Where Greed Grows Wild

The kayak drifts through the morning mist on Florida’s Silver River during a rare January cold snap. Birds observe from every direction: Green herons and snowy egrets stare half-hidden behind fan-shaped palmetto leaves. A male anhinga perches on a log, wings outstretched, gazing through orange eyes ringed in startling turquoise. Pileated woodpeckers and kingfishers shriek from the treetops as I glide past, toward one of the river’s 30 natural springs.

I am suddenly and wholly ecstatic, smitten with this river and the life it sustains. But love for a place, like love for a person, can harm as well as delight: It can be as dark as this river’s murky depths and as brilliant as its sudden pools of light. I keep paddling, my mind and senses open, hoping to better understand this gorgeous and absurd place.

~~

Barefoot in his white cotton pants, the resident herpetologist’s biceps are bulging as he sits astride a six-foot-long alligator.

An hour earlier, as I walked with a handful of other paddlers beneath a large arched sign that read “Florida’s Silver Springs,” I discovered a well-tanned, well-wrinkled man posing for tourist photos. Outfitted in a MAGA visor with a thatch of faux orange hair, he had one outstretched arm providing a perch for his blue and yellow macaw. He was my first clue that this setting is complicated — not just by politics, but by centuries of wild creativity and an even-wilder greed.

Florida has more than 1,000 springs — pools of shockingly clear water ranging in size and created by water bubbling up through vents from the Earth’s core. Below all the golf courses and amusement park asphalt lie ancient limestone aquifers creating caves, sinkholes, and springs that remain temperate at 72 degrees.

Along Silver River, Silver Springs is one of the largest, deepest springs in the world, pumping out 500 million gallons of water a day. The surrounding 4,000-acre Silver Springs State Park in north central Florida is crisscrossed by waterways and hiking trails under old-growth cypresses and oaks and red maples whose seedpods glowed scarlet on this otherwise muted winter day.

I hurried past the man and macaw to catch up to my guide, Lars Andersen, a master naturalist and veteran environmentalist who regards Silver River’s beauty with equal parts delight and grim trepidation. With his weathered face sober under a fraying canvas sunhat, he told me this sensitive region has been both shaped and threatened by human intervention since it became a tourist attraction in the 1820s.

~~

Hullam Jones eases his canoe into the water and bends barefoot, trousers rolled, to inspect the glass viewing panel he’s affixed to the bottom of his boat. At last, not a single leak. He climbs in and pulls the brim of his Panama hat down over his eyes, shading his face against the searing sun. Then, paddling the dark waters, he moves toward a glimmer of turquoise, looks down, and gasps.

Under his feet, a clear blue pool extends 30 feet deep, fed by a gently bubbling vent at the bottom. Limestone formations encircle the spring; Hullam guides his canoe to one rocky edge, where he glimpses the mouth of a cave leading who-knows-how-far underground. Large, silver fish float below him, their fins and scales gleaming blue in the play of sunlight through the water. And then, he drifts over a vast gray mammal — the largest he’s ever seen — floating in the springs. Through the glass, he marvels at the manatee’s snout, its whiskers, its tiny eyes, curved front flippers, and wide flat tail.

Hullam’s canoe inspires a fleet of glass-bottom rowboats that carry enthralled tourists across the water. They exclaim over the same otherworldly landscape that has graced the lives of Indigenous people for centuries. They admire the same marvels briefly glimpsed by the European explorers who navigated these waters by raft and pole just decades earlier, and by those who rode the paddlewheel steamboats that docked along the river to barter with plantation owners growing tobacco, citrus, and vegetables. The original canoe remains on display at the Florida Museum of History in Tallahassee, 147 years later.

~~

The morning is too chilly for alligators, Lars tells me. He points out a sextet of cooter turtles lined up on a partially submerged log. We’re approaching the springs from the east end of the park. Clouds give way to weak winter sunshine that illuminates the long red legs and curved bills on a flock of white ibis, and then, we reach Silver Springs.

Suddenly, the enormous bodies of manatees stretch out beneath my kayak; I study their flippers, whiskers, and flat round tails. Spooked by the shadow of my paddle, blue tilapia rush to guard their sandy nests. The warm, clear waters open up before me to reveal centuries of foolishness and spectacle, millennia of war and prosperity.

~~

Alongside a rare watering hole in the cool afternoon, a group of Paleoindians gather around the mammoth they’ve ambushed and speared to death. One man kneels astride the six-ton carcass, peeling back its flesh with a stone knife. Others slice its meat into pieces small enough to cook over a fire. One man — startled, perhaps, by the appearance of a giant ground sloth or some other creature passing by on its way to browse the surrounding dry prairie — drops his spear. The weapon will remain here, buried in sediment and then in water, until scuba diver George William Guest discovers it, along with bones from the mammoth, thousands of years later.

The descendants of the Paleoindians, meanwhile, branch into multiple tribes and dozens of chiefdoms. Nearly 12,000 years after their ancestors’ mammoth hunt, the Indigenous community of Silver Springs receives some unannounced visitors. In 1539, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto and his men land on the southwest shore of what is now Florida and make their way north by bushwhacking through forests and slogging through swamps.

De Soto and his men stagger onto the banks of the Silver River, sweltering in their high-necked, long-sleeved shirts and heavy breeches. They gape at members of the Timucuan Indian tribe fishing from hand-carved canoes and watch as others butcher an alligator. The Timucuans move through the trees and along the shore with their arms and legs bare, dried fish bladders dangling from their earlobes and feathers jutting upward from their hair.

The Spaniards proceed to enslave and murder thousands of Timucuans across their 30 chiefdoms. By the 1700s, war and disease have eradicated almost the entire Indigenous population. Those who remain join forces with Creek people and escaped slaves brought over from Africa. This group becomes the Seminole tribe.

By the early 1800s, the Seminoles face yet another threat: President Andrew Jackson’s demand that they leave their ancestral home. At the edge of the crystalline springs, Chief Osceola, resplendent in a brightly patterned tunic and buckskin breeches with two long-plumed feathers cascading from his turban, stands and regards his fellow Seminoles. Amid debate, he moves away from his people and takes a long, solitary moment to search the depths of the turquoise springs. When he returns, his proposal is clear: fight the white man; save our homes.

Jackson attempts to remove the Seminoles during two of three different wars (he wasn’t involved in the third). A couple of years into the second battle, Chief Osceola dies in an Army prison camp. Many Seminoles perish in the wars, and most of the survivors are then relocated by force. But it is believed that some of Osceola’s descendants hide in the swamps of the Everglades, biding their time until it might be safe to return.

“They’re gods left behind.”

~~

Along the edges of a now-motorized glass-bottomed boat, Yankee passengers in their Sunday best dip their fingers into the warm waters, marveling at the fish and manatees viewed up close. It’s the 1930s, and Silver Springs Nature Theme Park has become a major tourist attraction specializing in the absurd. At the front of the boat stands Colonel Tooey — Colonel appears to be his first name rather than his title — an unremarkable middle-aged, thick-jawed man in a brimmed cap and a white sailor shirt imprinted with the words “Tooey’s Boats.”

Along the shoreline, just a few feet from the boat’s edge, a dark-haired, bare-chested man wrestles an alligator. Barefoot in his white cotton pants, the resident herpetologist’s biceps are bulging as he sits astride a six-foot-long alligator, his fingers clamped around the reptile’s mouth. The man’s name is Ross Allen.

Allen was a teenager when his family moved from Pittsburgh to Florida. While others his age were busy dancing the Charleston and swilling gin in speakeasies, Allen was catching snakes and turtles. The year Wall Street crashed, he founded the Reptile Institute at Silver Springs to teach the public about his favorite creatures.

Alligator wrestling has become one of the main attractions at Silver Springs, where Allen hauls 500-pound gators by their tails and milks rattlesnakes for the public as he describes his anti-venom experiments. He also maintains a robust snake-selling operation. Even the actor Johnny Weissmuller, tall and toned and naked except for a loincloth and slippers (he’s on a break from filming Tarzan) joins Allen, who sometimes serves as his stunt double. In front of the Reptile Institute, they examine the trunk of a baby elephant. A banner behind them reads “Snakes Milked for Venom.”

As the boat rumbles on, tourists cry out and point to one of Allen’s protégées: a barefoot Seminole youth in a hand-woven sweater who demonstrates how to flip an alligator over and rub its belly, lulling it into a trancelike state.

The boat rounds a corner past oaks heavy with Spanish moss when one of the passengers cries out. “Look!” the woman trills, waving her handkerchief toward a thatch-roofed hut on shore. “A real Indian!”

In the crook of a cypress, a Seminole woman wearing a hand-woven skirt holds a baby on her lap. Boat passengers lean over the water to take her picture and look with envy at the tourists on land who tour the village. Some visitors watch the two teenage girls in gauzy shawls grinding corn in a hollowed-out log with wooden poles. Others walk into the round sleeping huts of the Seminole camp, snapping photographs.

Tooey slows the boat to drift past three kids just out of toddlerhood, floating along the river in a hand-hewn canoe. The children look over, dismayed, as the Northerners toss trash over the sides of their glass-bottom boat. One man in a white linen suit draws back his arm and hurls a chunk of fast-food hamburger into the forest. It lands among a troop of monkeys who erupt into chatter and begin to fight over the treat.

~~

These unsettling attractions seen by the passengers of Tooey’s Jungle Cruises live on in black and white photographs and archival film footage — including the 1960s travel film, A Guided Tour of Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute. But while we have ample glimpses into the tourist experience of the early 20th century, we know little about the Seminole experience. Take Allen’s alligator-wrestling protégée, Francis Osceola: His lineage, which may or may not have traced back to the same Chief Osceola who fought Andrew Jackson, remained unknown to the white people around him. It appears that no one took the time to interview him — nor any other Seminole — about what it felt like to live on display in this place their ancestors were forced to leave.

At the edge of the crystalline springs, Chief Osceola, resplendent in a brightly patterned tunic and buckskin breeches with two long-plumed feathers cascading from his turban, stands and regards his fellow Seminoles.

What we do know is that in 1934, Charles Metzger, then-proprietor of Silver Springs, persuaded a few dozen Seminole adults and children to construct a village along the riverbank. There, they would live “protected” — and on full display — for onlookers gawking from boats and outside the low wood-rail fences around what concessionaires called a “Primitive Seminole Indian Village.” 

But gawking at Indigenous residents wasn’t enough. Looking for ways to liven up the otherwise serene float, Tooey purchased six monkeys, possibly from a carnival in New York, and set them loose on a small island where he assumed they’d exist — like the Seminole residents — to delight his paying clients. And while the entrepreneur operated his tour boat along the Silver River from the 1930s until the 1960s, his ignorance wreaked havoc that Silver Springs environmentalists still struggle with today — for Tooey didn’t know that the monkeys were “excellent swimmers.”

Between 1984 and 2012, Florida wildlife officials — alarmed by tourist reports of aggressive monkeys giving chase — authorized the removal of 1,000 monkeys to slow population growth. Some were sold to laboratories. Animal rights groups protested, and the park ceased trapping.

Now, as then, visitors point and squeal. Though it’s been banned since 2017, some attempt to hand-feed PBJs and Cliff bars to the 300-plus rhesus macaques that live in the trees alongside the Silver River. Now, as then, few visitors realize the monkeys carry the herpes B virus. It’s rare for the virus to pass to humans, but, when it does, it can be fatal.

~~

The James Bond franchise becomes aware of Silver Springs in the 1960s. As a now-middle-aged Ross Allen drapes pythons around the shoulders of comely university co-eds and wrestles anacondas into underwater submission, Sean Connery, as James Bond, descends into the springs in scuba gear to beat the crap out of evil divers in the film Thunderball. Later, Roger Moore plays Bond at the springs, engaging in weirdly low-key snake-wrestling for the film Moonraker. 

In the 1960s TV series I Spy, Robert Culp and Bill Cosby play government spies. For an episode filmed underwater at Silver Springs, the crew lowers three imposing statues of Greek gods into the water.

Then, they abandon them.

~~

Celebrity biologist and wildlife conservationist Jeff Corwin sits in a drift boat alongside Florida Springs Institute scientist Bill Hawthorne, who’s sporting a green camouflage wetsuit. The two of them are here to cater to an audience of wildlife lovers — specifically, the viewers of ABC’s Wildlife Nation. Corwin is talking about the importance of preserving Silver River species; he holds up a large softshell turtle so the videographer can shoot a close-up of its unusually long, thin nose.

“It’s a connection for us to this amazing ecosystem and the incredible species that make Florida and Silver River such a magical place,” Corwin says of the turtle, which his fellow scientist deposits gently back into the water.

Season two of Wildlife Nation, released in 2024, focuses not only on the flora and fauna of Florida, but on a relatively — compared to the millennia of history that preceded it — newer craze in Silver Springs: conservation. Along with the turtles at Silver Springs, Corwin highlights the manatees, their bulbous gray bodies comical against the backdrop of crystalline water and elegantly waving sea grass.

“The beauty about Silver River is that it has a relatively constant temperature,” he explains. ”So when we get those very dangerous cold snaps, which happen here in Florida in winter, manatees can come here and survive.”

Environmental causes form the backbone of Silver River as we know it today: In 2018, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection assumed management of Silver River and the adjacent land and springs, in part to protect the sensitive region from development. Locals and visitors alike run the Silver Springs half-marathon or 5K along the river to benefit the advocacy group Florida Springs Council; they climb aboard paddleboards and scoop up monthly water samples for the Silver Springs Institute; and they sponsor manatees from the comfort of home while watching them float through the springs on webcams hosted by the conservation group Save the Manatee Club.

But love for a place, like love for a person, can harm as well as delight.

The wave of Silver Springs enthusiasm is stronger than ever, and the descendants of Hullam’s original glass-bottom boat are still here, departing Silver Springs dock every 30 minutes from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.. Captains on the historic watercraft navigate around kayaking tours and stand-up paddleboarders. Hikers emerge from the park’s campsites, stopping for ice cream in the café, a meal at the diner, or the gift shop to buy a plush manatee. At the Springside Café, visitors order burgers and falafel balls and sweet corn fritters and wash down their meals with a $2.50 bottle of water pumped out of crystalline Silver Springs.

The bottles, however, are a sign of the avarice that exists alongside modern conservation. The extraction process is incredibly controversial. As the group Environment Florida notes, “The state invests over $50 million dollars a year into the preservation of our springs because the water that flows through them are public waters. But current bottlers pay a one-time permit application fee of just $115 for the right to pump, the water is free.”

Approximately 1,000 people move to Florida each day. Their septic tank runoff, fertilizer usage, and water needs — for drinking, cleaning, watering lawns — combined with extraction from bottled water companies threaten many of the state’s springs. Companies such as Silver Springs and BlueTriton, whose brands include Pure Life and others, currently extract 4.1 trillion gallons of water a year from the state’s springs to bottle and sell. In some parts of the state, springs have stopped flowing altogether because of over-pumping, or they’ve become suffocated by algae. In those places, the beautiful turquoise waters have gone dark.

~~

As I paddle clear blue waters past centuries-old cypresses and longleaf pines, the leaves above begin to rustle. A troop of 15 silver-brown monkeys swings to the ground to chatter and groom one another on fallen logs.

Like so many others, I’m entranced by the park. And I’m worried, especially as National Parks around the country lose funding and jobs on a grand scale, and crucial environmental protections in Florida are hacked away. Silver Springs has long been the site of absurd juxtaposition, from the forced relocation and commercial reintroduction of the Seminole people to the public’s education of reptiles that are wrestled to make a buck. Concessionaries, dependent on the clarity of water, sell bottles of environmental destruction for $2.50. And then there are these monkeys with herpes.

I wonder if we, as a seriously flawed species, grasp the gestalt of these places we love. I ponder this as I float, encased in three layers of clothing, listening to birdsong on a winter river I have mostly to myself.

“You’ll have to come back when it’s warmer and the alligators come out to bask,” Lars tells me.

I nod, already planning my next trip, even as I wonder if I should return. I’m head-over-heels in love with the flora and fauna, the waterways, and the environmental activists of Florida. A lot of us are. But for most of the history of this place, our love has been reckless — and deadly. Can we teach ourselves to love more selflessly — to curb the destruction of our vacations and refreshments and entertainments? Can our adoration even exist free of greed, exploitation, and convenience? I’m not convinced we can.

~~

The warm, clear waters open up before me to reveal centuries of foolishness and spectacle, millennia of war and prosperity.

In my last half hour at the park, I fork over $15 to get a sense of what people have been marveling at for nearly 150 years.

Our captain is a brassy older woman who kindly steers clear of the manatees, merely pointing out the window in their direction so that we tourists can crane our necks and glimpse the shadowy outlines of these great creatures. She guides us along the murky water until suddenly, we’re over the famed Silver Spring. I gasp as tilapia glide below the boat, their blue fins glowing under the glass. The water appears turquoise, framed by limestone crevices and caves extending far down to the bubbling vent.

The captain saves what she considers the pièce de résistance for last. Circling the spring, she guides the boat over to a trio of figures: statues of broad-chested men, arms held tight at their sides. 

“They’re gods left behind,” she tells us.

The passengers float in wondrous silence over the mythological men, this trio of solemn-faced sentinels swathed in brown algae who’ve left their mark on the springs with the rest of us.

“Thanks for riding!” the captain sings, “And just a reminder: The big glass at the bottom of the boat is my tip jar!”

Guilty at my lack of cash, I fish in my coat pockets and excavate my backpack for stray change. Others do the same. Sheepish, we throw down a few coins and a stray dollar bill.

Below our meager offering, a manatee floats by. And then, we drift over the I, Spy statues once again. Their stony eyes regard us, downturned mouths set in a displeasure that strikes me as chilling despite their beards of algae.