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[ Home > Page 10: Restoring the Fountain of Youth, Part 5 ]
Page 10: Restoring the Fountain of Youth, Part 5![Page 10: Restoring the Fountain of Youth, Part 5]()
We have come, at the end, back to where I started. Now is the time to put the next twenty years in place. Your Governor, Jeb Bush, has demonstrated his commitment to Everglades restoration, and I have enjoyed a close working relationship with both him and his staff. Our Administration remains committed to using our final year to help in every way possible. The Florida delegation continues to prove itself united and effective in its bipartisan support in the Congress. The budget restraints are easing ever so slightly, economic growth in Florida remains vibrant, and there is every reason to expect that we should be able to gain approval and financing from both the Congress and the Florida Legislature in the course of this year. To say why that will happen, why Florida and the nation are united so firmly behind the Everglades, we must look not to abstract charts, financing proposals, or the whole complex of policies. We must look into the nature of restoration itself. And that takes me back almost five centuries ago, just north of here, when Don Juan Ponce de Leon tried to establish the first European colony upon the shores of a land he had discovered and christened "Pascua Florida." He had coasted almost the entire island (as it was first thought), navigating down the east coast from the mouth of the St. John's River, to Cape Kennedy and Biscayne Bay, around the Florida Keys and the Tortugas and up past Naples to Charlotte Harbor and Estero Bay. Like most Spanish conquistadores, Ponce de Leon was motivated by "gold, glory and God." Yet he also sought an elusive "fountain of youth." Scholars dispute what this meant to him. Some say he believed in legendary waters which, if drunk or bathed in, kept one forever young. Others argue that, when bumped from titled office in Puerto Rico, he felt his good name had been damaged and so sought a political rebirth with new honors, not a physical rebirth with wonder water. And revisionist historians claim the pragmatist, knowing the requirements for a permanent colony, simply led his troops in search of a freshwater spring.
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