Two weeks later, while I was in Kissimmee meeting with my attorney, Catherine Alvarez, a different crew came in from the west side where my fence line borders the timber company land and there's a gap where a fallen pine had taken out two posts that I hadn't repaired yet. They worked fast. By the time I got home at 3:15 that afternoon, there was a 40-foot wooden dock extending into Beckett Lake, a cleared and graded beach area with 20 tons of imported white sand, a pressure-treated wooden shed stocked with eight yellow kayaks and four stand-up paddleboards, two cedar benches, a gravel parking lot that could hold 12 cars, and a shellacked wooden sign that read: Welcome to Cypress Landing Nature Reserve. Authentic Florida Wilderness Experience. Below the sign, in smaller text: Operated by Cypress Nature Experiences LLC. Reservations required. Visit CypressNatureExperiences.com.
She'd built a tourist attraction on my land without my permission, without permits, without an environmental review, without notifying FWC that she was constructing commercial recreation facilities directly in documented alligator habitat. And without telling a single one of them what I just told her was living in that water.
The bookings started within a week. Miranda had listed the Cypress Landing Nature Reserve on every platform she could find: the company website with professional photos she'd staged using models and matching life jackets; a listing on a major outdoor adventure booking site; an Instagram account with filtered sunset photos and captions like Paddle into paradise and Florida's hidden gem—book your escape today; and a partnership with two Orlando-area tour operators who added the lake to their Off-the-Beaten-Path Florida Experiences packages for tourists looking for something beyond theme parks.
$45 per person for a guided kayak tour. $35 for a nature walk along the south shore. $25 for a lakeside picnic experience that included a blanket, a cheeseboard from Costco repackaged in wicker as locally curated provisions, and a laminated card identifying local bird species. The laminated card did not include a section on alligators.
The tourists came in rental cars with Ohio plates and Minnesota plates and Quebec plates. They came in shuttle vans from Orlando hotels. They came in flip-flops and swimsuits and sun hats carrying waterproof phone cases and GoPro cameras and the kind of enthusiasm that comes from spending $400 a night at a resort hotel and wanting something that felt real. They parked in the gravel lot Miranda had built on my property, walked down the path Miranda had cleared through my fence line, signed waivers at the shed Miranda had stocked with equipment purchased with HOA funds, and launched kayaks into a lake Miranda did not own, had no right to access, and had never once surveyed for the apex predators living in it.
I watched from my porch. Ruth Anne came out the first morning as a shuttle van pulled into the lot—six tourists, all matching sun visors, and one guide who looked about 22 and was wearing a polo shirt with the Cypress Nature Experiences logo embroidered on the pocket.
"How many?" she asked.
"Six plus a guide."
"Does the guide know about Diesel?"
"I doubt the guide knows what county she's in."
"Are you going to go down there?"
I thought about it. I thought about walking down the hill and standing at the fence line and telling a van full of strangers that the paradise they'd paid $45 to visit was actually a cattle ranch with a 12-foot alligator in the lake and a trespass complaint at the county clerk's office. I thought about the look on their faces. I thought about the guide in the polo shirt who probably believed the laminated script she'd been handed and had no idea she was working for a woman who'd built a business on stolen land and marketing copy.
I'd already called the sheriff. I'd already filed the trespass complaint. Catherine Alvarez was preparing an injunction. I'd done everything the law asked me to do.
"I'm going to sit right here," I said, "and I'm going to wait."
I sat on my porch every morning and watched strangers walk onto my land carrying paddles and coolers and the confident ignorance of people who'd been told by a professional marketing operation that everything was fine. Ruth Anne kept a tally in a notebook. Not because we needed evidence—though we did—but because she's a retired science teacher and data collection is her love language. In 3 weeks, she counted 412 individual visitors, 28 guided tours, 11 lakeside picnic bookings, seven shuttle van arrivals from Orlando hotels. And not one single person who stopped at the sign looked at the words nature reserve and wondered whether a nature reserve needed more than a laminated card.
For 3 weeks, the tourists came and went. Morning tours, sunset tours, weekend wilderness retreats that brought groups of 12 to 15 at a time. The guides—college kids Miranda had hired at $12 an hour, no benefits, no liability briefing, no training beyond a laminated script and a playlist of nature facts she'd probably copy-pasted from a website she didn't finish reading—paddled the tourists through the north end where the water was clear and beautiful and deceptively safe. They stayed away from the south end, not because they knew about the gators, but because the cypress roots were too thick for kayaks. The tourists took photos. They posted reviews: 4.7 stars. Hidden gem. So peaceful. Felt like real Florida. One review said, "We saw a log floating near the dock that looked just like an alligator. So realistic! Great atmosphere."
It wasn't a log.