Living off the land while leading
My friend Yvonne Hill recently convinced Sanibel's Island Cinema to show the movie "Harriet." This superb movie is full of riveting moments and inspiring drama. The setting for much of the action was a land that is much like parts of the western half of Sanibel: mostly flat, interspersed with brackish tidal waters and marshy woodlands. How did Harriet Tubman survive, traveling through that tough wilderness, I wondered? The movie, wonderful as it is, does not really cover this subject. Even on a small, 3.5-acre tract of upland and lowland wetland woods that my husband and I once owned on Sanibel, we would become disoriented as we wandered through the dense foliage. What kept us from becoming completely lost was the sound of traffic on Sanibel-Captiva Road. But Harriet had no traffic noise to orient her. Instead, she relied upon her knowledge of nature. The place where she was enslaved as a child is now in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge ...