I think of places like Graham Creek as fundamentally nonbinary places. Not quite land or water, but somewhere in between.
Dear America,
Graham Creek is a mystical place, running through a tupelo-cypress swamp, lined on all sides by fat-butted, twisting and knobby trees that remind one of long, warty witches’ noses. The black, tannic tupelo tea of the stream has almost no perceptible current, so paddle strokes disturb what seems like centuries of silence. Should you go there, you will quite literally be floating on life and death.
Graham is a small tributary, running through Tate’s Hell State Forest and into the Apalachicola River, the largest river by volume in Florida. I’ve spent much time there and throughout Tate’s Hell, especially while volunteering with the Apalachicola Riverkeeper, and have had the privilege of seeing Graham on numerous different occasions, and throughout the seasons. A river or stream in flood has a completely different character than the same river during a drought. Go to Graham in the winter and the trees stand like stripped bones sticking from the earth. In fall, when I first paddled there, they were draped in auburn (cypress being one of the few trees to reliably change color for autumn here in Florida). And because there are so many different versions of a river or creek, let me tell you my perspective of that place, the way the creek flows for me. I’m a nonbinary person; I go by they/them pronouns, and I don’t think of myself as a man or a woman, purely masculine or feminine, but somewhere in-between. Nonbinary people are part of the trans spectrum, and trans people, especially lately, have had a horrible time in Florida. Still, I love this state, and I think of places like Graham Creek as fundamentally nonbinary places. Not quite land or water, but somewhere in between. A creek, but also a floodplain. Fresh water, but tidally influenced. A question mark on maps made by people who need their rivers to run in orderly lines across the landscape. I see most of Florida (the places left undeveloped) as fundamentally queer spaces, and that is one reason I’m always excited to paddle Graham.
Tate’s Hell, the state forest that Graham Creek runs through, was named after Cebe Tate, a Florida cracker whose infamous panther chase through the swamp ended with him losing his way, and after several days, walking into the town of Carrabelle and supposedly dropping dead immediately after uttering the words, “My name is Tate, and I’ve been through hell.” At least, that is one version of the telling, though there are many variations. Getting lost in the forest is some people’s worst nightmare. Personally, though I love such stories as Tate’s, I’ve always hated the name Tate’s Hell; the place is heaven to me. Though I must admit, the times I’ve been lost, even in places as humanly influenced and close to my home as the maze of logging roads running around the Florida Trail, I’ve been frightened. I can remember on more than one occasion sprinting through the woods, retracing my steps, desperate to find my lost way. When the sun starts to set, and you’re unsure of the path that will lead on to your camp or back to your car, your chest gets tight as a trail overgrown with bamboo (and sometimes, in Florida, that’s what you’re walking through). On a recent kayak adventure on Graham Creek, I had one such pulse-intensifying experience. I put in late, at 3 p.m., which in December gave me barely two hours to paddle before sunset. I wasn’t going far, but I was going upstream—alone. And I was already grumpy after having been trapped at a mechanic’s shop all morning, thinking how I might not make it to my campsite. I was paddling from Graham to where the creek splits off from the East River and from there to the Big River (the Apalachicola). I hadn’t paddled the route before and each fork took longer to get to than I’d imagined. Though I had a map and had been given directions by friends, I began to get uneasy as the sky darkened, as the trees grew more wraithlike and encroaching. I was never really lost at all and made it to my sandbar camp with enough daylight to set up my tent and even gather firewood without the use of a flashlight. But there’s something unsettling even about the mere idea of being lost in the woods, especially at night, and especially if you are alone. Like a Brothers Grimm tale.
Yet Florida is a special state because it still contains places to get lost in, mysterious places, spots that are “off the map.” Whether those be the mangrove mazes of the Everglades or swamps like Tate’s Hell. These places are constantly changing. Treefall blocks a path; seedlings mature and alter the course of water flow. The fact that places like Graham are constantly in flux makes them more than just an exciting adventure—they are also important refuges, difficult-to-penetrate fortresses for the environment and the more-than-human creatures they support.
Rivers like the Apalachicola and their connected wetlands are in danger all over the state, the country, and the world. Nature reports that, since 1700, about 21 percent of the world’s wetlands have been lost. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported in 2022 that the U.S. fared even worse—we have lost over one-half of our wetlands nationwide. And by the mid-1990s, Florida alone had lost 9.3 million acres, more acreage than any other state in the nation and a 44 percent loss since attainting statehood.
While efforts have been made toward preservation and restoration, the National Audubon Society reports that “for every one acre of wetland restored [in Florida] from 2004-2009, two acres were destroyed.” Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that so many people don’t see places like Graham Creek as important. Swamps, bogs, and marshlands—for so many years, we colonial settlers have viewed them as “useless” places, wastes of space. We have tried to drain them for farmland and dredge them for shipping vessels. We use the phrase “drain the swamp” as a euphemism for getting rid of useless/crooked lobbyists and politicians in our governments.
Redefining peoples’ thoughts about wetlands is not so different from redefining their thoughts about queer people.
This hatred is not a new line of thinking. For hundreds if not thousands of years Westerners attributed disease and death to wetlands and their miasmic vapors. The nature poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote (in his culturally appropriative poem “Song of Hiawatha”) of an evil figure who “Sends the fever from the marshes, / Sends the pestilential vapors, / Sends the poisonous exhalations, / Sends the white fog from the fen-lands, / Sends disease and death among us!” But if we’d been listening to real Indigenous wisdom on this continent instead of making up our own versions like Longfellow, we might have known better.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of swamp-reliant peoples in her book Braiding Sweetgrass:
People valued the supermarket of the swamp for the cattails, but also as a rich source of fish and game. Fish spawn in the shallows; frogs and salamanders abound. Waterfowl nest here in the safety of the dense sward, and migratory birds seek out cattail marshes for sanctuary on their journeys. Not surprisingly, hunger for this productive land precipitated a 90 percent loss of the wetlands—as well as the Native people who depended upon them.
It wasn’t until around the latter half of the 20th century that any significant number of settler-colonial Americans began to shift their attitudes about wetlands thanks to the work of activists, scientists, and writers like Florida’s own Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the author of the 1947 classic The Everglades: River of Grass, which played a major role in convincing Americans to protect the Everglades as a national park. And yet we still have a long way to go. Recently, elected officials approved exploratory oil and gas drilling in the floodplain of the Apalachicola River, just upstream of Graham Creek. The proposed drilling platform will sit below the high-water line during flood stage, which would easily send toxins flowing downstream and throughout the surrounding, interconnected swamplands. I am afraid for my river. And I am reminded of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s opening words in The Everglades: “There are no other Everglades in the world.” Indeed, there is no other Graham Creek in the world either. And no other Apalachicola watershed. No other Florida. No other Turtle Island (North America). No other Earth.
The way unfamiliar people are uncomfortable with wetlands reminds me of the way so many cis people are uncomfortable with nonbinary/trans people like me; I think it has to do with the fact that we are not easily defined, not easily categorizable within (cis and dryland) society’s acceptable parameters. The borders of a wild river and its floodplain aren’t definite; this makes development difficult and housing more susceptible to floods. That’s why we dam rivers (I’ve always thought it more than coincidental that dam and damn are homonyms); that’s why we dredge them (a problem still seriously affecting the Apalachicola watershed). We want to make them predictable, straight (again, a homonym not lost on my queer mind). We want our rivers and our people to fit neatly into our predetermined, acceptable categories. But that’s not how nature works, which is why we need to keep protecting our rivers and our people. I imagine a world where more people are comfortable paddling in a tupelo-cypress swamp like Graham, or feeling the wet squish of bogland and sundews under their feet, a world where people recognize the value of these “useless” wetlands and vote for government officials who refuse to drain or otherwise disturb them; similarly, I imagine a world where nonbinary/trans people like me are no longer “unimaginable” or seen as “confused.”
A river and its floodplain are a nonbinary space, one that can be traveled not only in two directions (upstream or down), but in all directions, and so rivers beg for all stories. This is one of the reasons I felt a significant need to protect Graham Creek and to write this story about it. I believe redefining peoples’ thoughts about wetlands is not so different from redefining their thoughts about queer people. I felt a responsibility to Graham as a queer person. But I wouldn’t want to make the mistake of so many colonial mapmakers and look at Graham as only one thing. Yes, as a queer storyteller, I feel a responsibility to tell the story of Graham as a queer place. I also have a more obvious responsibility to Graham Creek as a paddler. When I go there, I need to keep it clean, leave no trace, pick up any trash I find. And with that responsibility comes a responsibility to the wider watershed. If I want Graham Creek clean and lively, I need the Apalachicola clean and lively. I need the river to be flooded with the glorious, life-giving water so often blocked up by the Jim Woodruff Dam. I have a responsibility to interact with my local government, to vote, and to support organizations like the Apalachicola Riverkeeper. (This seems particularly important as the proposed oil and gas drilling in the Apalachicola basin was approved by locally elected officials). And if I want to keep the Apalachicola system clean, I also have a responsibility as a national/global citizen. If I want to protect this river, I need to protect the climate. I need to interact with my national government; I need to vote there, too, and to think about who will do good for my river at all levels. Paddling on Graham, I saw this interconnection firsthand. I saw that black water and knew exactly where it was running, even though it was still a question mark on the map. I understood the importance of this seemingly small backwater creek, even if I could not fully understand which way the water would move, what it was doing, what story it was telling.
The last story I want to tell is one about water: Somewhere, out at sea, water is evaporating. It is tumbling into cloud, wrapping itself around dust particles, getting heavy, and falling. It is falling on a river it has never known, then falling down that river, through its floodplain. It is a well-worn path of water. It is both new and old, the same river and a different one than what was flowing a thousand years ago. Now it is wrapping around the legs and knees of cypress and tupelo, catching nutrients in its flow, pulling them along with it. And now it is running through the main channel, curving like a question mark into the big river. It is looking for the salt of the sea that it lost so long ago. It is bringing a gift back with it, that leaf litter. And when it finally meets the bay, this is not the end of the story, but another beginning.
For the rivers,
Chris Watkins
Chris Watkins is a genderqueer poet, writer, and environmental activist living in Tallahassee, Florida. They earned their Ph.D. in Poetry and Ecocriticism at Florida State University and currently serve as the academics and partnerships coordinator of FSU’s Sustainable Campus as well as a member of the board of directors for Apalachicola Riverkeeper. Chris’s recent work has appeared in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, and The Harvard Review, among other journals. Their debut collection, The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus, is forthcoming with Saturnalia Books.
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo by Dani Davis.
