Personal Narrative: My Cultural Understanding Of Lake Okeechobee

From my cultural understanding of Lake Okeechobee, my imagination had conjured up swampy, reedy, you better have a fan boat, alligator infested waters. Cruising along the canal on the east side of the lake, there was very little swamp and plenty of wide-open land. Not at all what I expected for the interior of Florida. I wondered if maybe this was because it was a canal, instead of a natural river, and once we got out to the lake and river on the other side it would look more like I anticipated. I suspected it’s because this was a canal and many engineers and laborers had been employed draining the swamp around it. The night before we entered the lake, we anchored outside the levy. There was a big wall of dirt between me and seeing the lake, so I found myself full of anticipation for what it would look like.

The charts told us it was very shallow so we stayed right on track in the channel dredged for boaters to cross. Aside from the shallow reported on the charts it looks like any other big wide-open Lake on this side. No reeds, no fan boats, not a swamp to be seen. A couple hours later, approaching the other side of the lake, however was another story. This is where the reeds and fan boats began to come into play. The west side of the lake goes on a lot further than where the open water ends. The dredged channel continues on through across, what looks like, grassland. We cruised along in the grassland for another half-hour before we came to the levy defining the other side of the