E VA N M A N D E R Y
Chapter 15 ***
I
N THE 1940S, the Army Corps of Engineers literally lifted Florida from
the center of the Earth. Back then, the Corps took on huge projects. Their engineers carved the St. Lawrence Seaway, constructed mam-
moth dams along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and even built an atomic bomb, but none of these projects were so ambitious as dredging the periphery of the Everglades with a series of drains and pipes. It was a mammoth undertaking that took thirty years from start to finish and cost more than one hundred lives. David had often wondered how strange it would have struck the Corpsmen that the land they’d created would be filled with Waffle Houses and Wal-Marts and populated almost entirely by old people who could no longer tolerate the cold of Maine or New York or even Northern Florida, and so gathered in this haven to live out their remaining days under the sun, in air-conditioned clubhouses and diners. How stranger still that amidst the endless sea of condominiums and parking lots, there should be a fifteen-year-old boy living out his childhood. The Conways lived in Plantation Estates Phase Two. One might imagine the various phases would be the same, but Phase Two had been built during 1970s stagflation. To keep costs down, compromises had been made in the selection of building materials. The walls were made 155