I went to Everglades City in the hopes of recovering a memory. I had first made my way to this outpost, once known as “the Last Frontier” of the South, a decade ago, as I was finishing my master’s thesis on Zora Neale Hurston’s folktales. My father had just received his kidney cancer diagnosis. Anxious and adrift while waiting on his treatment plan, I asked him to join me as I retraced the author’s travels around Florida. My mother came along, too, intent on making sure our curiosity didn’t get the better of us in alligator country. We planned to start in Eatonville, Hurston’s hometown, then to make our way toward Tampa, traveling the Tamiami Trail into Everglades City before ending our trip in Belle Glade, a setting in her critically acclaimed book . The Everglades seemed to us at
