AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: "THE SWAMP"
PBS, 9:00 p.m. ET
This new documentary about Florida’s Everglades hits all sorts of chords with me. I grew up in South Florida – specifically, in Fort Lauderdale in Broward County – yet never knew, until watching The Swamp, that the county in which I lived was named after a Florida governor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who had grand plans to populate South Florida and, as they say, drain the swamp. An earlier man with similar plans was Hamilton Disston, who purchased 4 million acres of South Florida for 1 million dollars, and set about selling swampland to Northern and Western rubes, sight unseen, by promising such snazzy features as “No grasshoppers!” I love that someone would have the audacity to push the absence of grasshoppers as a feature, when South Florida was overrun with, among other things, mosquitos the size of hummingbirds and cockroaches the size of cocker spaniels. The Swamp covers all the fascinating history – massive mistakes in civil engineering, the establishment of the Glades as a national park, mistreatment of the local Seminoles, the impact of hurricanes and flooding and fires and halted drainage, and so much more. One other reason I’m particularly taken by The Glades: In the summer of 1974, during a particularly nasty drought, I was part of a small United States Geological Survey crew dispatched to map the Everglades, using a series of cars, boats, off-terrain vehicles and miserable overnight, over-the-water outposts. You won’t see this in the documentary, but it got so hot that summer that, in the abandoned watermelon fields, the melons got so hot and overripe, they exploded. For a full review, see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower. Check local listings.