Bright Futures

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Twelve hundred years before I drove my dying car into the parking lot of the Dairy Queen on 301 in Sarasota, saber-tooth tigers, mastodons, giant armadillos, and camels roamed what are now the high-end malls that house Saks, Nieman-Marcus, Lord amp; Taylor, and twenty-screen movie theaters.

The land that is now the Florida Keys was part of a single landmass double the size of the present state.

People who inhabited Florida twelve hundred centuries ago were hunters and gatherers who lived on nuts, plants, small animals, and shellfish. There was a steady clean water supply, good stones on the ground for toolmaking, and more firewood than they needed. Complex cultures developed with temple mounds and villages. These villages traded with one another and developed cultivated agriculture.

As ocean waters wore away land, the peninsula shrank.

Juan Ponce de Leon landed in 1513 in what became St. Augustine. He called the area “La Florida,” in honor of Pascua florida-the feast of flowers. In 1539 Hernando de Soto arrived, and a short time later, in quick succession, came settlers, slaves, and hurricanes. The natives were gone, though remnants of natives and runaway slaves created the Seminole tribes. By this time the peninsula had already long since shrunk to its present size.

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