Introduction – The Lake Remembers the Roads
Lake Okeechobee lies still, but it remembers movement.
Beneath her mirrored surface and beyond her reed-fringed arms, invisible threads stretch outward, ripples that once flowed as roads. Before fences, before engines, before grids carved Florida into parcels and boundaries, there were only currents and canoes. Water shaped the land, and the land listened.
The peoples who lived with the lake, Belle Glade, Calusa, Tequesta, Timucua, and later the Seminoles, did not pave their presence. They etched it into water. Their roads were not built with stone but with will, memory, and tide. Dug by hand or followed by instinct, these waterways were lifelines of trade, of ritual, of survival. They linked tree islands to shell mounds, coast to lake, uplands to wet season marshes. They whispered messages between cultures and across generations.
Every canal, channel, and spring-fed stream was more than passage. It was relationship. The flow taught patience. The tide taught rhythm. The floods taught reverence.
The lake, then young and wild, was both hub and haven. The people did not conquer it, they moved with it. Their routes formed an aquatic web, a circulatory system of the land’s soul. Today, many are lost, buried beneath sugar fields, suburbs, or silence. But the lake still remembers.
Now we follow her memory.
In this section, we drift with her stories, not just outward from Lake Okeechobee but through the watery veins of ancient Florida. Each chapter ahead is a path, a canal carved with ceremony, a hidden creek that carried corn and copper, a sacred passage between stars and soil. These are the water roads of the ancestors.
And like the lake, they are still alive, if we listen.