The Kissimmee River – Headwaters to Lake Okeechobee
The lake does not sleep, but she dreams. And in her dreams, a serpent moves.
It begins far to the north, where water seeps from pine flatwoods and cypress domes, gathering into a slender flow. This is the Kissimmee, her oldest companion. Long before levees, it twisted its way southward in wide, lazy curves, a silver serpent sunning itself across the land. It was not a river in haste. It was a ritual. A rhythm. A slow breath pulled through 100 miles of grassland and marsh.
The ancestors knew its pattern. They followed its bends by canoe, camping where it split into oxbows and returning when it flooded wide. Along its margins, they fished and sang. The river brought egrets, deer, turtles, and long-legged dreams. Its water touched prairie roots, fed ferns, and whispered into Lake Okeechobee like a long-held promise.
They saw the river not as a line, but as a body. Alive, winding, patient. They told stories of the sleeping serpent, how it coiled gently across the earth to protect the lake from thirst and the plains from fire. Each turn of its body was sacred, each flood a message. They honored its flooding seasons, knowing that when the serpent stirred, life came with it.
The Belle Glade and later Seminole travelers moved along it, marking safe passages between mounds and hammocks, storing knowledge in its curves. Ceremonial bundles were carried downstream. So were herbs, tools, and stories. The Kissimmee was not only a waterway. It was a memory path, braided with lore.
But the world changed. The serpent’s curves were deemed wasteful by those who could not see their purpose. In the 1960s, the river was forced straight, dug into a rigid canal, renamed as progress. Its coils were sliced open. The floodplains dried. The fish fled. Birds vanished. And Lake Okeechobee felt the difference.
The water came too fast now, too straight. It did not linger to nourish the land. The serpent no longer stirred in its sleep. It convulsed.
The lake watched as her ancient vein became a drainage ditch. She tasted the sediment, the fertilizer, the disquiet. The balance once kept by the meandering flood was lost. And with it, so was the voice of the serpent.
But the people began to remember.
They saw fish disappear, saw sawgrass wilt, saw sacred birds grow scarce. They listened again to the old stories. And in time, they began to act. In the early 2000s, the river’s restoration began. Earth was moved again, but this time to unstraighten. Meanders were returned. Old oxbows breathed again. The serpent was not dead. Only wounded.
Now, it stirs. Slowly, the river reclaims its bends. The birds return. The grasses sway. The waters slow and spread. And the lake, farther south, drinks this gift like a memory returned.
The sleeping serpent still moves beneath the surface. Its shape cannot be erased from the land, only buried and recalled. Its floodplain is wide enough to hold both water and story.
And as the river resumes its ancient rhythm, the lake listens. The vein has begun to heal. And the dream, once forgotten, lives again.