A swamp home that's priceless
Associated PressThe state is offering millions for a man to sell his patch of Everglades, but he won't budge.
Published July 4, 2004
NAPLES - Out in a scrubby, muggy patch of former swampland, Jesse James Hardy owns everything under the sunrises that stretch from a horizon of slash pine and palm trees.
He owns all that's under the stars in the summer sky, including the millions of mosquitoes and gnats that swarm the still air.
He owns a well he dug 60 feet down that provides what he calls the best-tasting water in Florida. And he owns a simple clapboard house that he put together himself - after a wildfire tore apart the last one.
"It ain't been an easy life but I love it. I really do. This is my home," said Hardy, a 68-year-old former Navy SEAL. "I couldn't trade it for nowhere else. It's irreplaceable."
But Hardy's 160 acres sit in the path of what is perhaps the nation's most ambitious environmental project ever, a 30-year effort to restore the natural water flow to the Everglades.
For years, state officials have quietly negotiated with Hardy to try to come up with a price for a piece of land that many consider worthless - and one man considers priceless. He has adamantly refused, even as the offers have doubled and tripled into the millions of dollars.
Restoring the Everglades means turning Hardy's land back into its natural state as a flooded plain, before developers backfilled, dredged and carved canals through an ecosystem that once stretched uninterrupted from a chain of lakes near Orlando to the Florida Bay.
Backers say the project would revive the population of birds, fish and other wildlife essential for tourism, and improve the water supply for surrounding communities.
"There's a lot of overwhelming public benefit," said Ernie Barnett, the state Department of Environmental Protection's director of ecosystem projects.
But Hardy, who was recently treated for prostate cancer, insists he's staying put, even if it means passing up millions.
"It's nothing fancy but what I'm telling you is I live all right," he said. "I don't have to have gold-plated plumbing to take a shower. I got it better than people living in town. Of course, a lot of people won't live like this."
Hardy's homestead on the edge of what were once Everglades wetlands is hidden 40 miles east of downtown Naples, but seemingly a million miles from the development of Florida's southern coasts.
Directions to his place include a turn at a lonely stop sign, and meander for miles along dirt roads marked only by a canal and a bridge.
A blue bucket, cracked down the middle, beckons visitors to his driveway. There are no street signs or numbers out here.
Hardy bought the property for $60,000 in 1976 from the wealthy Collier family, the county's namesake.
"This was, like, no good land," Hardy said. "I bought it because it was cheap. ... There wasn't any people here. It was just very serene, clean, fresh, quiet. It was just a real beautiful place."
Since then, Hardy has tamed his wilderness, largely for a 9-year-old boy he considers his son. Tommy Hilton and his mother, a family friend, came to live with Hardy five months after the boy was born.
Hardy said he and Tommy's mother, Tara Hilton, are not romantically involved. She works for him, helping him check the trucks that buy the lime rock off his property and haul it away. Disability from the military covers the rest of the bills.
Hardy said they raise Tommy together like any other parents. "He's got everything he's ever wanted. What little boy wouldn't want to grow up here?"
Piles of toys - model cars and trucks, a tent, a bicycle and a basketball hoop - fill most of their home's front porch, where tattered window screens long ago gave up their fight against a steady stream of bugs.
"The dirtier you are the less they'll mess with you," Hardy said, unaffected by the seemingly millions of sand gnats swarming about.
But the place, if anything, seems tidy. Hardy carefully wipes his sandaled feet on a doormat before taking the three steps into his home and has a laundry line full of clean gray T-shirts and camouflage pants - his uniform of choice from 14 years in the Navy. Slim and agile, only Hardy's scruffy gray beard make him look the part of a rural recluse.
A few years back, when the Everglades restoration was just an idea on paper, the state offered Hardy $711,000 for the property.
Hardy still seems insulted by the proposition.
"They're wanting to get all the humans off the land and turn it back to wildlife, and they don't even know if it's going to work," he said. "They want to take this away from me and that little boy."
State officials have kept trying, offering to swap his land with a similar stretch a little farther from the Everglades.
They've gradually upped their offers until last month when it reached $4.5-million - a figure even state officials admit is probably more than the land is worth.
Whatever the latest offer, it seems like pennies compared to the overall $8.4-billion restoration - a project that aims to link a vast ecosystem of tranquil waters, sawgrass prairies and towering cypress trees.
Once restored, Hardy's property and the surrounding areas would rejoin Picayune Strand State Forest and link four valuable reserves that surround it, including the Florida Panther Wildlife Refuge and the 10,000 Islands National Wildlife Refuge.
Habitat would be restored for the endangered Florida panther, West Indian manatee, red-cockaded woodpecker and birds, whose population has dwindled to 10 percent of what it was in the early 1900s.
Hardy's land is so critical to the start of the restoration that state officials have recently threatened to take him to court under eminent domain, a law that allows government to take private land for a public purpose.
Gov. Jeb Bush and state environmental officials have said they want an agreeable solution without going to court. But for Hardy, this land has become his life.
"The Everglades is 60 miles east of here. This has nothing to do with the Everglades," he said. "I'm out here. Nobody even knows. Please, tell them, "Please, just leave me alone.' That's all I want."