Editor’s Note: Dispatches from a Sinking State is a contributor series from The Marjorie featuring first-person accounts of the environmental changes Floridians are witnessing across the state. This essay was funded by the Schooner Foundation.

All photos and text by CD Davidson-Hiers.

Even as a child, I knew Molino was not forever. 

My tiny corner of northern Florida is where zippered glissandos of cicadas score humid sunsets with sound. Where, in the summers, you go to bed sweaty, happy, and with the windows open. You listen for the frogs to bellow in the swamp. You listen for cows’ voices to echo in the distance; catch a far-off train whistle in A#. We used to be serenaded by coyotes at night, their yips and screams coming from the hilltops as the barn cats rushed home. 

Even so young, I felt an anxiety for the loss of this place. 

We live an hour from any oceanfront beach. I felt we had time before we lost the forested wilderness. And we did, for a bit. 

Now, nearly 5,000 townhomes and apartments are planned to be built here, more than four times the population. Realtors’ signs spring up like an invasive species with no natural predators. New roads will raze the trees, and people will begin a long-planned phase of relandscaping the highlands of Escambia County, tucked in just beneath Alabama.  

Molino is home to fewer than 1,200 people. Some estimates say the population has gone down from there in the last year. Yet like most left-alone places in this state, my rural town is now coveted for its suburban potential.  

The millions of dollars these new houses will afford developers will be called progress and placemaking, built sustainably and smart, labeled as community enhancements or revitalizations. We’ll be told this is happening for our own benefit.

I realize business considers itself an unemotional opponent. But as the global shift in our climate is and will continue to be the greatest threat to public health and safety, the impact of losing these spaces cannot be easily comprehended. The dangers of our future are not postponed for today’s profit. 

The feeling of loss does not encompass the dull ache of watching human development slowly creeping from the city into our countryside. 

***

For the entirety of my life, Molino has looked like homes organized by the fields that stretch out and away from the road. Wooden and wire fences demarcate horse and cattle pastures where metal hay rings have settled within fields. 

Cotton grows along the highway and, as a little kid, it was the only snow I knew until I first saw snow, picked it up, and began to cry because it was cold and it hurt and I didn’t understand why. 

There are swamps and streams and creeks that run through the woods. Forested acres and acres of wilderness intersperse between the farmlands. 

Before you get to my road, there’s a Share the Road sign with hat-wearing figures on tractors and a fire tower that reaches high above the trees where someone hangs a lighted star in the winter months. In the spring and summers, the clover that blankets the ground ripples as thousands of bees crawl and buzz among the white poofs of their flowers. You are careful where you step when out barefoot. 

When the Dollar General store broke ground up the hill about a year ago, we weren’t too surprised. That spot of land had been cleared of pine trees and left as an awkward bald spot in front of the rest of the forest. Wild bahiagrass was replaced with squares of sod brought in on trailers. A “now hiring” flag out front advertised on behalf of self-checkout cashiers. 

Then, last year Turtle Creek subdivision punched a hole into 31 acres of tangled forest a few miles south and across the street from an outdoor produce stand. Magnolias, oaks, pines were scraped out of the soil for what’s proposed to be 134 “new” lots. 

***

A hundred or so of my townspeople went to an Escambia County planning board meeting last summer to protest the new developments and stretched out the meeting for about seven hours. This is not what we want, they said. 

“We’re going to ride horses down the road. We’re going to do that country way of life, and they aren’t going to change it,” one resident told the board. 

Representatives from a St. Petersburg firm pointed to zoning plans long in the making and said they wished people understood this had already been decided. Molino will be getting a town center. 

Escambia County staff wrote that one large development project will “minimize the impact on the local environment and community.” 

The project “aims to create a more spacious and sustainable living environment that promotes a sense of openness, encourages green spaces and respects the existing character of the area.” 

I think back to one young farmer who I interviewed after Hurricane Sally decimated his crops for the season in 2020. He’d stepped forward from a group hosting a press tour to ask Florida’s agricultural commissioner (then Nikki Fried) what she planned to do to slow new construction in the area. 

“When you lose your land to development, you never get it back,” he had said.  

***

A family of beavers moved their hutch into the pond on my parents’ property about a decade ago. We welcomed them with an exuberance we could not demonstrate with pies or other gifts. But my mom saved their lives when she told a neighbor “no” who’d walked down to ask if he could shoot them. The beavers, who have since born several generations of offspring, redesigned our swamp, raised the water levels, and flooded the creek until it was as high as the horses’ chests.  

The beavers left saplings piled into neat stacks with bark stripped clean, and they pressed long lines of mud into thin dams and glued collapsing embankments into place. Their works made way for a host of other animals, including dozens of new species of birds — belted kingfishers that dive beak first into the waters, brown grackles that flock and swarm to bathe, and a great blue heron who rests in the pines around the pond. I’ve seen northern flickers and American woodcocks and heard downy woodpeckers, which are all new to us. With the sound of their calls, midday on the farm is as loud as a school cafeteria. 

It’s nearly impossible to name all the losses that will come, swept under by a prophesy of good.  

We already had armadillos, deer, Florida panthers somewhere out here. Opossums that give Oscar-worthy swoons and slip away as no one is looking. 

Foxes and owls. Bats that duck and swoop through the dusking air. Thousands of dragonflies dart about in a small paddock next to the barn in brilliant flashes of blues and greens. When I catalog it all, I realize where the mythology of my childhood was written. I grew up through stories about animals and learned to grow still and observe so closely I’d forget where I was, running home to the sound of my mother ringing a cowbell. I could catch fish with my hands. I remember how at night hundreds of fireflies danced like string lights in front of us. 

We’ve got plants that rely on the just-so about their environments, like the pitcher prairie plants sticking up as bassoons in the wetlands. Wild green onions sprout like clumps of horsehair in winter. Pricker plants grow their white flowers that fold into dewberries and blackberries we gather by the hundreds. 

We’ve got pileated woodpeckers with their flame-red mohawks. Two red-shouldered hawks call to each other in the afternoons and the cats press themselves to the ground. Blue birds hover in midair and cardinals bounce along the ground with orange road-cone beaks. We’ve got mockingbirds that sound like electric fences buzzing in the mist when they’re warning each other away. 

It’s nearly impossible to name all the losses that will come, swept under by a prophesy of good.  

We will have squirrels, though. More and more of them. More rats and roaming cats. More dogs kept inside to keep us company as we tear down the outdoors. Our sunsets will become more and more beautiful as the treelines disappear and pollution adds a bright smear of orange to the sky at dusk. We’ll begin to marvel more at the stars as we forget we once could see them like glowing cascades of freckles. 

Only once have I seen the Milky Way dashed across the night like a belt – just after Hurricane Ivan blew out the electricity for two weeks almost two decades ago. Each night, our mouths fell open staring at what the heavens held – (and they had to be called that, heavens) – opening above us, pulling us out of ourselves and into the cosmos. 

If the earth had tilted just then, I felt as if we would all fall into that mouth of star-studded sky and into the forever beyond it.  Only the fireflies would have been left behind us doing their electric dance in the dark.  

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