Time Capsule: Canal Threatens Florida's Oklawaha River There are
two Oklawaha Rivers today. There is the twisting, unspoiled
black-water stream of the Florida Wilderness. And there is the
dammed, straightened, Army Engineered desolation of the
unfinished Cross-Florida Barge Canal. Five miles meandering with
mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran… Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, so far as I know, never paddled in a canoe,
but in “Kubla Khan” he caught the dreamlike quality of Florida’s
spring-fed rivers as only a poet could. Alph, the sacred river,
was of course conceived in a dream, (so rudely interrupted by “a
man from Porlock”) but it was firmly based on factual
description by one of America’s earliest and greatest
naturalists, William Bartram, in his classic Travels. That the
journal of a botanist in the Florida wilderness should have
inspired one of the greatest poems of the English language is of
more than purely literary significance. It is a dramatic symbol
of the change in the attitude toward