Editor’s Note: Leslie Kemp Poole pens Lessons from the Marjories, a column meditating on the legacies of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjorie Harris Carr, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosopher

What does it mean to love a river? To feel the flow of life in its waters? To know the history that ripples within its current?

Rivers figured large in the lives of Florida’s three Marjories. Each found joy, direction, and purpose from different waterways. And we are the fortunate inheritors of works inspired by their riverine passions.

For Marjorie Harris Carr, one of the loves of her life was northeast Florida’s Ocklawaha River. She exulted in its twisting path amid tangled banks filled with wildlife. “The first time I went up the Ocklawaha, I thought it was dreamlike,” she recalled.

She was not the first to be inspired by the river. Since the 1800s, tourists traveled its narrow waters on wooden steamboats, headed upstream for the wonder of the diaphanous Silver Springs. Poet Sidney Lanier called it “the sweetest water-lane in the world…a lane which is as if a typical woods-stroll had taken shape and as if God had turned into water and trees the recollection of some meditative ramble through the lonely seclusions of His own soul.” Writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, after an 1873 Oklawaha excursion, declared she had been to “Fairy-Land.” In its untouched nature, she wrote, “there is a netting and convoluting, a twisting and weaving and intertwining of all sorts of growth; and one might fancy it an enchanted forest, where the trees were going to change into something new and unheard of.”

Perhaps it reminded Carr of the wildness that shaped her childhood in Bonita Springs. She had paddled on the Imperial River and, even as a youth, worried about wildlife that was shot out by hunters who made a target of any moving creature: “Alligator, red bird, heron, what have you.” Stowe observed similar behavior, complaining that some men on board were “foaming at the mouth with excitement” as they shot wildly at alligators.

Carr’s affinity with the Ocklawaha motivated her work in her last decades as she fought first to re-route, and then to stop, the ill-conceived Cross Florida Barge Canal that partly destroyed the river. Her efforts reached into the halls of Tallahassee, newspaper editorial boardrooms, public hearings, and the telephones of Congress. Ultimately, her tireless work with a gifted team of river-lovers halted the canal project by presidential edict in 1971. The Ocklawaha was dammed, much to her dismay, but her legacy lives on with the Florida Defenders of the Environment and others dedicated to removing the aging, purposeless dam structure and restoring the river’s flow—her final focus and wish.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas fled from a bad divorce in 1915 to work for her father’s newspaper in Miami, then a fledgling outpost. After a decade, she turned to freelance writing, penning articles for national publications, including the “Saturday Evening Post,” that were eager for descriptions of Florida’s exotic people and wildlife. 

Everything changed when Douglas, busy penning a novel, was approached by a representative for a publishing house putting together a Rivers of America series. When he suggested she write about the Miami River, she responded that it wouldn’t be worthy as it was “only an inch long.”

“But when a publisher visits your house and asks you to write something, you don’t let him go casually,” she recalled in her autobiography, “Voice of the River.” “I suggested that the Miami River might turn out to be part of the Everglades. I knew it was connected to the Everglades. I can’t pretend I knew much more than that.” The publisher was amenable, so Douglas took a $1,000 advance and dug into research. State hydrologist Gerry Parker explained to her that a river is a “body of fresh water moving more in one direction than the other.” After mulling it over, Douglas went back to Parker and asked if she could “get away” with calling the Everglades a “river of grass.” He agreed.

With that description, Douglas wrote her 1947 book “The Everglades: River of Grass,” forever changing the public’s view of this massive system, once considered a wasteland. “There are no other Everglades in the world,” the book opens, with the remaining pages describing its intricate nature and long human history. It was a best seller.

After its publication, Douglas went on to a long, colorful career. She wrote more books along with poetry, short stories, and even lectured at a local college. But in the last decades of her life, Douglas’ river of grass gave her renewed drive and direction. At age 78, she joined efforts to stop a “ridiculous idea”: a commercial jetport in the Everglades. At the challenge of local activists, she created an advocacy group, Friends of the Everglades. She recruited members and talked to any interested group. The jetport was stopped, but Douglas’ career as a champion of the Everglades continued until her death at age 108.

As with Carr, a river shaped and remade her life’s journey.

Once I lost touch with the Creek, I had had hardships that seemed to me more than one could bear alone.

Marjorie kinnan rawlings

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who had many adventures on the Ocklawaha and the St. Johns rivers, had one particular experience that changed her course.

Rawlings and her husband, Charles, moved in 1928 to the rural hamlet of Cross Creek with hopes that their newly purchased farm and orange groves would produce enough income for them to pursue writing careers. As any of their neighbors could have advised, it was a lovely but unlikely dream. Within a few years, their savings were gone but Rawlings found unexpected inspiration—and growing success—in writing about her new community and its landscape. Charles, however, was deeply unhappy and Rawlings soon faced the prospect of a divorce, a rare event of the era that might damage her literary ambitions. She also had a case of writer’s block that held up progress on a novel.

“Once I lost touch with the Creek,” she wrote in “Cross Creek,” “I had had hardships that seemed to me more than one could bear alone. I loved the Creek, I loved the grove, I loved the shabby farmhouse. Suddenly they were nothing. The difficulties were greater than the compensations. I talked with my friend Dessie…She knew only that a friend was in trouble.”

Dessie Smith’s solution? A trip the length of the St. Johns River—an adventure she’d long hankered to take. After a night of moonshine drinking, Smith organized the trip and on a cool March morning in 1933, the two set off in a wooden jon boat with a small outboard motor. For 10 days they camped, fished, hunted (well, Smith hunted), and enjoyed meals cooked in Rawlings’ iron Dutch oven. They chatted with people along the shore, got lost and survived the maze known as Puzzle Lake, and were exhilarated by dewy mornings and moon-glowing nights.

Rawlings was reminded of nature’s beauty and panicked that she might never be happy back on land. But when they reached home, she found “a forgotten loveliness” in life. “Because I had known intimately a river, the earth pulsed under me. The Creek was home. Oleanders were sweet past bearing, and my own shabby fields, weed-tangled, were newly dear.”

Her soul was restored. She divorced her husband, finished the novel, and six years later won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And a river trip with a good friend was her inspiration. 

Each of these Marjories steered new life courses driven by a love of Florida waters. In a time when a majority of state residents live in the hectic chaos of urban areas, perhaps a river trip is the tonic we all need.

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Cover photo: Ocklawaha River. Photo courtesy State Archives of Florida