Pinecrest, Edgar Watson, and the moral edge of the Everglades

“To travel is to feel.” — Fernando Pessoa

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I went to Pinecrest today, though it no longer exists.

Not in the way that towns exist—with a centre, a rhythm, a memory held in walls. Pinecrest lingers instead in fragments: a clearing that suggests a home, a bend in the road that remembers voices, the faint geometry of something that once insisted on permanence in a landscape that permits none.

It lies at the margins of Everglades National Park, but the word margin feels inadequate. This is not an edge. It is a threshold—between water and land, law and its absence, settlement and disappearance.

 As I stood there, I found myself thinking of Edgar Watson, killed not far away in Chokoloskee, near what we now call Everglades City. There is no map that binds Pinecrest to Watson’s homestead, yet they speak to each other across the wetlands.

 

Both belong to a time when the Everglades did not so much host communities as test them.

Pinecrest gathered its people the way the swamp gathers drift—hunters, fugitives, farmers, bootleggers—each carrying a private intention, none entirely accountable to a larger order. Watson, too, lived within that ambiguity: cultivator and alleged killer, neighbour and threat. His death, at the hands of those around him, was not a verdict of a court but of a community that had learned to survive without one.

Standing in Pinecrest, I sensed that same quiet tension. Not violence as spectacle, but as possibility—always near, like the still water beneath sawgrass.

And yet, another presence moves through this landscape, quieter and far older.

Long before Pinecrest, before Watson, before the Trail cut its line across the wet earth, this was and remains the homeland of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Their dwellings do not impose upon the land; they rise lightly from it. Their knowledge is not written in deeds or titles, but in water levels, winds, the taste of plants, the patience of seasons.

In my own visits to their camps, I have seen something that Pinecrest never held—continuity. An elder seated quietly, a home kept with care, stories spoken not as recollection but as inheritance. Health, even, follows a different grammar there: less intervention, more alignment.

The contrast is not moral. It is existential.

The settlers of Pinecrest and men like Watson lived against the Everglades—enduring it, extracting from it, hiding within it. The indigenous communities live with it—within a cosmology that does not require domination to sustain life.

And so Pinecrest disappears. Not abruptly, but as if it had always been provisional.

The State would later remove what remained, speaking of restoration, of returning the land to its “natural state.” But the Everglades was never empty. Its most enduring inhabitants had already learned how to belong without leaving scars that required erasure.

As I drove away, the road unspooling slowly behind me, I felt that Pinecrest had offered no spectacle, no monument—only a question.

What does it mean to inhabit a place?

Some pass through, leaving fragments.

Some impose, and are undone.

And some, quietly, remain.

In the Everglades, it is not the loudest presence that endures, but the most attuned.

Versión en Español

Hoy visité el asentamiento abandonado de Pinecrest, a lo largo de Loop Road, en los márgenes del Everglades National Park. Apenas quedan rastros de una comunidad de los años 1920, marcada por el aislamiento y la ausencia de autoridad formal.

Este lugar me recordó la muerte de Edgar Watson cerca de Chokoloskee, donde una comunidad actuó fuera del marco del Estado. Pinecrest y este episodio reflejan una misma realidad: cómo las sociedades se forman —y a veces se fracturan— en los límites entre ley y entorno.

Sin embargo, este paisaje guarda una continuidad más profunda. Mucho antes de estos asentamientos efímeros, y aún hoy, las Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida y las Seminole Tribe of Florida viven aquí con conocimiento y equilibrio duraderos.

Desde una perspectiva antropológica, el contraste es claro: algunos intentan imponerse al entorno y desaparecen; otros se adaptan y perduran.

Los Everglades nos recuerdan que la sostenibilidad también es cultural.

Version Française

Aujourd’hui, j’ai visité l’ancien site abandonné de Pinecrest, le long de Loop Road, aux marges du Everglades National Park. Il n’en reste que des traces — vestiges d’une communauté des années 1920 façonnée par l’isolement et l’absence d’autorité formelle.

Ce lieu m’a évoqué la mort de Edgar Watson près de Chokoloskee, où une communauté a agi en dehors des structures étatiques. Pinecrest et cet épisode illustrent une même réalité : comment les sociétés se forment — et parfois se désagrègent — aux frontières du droit et de l’environnement.

Mais ce territoire porte une continuité plus profonde. Bien avant ces installations éphémères, et encore aujourd’hui, les Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida et les Seminole Tribe of Florida y vivent avec un savoir durable et un équilibre remarquable.

D’un point de vue anthropologique, le contraste est saisissant : certains tentent d’imposer leur présence et disparaissent, d’autres s’adaptent et perdurent.

Les Everglades nous rappellent que la durabilité est aussi culturelle.

GOOD BYE , RICKY CAFE

GOODBYE, RICKY CAFÉ

“I carry within me all the dreams of the world.”

— Fernando Pessoa

There are cafés that serve coffee, and there are cafés that quietly hold fragments of one’s life.

Ricky Café, in Kendall, was once the latter.

On my days off in Miami, I would walk there without urgency. Beneath photographs of Paris—its bridges and its distant promise—I would sit, open a book, and repeat a small ritual in a language not spoken around me:

un café con leche, estilo de La Habana…

It was common that no one spoke English. And yet, there was understanding.

The older staff marked time by absence; the younger by smiles of return. In such places, one is not quite a customer, but not quite a stranger either.

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Paris — Memory and Imagination

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Slowly, imperceptibly, something shifted. Prices rose—not dramatically, but quietly, persistently. Then came the arithmetic of modern transactions: percentages layered upon percentages, until even a simple cup of coffee carried the weight of calculation.

What is lost in such moments is not money, but proportion.

I was reading Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa—a meditation on departure and return. I spoke of it to a woman from Honduras, long separated from her own city. She smiled with recognition. Literature, like migration, creates its own quiet kinships.

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Miami — Heat, Habit, Return

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Across the world—Mérida, Quiberon, Cochin, Havana—I have found such places. Cafés that ask little, and in return, offer something immeasurable: continuity.

But continuity is fragile.

In another part of the world, a sudden sixfold rise in the price of coffee would provoke outrage. Here, it dissolves into acceptance, like sugar in a cup—unseen, but altering everything.

I find myself less eager now to return.

And so, without ceremony, I leave.

Goodbye, Ricky Café.

PRANAYAMA BREATHING, VAGAL STIMULATION AND DROP IN BLOOD PRESSURE

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment;

Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.” — Rumi

I have spent much of my professional life moving between worlds—London, Melbourne, Miami, and the Indigenous communities of the Americas. In each place, medicine was practiced, but not always understood in the same way. Early in my training, I developed a quiet suspicion that the body knew more than our textbooks allowed.

In Kuala Lumpur, a friend introduced me to Pranayama and Yogic philosophy. At the time, it felt like an interesting cultural encounter. Years later, it has returned, not as philosophy alone, but as physiology.

A simple observation: a patient’s blood pressure, elevated in the early evening, falls measurably within minutes of slow, deliberate breathing. Not dramatically, not theatrically—but consistently, reproducibly. The diastolic pressure yields first, as if acknowledging a subtle shift in vascular tone. The systolic follows more reluctantly, tethered as it is to the aging architecture of the arterial tree.

What we are witnessing is the interplay between structure and function. Arterial stiffness, the inevitable companion of age, coexists with a nervous system that remains, surprisingly, negotiable. The sympathetic surge can be quieted. The vessels can be persuaded, if only briefly, to soften.

This is not a rejection of pharmacology. Losartan and Nebivolol continue their work in the background, steady and necessary. But they do not complete the story. There remains a residue of autonomic tone—accessible, responsive, and, in a sense, culturally intelligible.

In many Indigenous traditions, breath is not merely a biological act; it is a bridge between the visible and the invisible, between body and awareness. What modern physiology now describes as vagal modulation, these traditions have long practiced without the need for terminology.

Perhaps what we are seeing is not innovation, but recognition.

The patient who sits, breathes slowly, and watches his blood pressure fall is participating in a form of medicine that is both ancient and immediate. It requires no prescription, no device beyond attention, and yet it alters measurable physiology.

Artificial intelligence, in this context, becomes an unexpected ally—not as a replacement for the physician, but as an interpreter of patterns. It helps articulate what we observe but may not fully name.

Medicine, then, may be entering a phase not of fragmentation, but of reintegration—where data, culture, and lived physiology begin to speak to one another again.

And perhaps, in that quiet convergence, we are reminded that healing has always been more than the sum of its parts.

What Did the Medicine Man Say?

“Humility is not thinking less of oneself; it is thinking of oneself less.”

— Ancient teaching often repeated among Indigenous elders

It took me four days to return to Miami from Cochin, Kerala—via Bombay, Baku, Istanbul, and Paris. The journey felt like a passage across worlds. I had left behind regions overshadowed by war and uncertainty in the Middle East and arrived once again among the quiet mangrove landscapes of the Everglades.

For a wandering physician—someone whose life is measured in airports, border crossings, and distant communities—returning to work among the Indigenous peoples of South Florida always brings a sense of grounding.

The ninety-seven-year-old Medicine Man lives with his wife in a spacious wooden house deep inside the Everglades National Park. My visits to him have gradually become a small ritual within my medical work.

Normally he does not speak English. Our conversations are usually translated by his wife, who speaks both the native language and English—the language brought centuries ago by the conquistadores.

But on this visit something unexpected happened.

As I entered the house, he looked at me carefully, almost as if he were reading a message written across my face. Then he spoke directly to me in English.

“What happened to your hat?”

The question startled me.

The hat itself has a story. It was made in Mexico, and the band was woven by a Native woman who lives in the Everglades. Over the past year it has travelled with me through many countries, and for reasons I never fully understood, it attracted attention wherever I went.

The Dolmens/Maniyars in Marayoor, Kerala, India 

The Erudite Mr Walton, Princess Street, Fort Cochin

The Eighty year old Barber of Istanbul.. a complete hair cut including waxing and drying of my hat which destroyed its shape 

A Kirgyz taxi driver from Bishkek

The cachiquel indian lady from Antigua

People would compliment it. Some asked where it came from. In Istanbul, while waiting for tram number one at the Eminönü station, a stranger even asked if he could photograph me because of it.

Gradually, without my noticing it, the hat had become something more than clothing. It had become a small social symbol.

Later that afternoon, as I drove deeper into the Everglades, I suddenly realized that I had left the hat behind in the Medicine Man’s house.

When I returned the following day to collect it, he handed it to me and burst into a deep, joyful laugh—a laugh that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than thought itself.

I remember thinking how radiant he looked.

In the philosophy of Yoga, ego is described as one of the fundamental distortions of human consciousness. The sages call it asmita—the illusion that the self is separate and important.

Over time, I had begun to enjoy the attention the hat attracted during my travels. What began as innocent curiosity from strangers had slowly nourished a quiet pride.

Perhaps the Medicine Man had seen this before I did.

Among Indigenous cultures, teachings are rarely delivered through lectures. They appear instead through gestures, silences, humour, and small moments whose meaning unfolds later.

Perhaps that simple question—“What happened to your hat?”—was such a teaching.

As we drove out of the park that day, I told my colleague quietly,

“I think I should get rid of this hat.”

I did not bother explaining the metaphor.

Among the Indigenous peoples of this continent—what they call Turtle Island—one hears a teaching repeated again and again:

Be humble.

On my next journey abroad, I may wear the simple jipijapa hat of the Yucatán, well known also to the people of Cuba.

But this time I will try to remember something the Medicine Man may have already known:

The most important thing a traveller carries is not the hat on his head, but the humility in his heart.