another one," she says cheerfully. Carter explains that county workers, as part of an infrastructure-improvement project, have been going through the entire neighborhood, ripping out old pipes and installing new sewers and drainage to help with flooding and water quality.

In the meantime, the kids have turned one of the drainage containers into a makeshift fort. The square chunk of concrete is about four feet high and eight feet wide. A few of the kids jump through an opening at the top. Brittany invites me to join them. "This is where we go when the big boys chase us," she confides. "They don't know about it. And we have a Christmas tree in there, too," she adds. I peer into the dark opening, where Williams and Tiarra Ferguson, another nine-year-old, crouch playfully on a dirt floor; sure enough, a wisp of green pine is propped against the wall.

Ten years ago a nature center didn't rate high on the list of needs by area residents. Riven by drugs and crime, the neighborhood was named in a national survey as one of the 10 toughest places to grow up in America. Today, however, a slew of commercial redevelopment projects and the creation of new, affordable housing suggest that the community is on the upswing. In addition, a refurbished county park along the river will be home to the $13 million African-American Cultural Center and Research Library, which is scheduled to open in September 2002. Local officials believe all signs point to a resurgence. "There's a synergism that is fueling the restoration of the North Fork and the revitalization of the surrounding community," Eggelletion says.

The kids are pulling Frank Peterman into an adjacent field, peppering him with questions about plants and alligators. "Look! An eagle!" Jeremy shouts, pointing to the sky. Frank looks up and tells everyone it's an osprey. The kids are dashing around in circles, stopping at whatever flower or creepy-crawly catches their fancy. Brittany walks over and asks if she can borrow my tape recorder. She smiles as she speaks into it, playacting a scene that will no doubt be repeated for years to come. "Today in nature we learned about birds, plants, and bugs," she says proudly. "Thank you very much for coming."