An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century

Epilogue: “Without Me”

[ e p i l o g u e “Without Me” William “Toby” Muir’s wife, Celeste, called him to the phone one afternoon. “Jarjee” wanted to talk to him. Douglas was probably 106 at the time, and Muir surely had not expected a phone call from her. But there on the line was that familiar resonant voice. “Toby,” she asked, “do you still have your sailboat ?” He did. “It has been a long time since I’ve been sailing. Would you take me sailing?” He would. “How long is your boat?” Twenty-three feet. “As I remember, it is a sloop, isn’t it?” Yes. “Now a sloop has only one mast, isn’t that right?” Yes. “It is the ketch and the yawl that have two masts.” True. “And it is the yawl that has the mizzenmast behind the rudder.” For a half hour, the questions and conversation continued. Marjory Stoneman Douglas still knew a thing or two about boats. She might have been gathering information for a story, except that writing stories was long behind her. She wanted to go sailing, though, and at this moment she was not thinking of the inability of her mostly bedridden body to carry out the vision so clear in her mind. Before hanging up, she told Muir she would have to find her bathing suit or buy a new one. They made a date for the following weekend. But Muir knew that she would soon forget the conversation. 592 ] epilogue Although Douglas continued to hold occasional press conferences and to make public speeches after she turned one hundred and retired from Friends of the Everglades, she was clearly declining. A few months after Governor Lawton Chiles signed the calamitous Marjory Stoneman Douglas Everglades Protection Act in her front yard, she went into the hospital with swallowing problems. The doctors and nurses believed she was intentionally starving herself, dismissing her as an old woman going out into the woods to die. But they put little effort into trying to communicate with their near-deaf patient. Sharyn Richardson explained to Douglas that she would die if she did not eat. “Well,” she responded resolutely, “I certainly don’t want to do that.” She would have a bowl of vanilla ice cream, which Richardson gladly retrieved from bemused nurses. After her release from the hospital, she functioned with increasingly impaired mental faculties. A full-time aid, Medina Brown, came to care for her, as did the Wellesley Club and many of her friends. Some stopped coming around after she began spending much of her time in bed and required assistance (fetching her a glass of water or escorting her to the bathroom). One or two trailed off when they realized they no longer had a drinking buddy. Helen Muir wished her friend had been spared the last declining years. Around the time of the telephone conversation with Toby, Helen asked how she was feeling generally. “Like a caged bird, my dear,” she said. “Like a caged bird.” Sometimes, though, she got to spread her wings, as in 1993, when she went to the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The year before, Hillary Clinton had come to Miami to campaign for Bill’s run for the presidency. The Wellesley Club hosted Clinton, a fellow alumna, and took her to the Stewart Avenue home of the oldest living Wellesley graduate. Clinton was familiar with Douglas and her hard work to protect the Everglades, cheerfully sitting next to her and chatting as she lay in bed. Douglas was an important enough individual that Hillary Clinton sought her endorsement for Bill. And Douglas eventually gave it. The next year, both Clintons came to Miami, and this time Douglas was rallied into evening clothes and a wheelchair to meet the president and First Lady at a reception at the Sheraton Bal Harbor Hotel, the site of “without me” [ 593 many environmental conferences of years before. Bill knelt next to Douglas , held her hand, and raised his voice above the din to have a short conversation with her. Among other things, he said she should come to the White House to visit, repeating an invitation Hillary had previously extended . Kathy Gaubatz, one of the Wellesley “mafia” who escorted Douglas that night, saw this as an opportunity. For the next few months, she and the Miami Wellesley Club delivered a steady stream of letters and...