Silver Kings

<I>. . . Maybe it was a good thing that we left Sweetwater where the world was so much what it was for me that I never thought of its danger never could separate its danger from the whole of it. Of course I remember the big Cottonmouth. And I remember earning fifty cents for cleaning out the bark and old newspapers from a squatter's woodshed when another boy and I uncovered more than twenty scorpions . . . But so far as these and a few other images stand out to me now as if they had been warnings they are fictitious. For at the time they were part of a current a current so strong that if we had not left that house on the edge of the Everglades maybe one day I would have gone out into the swamp and not come back. And sometimes years later I have thought that it would have been a good place not to come back from the best place.</I></p>