There are only a few clouds in the sky, but they are big and cottony and they occasionally blot out the sun. He quickly pulls the garment back over his face and turns and looks over the bow at the Everglades, the last true wilderness in this part of the world, a geography that is, to borrow Pat Conroy’s line, Hiaasen’s wound, but also his salve. “I’m from South Florida,” he yells over the whine of the motor. At one point, perhaps a bit self-conscious about his getup, Hiaasen turns to me and peels down the Buff. He’s wrapped up like an Iditarod musher-ski hat, rain pants, winter jacket,bandanna-like Buff covering his face. In front of us, in his “lucky seat” in the middle of Huff’s boat, is the writer Carl Hiaasen. I’m seated next to Huff, my head down into the chilly wind. As the bow comes down on plane, like a man nodding to sleep in a chair, he nonchalantly starts carving turns through what appears to be an inscrutable, watery maze of mangroves. Steve Huff, his weathered right hand on the motor’s tiller, leads us away from the Chokoloskee, Florida, dock in his sixteen-foot Hell’s Bay skiff.
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