One park ranger, Steven Robinson, agreed to be identified only if it was made clear that he was expressing his personal opinions, not speaking as a representative of the national park. Robinson believes that true restoration can be achieved only by recovering more natural systems than the one the plan promises.

"Take down the wall around lake Okeechobee. Take out the sugarcane farming. Walk away and let nature take its course," he said one afternoon, after I'd listened to him patiently advise visitors on everything from not attempting a backcountry canoe expedition if they'd never been in a canoe to the fact that it was natural, if sometimes messy, for an alligator to eat a duck. "It will cost one million dollars, take one month, and the Everglades and the cities can be saved."

Robinson, I was told, has worked in the park longer than anyone else—twenty-one years—as a "nonpermanent winter seasonal employee," without medical benefits or even a raise in all that time. Yet he said, "This is the best job in the world, because I get to try to save the planet and be outdoors in Florida, my home." Which meant he certainly had opinions worth listening to. (His financial situation, by the way, is typical of seasonal rangers—some of whom joke that one of the job requirements is a vow of poverty—and would not be helped by the plan. The $7.8 billion provides for the continuation of a park for them to work in, but does not allocate a penny of the money to the park itself.) But his walk-away plan would not exactly sit well with the sugar growers, or with South Florida residents who want a quarter-acre lot and a backyard with sprinklers. In fact, it is just the kind of plan that would be tied up in court for forty years.

So what are we—as visitors to the park who hope that there will be birds in the sky by the millions again, and as U.S. taxpayers who want to make sure our money is wisely spent, and as citizens of the world determined to act responsibly toward the earth—to do? Do we sign off on the Everglades Restoration Plan, reassuring ourselves that the myriad federal and state agencies involved, led by the Corps of Engineers—which throughout its often controversial history has had a reputation for building first and asking questions later—will act in nature's best interests? Do we give groups like Friends of the Everglades the support that will allow them to monitor the progress of the plan and to be ready with alternative solutions should it fall short of the mark? Do we let our elected officials know how important these issues are to us? Or do we just skip the Everglades and go straight to Orlando? (Disney World took such a toll on park attendance when it opened in 1971 that, to this day, visitation—1,037,881 in 2002—is just over half what it was at its peak of 1,773,302 in the early 1970s.)

Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who died in 1998 at the age of 108, has been widely quoted as saying (although the words were actually written by Joe Podgor, a former executive director of Friends of the Everglades), "The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet."

And I may be able to live on a houseboat in the saw grass backcountry again, and hear the splash of a fish on an otherwise still evening, signaling, as clear as a village bell, that all is wet and wild once more—as it should be in this utterly unique corner of the world.