His sun-browned, thickly veined forearms draped on the boat's steering wheel, Totch Brown squints into the dark herd of clouds stampeding across the Everglades horizon.
"Looks like a northwester," he mutters, mainly to himself. "We need to get over to the right of it."Calmly, he guns the outdoor motor of his 22-foot-long boat and slices through the rising waves. Totch stares into the storm with its now-lashing rain, while his passengers, pelted and buffeted by swells, silently huddle and cling to each other's yellow rain slickers.
A 15-minute eternity later, the storm is suddenly behind, and the passengers exchange grins and sighs and talk of how scary it had been.
The captain, meanwhile, opens the bottle of pills that help keep his damaged 75-year-old heart going. He gazes back at the storm clouds in retreat.
"Aw, that wasn't nothin' to me," Totch says softly.
This, after all, is a man who has spent his life in the wilderness of the western Everglades, slipping boatloads of poached gators past rangers and holds full of marijuana past the Coast Guard. He has survived by shooting and eating the sea birds known as "Chokoloskee Chickens." He has slept under the stars in defiance of the ravenous "swamp angels," the mosquitoes.
Loren G. "Totch" Brown was born in 1920 on the 150-acre shell island of Chokoloskee, where his grandfathers had settled in the 1880s. Today, Totch and Estelle, his fellow lifelong islander and wife of 56 years and his "Queen of the Everglades," are among about 200 year-round residents.
Only twice - World War II service for which he earned the Bronze Star at the Battle of the Bulge and a 15-month prison sentence for tax evasion in the early 1980s - has Brown lived away from the watery wilderness called Ten Thousand Islands that begins about 80 miles west of Miami.
In the early 1980s, Brown was forced by heart problems and legal problems to slacken his usual pace of hunting, fishing or other, less reputable activities from dawn to dusk - and often dusk to dawn.
"Once I slowed down, I began to notice the Everglades. I was always too busy trying to go out and get it every day, to stop and see the very unusual beauty that we have.
"Our ways were just going to nothing. I started thinking, `Damn, we're going to lose the history of the most precious place on Earth. My duty is to get this history down.' "
The result has been a book, "Totch: A Life In The Everglades," and a public television documentary, and a second book and documentary are in the works.
Occasionally, Totch also takes small groups - naturalists, journalists, fans of his book - on a personal, six-hour tour of the Ten Thousand Islands.
He fondly recalls learning to hunt raccoons at night and ducks and deer by day, to fish for mullet, to pull up stone crabs and to gather clams to make chowder. Sour tamarinds provided snacks and skittering sandcrabs were his toys.
"It certainly offered a good, clean, wonderful life to a youngster growing up," he wrote in "A Life in The Everglades." "It's a shame every youngster don't get a chance at a few years of that kind of living."
In the 1980s, more than 100 people, about a tenth of the population, were arrested in sweeps of fishing villages where gold chains and fancy cars had suddenly become commonplace. Ten Thousand Islands, with its maze of coves and channels hidden by mangroves, was a fine place for smuggling marijuana.
Totch recalls going to see President Harry S. Truman's 1947 announcement establishing Everglades National Park. He then set out on a gator hunt.
When marijuana smuggling came to the region in the 1970s, the question of legality didn't bother Totch as much as his concern about the impact of drugs and about who controlled the trade. But he eventually decided marijuana wasn't so bad, although he never tried it himself.
After a lifetime of escaping gators, rangers and Coast Guardsmen in the wild, Totch's luck ran out when two Internal Revenue Service special agents came knocking on the door of his home in 1982 to tell him he was under investigation for tax evasion.
Totch worked out a deal in which he paid a $1.25 million fine and turned over some $2 million in property. But he refused to testify against his friends, saying: "Not a tree grows tall enough to hang me from to get me to talk before a grand jury."
He served his time in federal prison at Lexington, Ky., and returned home in 1985.
From time to time these days, he camps out alone on one of the mangrove islands, writing and reflecting about his past and the Everglades' future.
"There used to be millions of little old creatures; turtles, moccasins, every log had something on it. These ponds had ducks by the jillions. All of it's going down fast. I can just see it going," he says.