Editor's Note

U.S. Route 41 through the southern tip of Florida is still probably one of the longest stretches of American blacktop between flush toilets. Bypassed by an interstate, the narrow ribbon of road has been left to sporadic local traffic and tourists looking for "wild Florida." What they'll find is an "authentic" Miccosukee Indian Village, announced by a humongous billboard promising a gift shop, arts and crafts demonstrations, airboat rides and alligator wrestling. The irony here is that beneath the old-timey tourist trap is actual authenticity, one of the most pristine encounters with Native American culture in North America. The Miccosukees are descendants of the tiny remnant of the Seminole alliance who managed to escape two wars with the U.S. Army and multiple attempts at forced removal to Oklahoma. They hid out deep in the Everglades, learning to make an abundant life in what the whites at their heels considered a hellish wasteland.

When I got to know the Miccosukees nearly 30 years ago, there were some who still remembered their elders telling them to eat breakfast standing, so that if soldiers came, they could escape quickly into the swamp. They still celebrated traditional ceremonies in secret camps where no non-Seminoles were allowed, and still maintained the sacred medicine bag, filled with magical items that would guarantee their survival. A young man I met, wearing cowboy boots and driving a Ford pickup with rock music on the radio, took me deep into the cypress stands to hunt for garfish with a spear. As we were chatting about football, be mentioned casually that the river we were fishing had been carved many years ago by a giant serpent. This was clearly as real to him as the score of the latest Dolphins game. He said he was studying to become the tribe's medicine keeper.

I envied him his incredible swiftness with that spear, his confident connection to a mystical past, but I worried for his future, encroached on all sides by the sprawl from the coasts and the intrusiveness of modern life.

In recent years it's become even more penetrating and inescapable. It's hard to imagine how anything can survive untouched by all our technology and aggressive materialism. Everything is held hostage by cellphone signals and satellite images that can reveal the location of once-secret ceremonies. The "blank spaces on the map," both literal and metaphorical, are all being filled in.

So it surprised and somehow heartened me to learn that somewhere on our planet, a man still lives completely outside the constricting coils of our world. His elusive face appears on today's cover (above), and his story begins on Page 12.

Tom Shroder can be reached at shrodert@washpost.com.