59 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick D. SmithA Land Remembered
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 39-45Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 39 Summary
In 1908, Sol decides to leave the homestead. He says, “I can stand it being lonely out here, but every time I ride through the woods or go into the grove or tend cows, there’s a ghost looking at me” (363). He leaves the cattle and orange groves in the care of Ron Clayton and his family. Tom Lardy, whom Sol hired to replace Frog, is permitted to stay on the farm indefinitely with his wife, Jessie.
Chapter 40 Summary
After leaving the MacIvey homestead, Sol travels to the land his father bought in South Okeechobee near the Seminole village. Over the next three years, Sol uses dredges to transform the area into farmland.
In 1911, Sol decides to visit Toby for the first time since they met. During the visit, Sol learns that Keith died five years earlier of old age. When Toby discovers that Sol is responsible for transforming the land around Pay-Hay-Okee, he is outraged. Sol tells him he’s supplying food for the cities, to which Toby responds:
‘Animals have to eat too, and so do birds, and so do we! Will your infernal machines not stop until they come here and crush my mother’s grave? I hope they never enter this swamp, or go to Pay-Hay-Okee. If they do, you will have destroyed us too, all of us’ (370).
Sol is surprised to learn that the reason Zech bought the land was to preserve it, not to farm it.
Tormented by his encounter with Toby, Sol drives his Model T to Palm Beach and requests a room at the Hotel Poinciana. When he is refused, Sol vows to build his own hotel. The man at the front desk yells back, “Cracker hick!” (373).
At a nearby restaurant, Sol flirts with a waitress named Bonnie O’Neill. Her frankness reminds him of his mother. Desperate for companionship, Sol hires Bonnie as his housekeeper.
Chapter 41 Summary
When World War I breaks out, the army tells Sol that the best way for him to help the war effort is by continuing to work his farms and supply produce to the troops.
In 1918, Sol receives a panicked letter from Tim, urging him to return to the homestead immediately. He drives there with Bonnie, who is now his girlfriend. At the homestead, Sol discovers that his new overseer, Donovan, destroyed his family’s old hammock home and replaced all the grazing grounds with orange groves. He even planted orange groves around the graves of his parents and grandparents. When Sol tells Bonnie, “That bastard bulldozed two whole lifetimes” (383), he finally realizes why Toby became so angry with him.
Chapter 42 Summary
In 1924, Sol finally begins to develop the land he and Zech purchased in Miami, back when the city was still called Fort Dallas. He builds a giant concrete house with a vault in the center where he stores his and his family’s gold. Sol also begins to sell off parcels of the land, earning $3 million the first weekend alone. Within a few months, Sol has $80 million in the vault.
Chapter 43 Summary
The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 wipes out much of the property in the city, although Sol’s sturdy house still stands: “The storm had turned paper millionaires into paupers overnight, former tycoons now pushing wheelbarrows and working with crews on dump trucks, shoveling up litter and salvaging what little the winds spared” (390). Sol uses his cash stores to buy acres of flattened land for five cents on the dollar.
Two years later, another large hurricane approaches in mid-September. Rather than risk staying in Miami, Sol and Bonnie retreat to their home in Okeechobee. To their surprise, the hurricane moves inland, and the Okeechobee region bears the worst of the storm. When their home floods up to the rafters, Sol and Bonnie confess their love for one another and vow to get married as soon as the storm passes. Suddenly, the house collapses and the two are separated. The next morning, Bonnie is gone, one of over 2,000 people who died in the area around Lake Okeechobee during the storm.
Chapter 44 Summary
In the wake of the hurricane, Sol leads a project to dike Lake Okeechobee and prevent another devastating flooding disaster. In doing so, however, he diverts the water supply from the Big Cypress Swamp where Toby lives, decimating his community: “It was all done with good intent and faith at the time but nevertheless created a travesty against nature that could never be reversed” (398).
Still bitter over being turned away from the Hotel Poinciana years earlier, Sol builds the massive La Florida hotel in 1952. He never marries or bears any children: “The name MacIvey became a phantom, not something real but meaningless letters across bank buildings, art centers and small parks” (399).
In 1954, Sol is named Citizen of the Year by the Greater Miami Economic Council. In his acceptance speech, Sol chastises the audience for destroying much of Florida’s natural wilderness, a process in which he himself is complicit. He says, “The catchword with me is stupidity. With you it’s greed” (401).
Chapter 45 Summary
While reminiscing alone in the family’s Punta Rassa cabin in 1968, Sol feels a sharp pain in his chest. Rather than reach for his heart pills, Sol sits outside on the porch, where he sees ghosts of his childhood, including Zech, Glenda, Emma, Frog, Skillit, Bonnie, and finally, Tobias. His last words are, “Where did it all go, Pappa? Where?” (403).
Chapters 39-45 Analysis
With his entire family—including Frog—dead, Sol becomes the first MacIvey in three generations to abandon the homestead. He tells Jessie, “I can stand it being lonely out here, but every time I ride through the woods or go into the grove or tend cows, there’s a ghost looking at me” (363). Upon leaving, he also notices how few material objects his parents and grandparents left behind when they died. While the MacIveys were never materialistic people, this observation emphasizes how little the family has to show for its decades of backbreaking work, aside from gold. And when gold is all that’s left of three generations’ labor, it is perhaps unsurprising that Sol—rudderless and without a family, biological or otherwise—has few goals going forward aside from turning that gold into more of it.
The one family member Sol has left is Toby. But rather than embrace Sol, Toby viciously attacks him for having destroyed the wilderness around the sacred Seminole land, telling him, “It is not just swamp! It is God you are killing. He put the land here for all creatures to enjoy, and you are destroying it. When you destroy the land you destroy God” (370). While Toby believes his words must be harsh in order to reach Sol, they have the opposite effect, alienating his half-brother even more. It will be more than 50 years before Sol visits Toby again.
Sol’s decision to transform the Okeechobee land—land his father purchased in order to protect—raises a series of questions that hold relevance to all three generations of the MacIvey family. For much of Tobias’s life, merely surviving the wilderness is the most he can expect. As Zech comes of age, the family begins to thrive, but the line between surviving the wilderness and taming it becomes blurred. For Sol, survival is rarely an issue, and his ingenious system of dredges proves that he’s effectively tamed nature. But Sol’s actions begin to represent less a taming of nature and more a conquering of it, and finally a destruction of it. The lines between surviving, taming, and conquering or destroying nature are important distinctions that Sol never considers until the damage is already done.
The one moment where nature seems to fight back against Sol—taking a great deal from him in the process— occurs during the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane. As if drawn to Sol, the hurricane moves away from the coast and hits the Okeechobee area the hardest, flooding the lake and killing over 2,000 people, including Sol’s companion and the only woman he ever loved, Bonnie. Historically, the Okeechobee hurricane is the second deadliest hurricane in US history, killing over 4,000 people across Florida and the Carolinas. For Sol, the loss of Bonnie proves that his father was right to advise him never to fall in love. Moreover, the event steels Sol’s resolve to conquer nature once and for all. With his arms to the sky, Sol yells, “Damn you! Damn you! You’ll not do this again! We’ll dike the lake so you can’t do it again!” (395).
Sol’s efforts to prevent Lake Okeechobee from flooding in the future have the effect of “turning the life-giving water away from the Big Cypress Swamp” (398) where Toby and his people reside. The author describes the engineering project as “a travesty against nature that could never be reversed” (398). In fact, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, damaging effects from the Okeechobee dam continued to emerge as recently as 2019, when algae blooms caused by the disruption of natural water flows resulted in dangerous toxicity levels in virtually all of the lake’s fish species (Treadway, Tyler. “With Toxic Blue-Green Algae Bloom, Don’t Eat Lake Okeechobee Fish, Audubon Biologist Says.” Treasure Coast Newspapers [Port St. Lucie], 10 Jun. 2019).
As Sol grows older, he takes stock of the MacIvey family name. While it once signified an improvised family that included his parents and grandparents—along with Skillit, Frog, Bonzo, Pearlie Mae, and everyone else who devoted their lives to Tobias’s vision—it is now little more than a brand: “The name MacIvey became a phantom, not something real but meaningless letters across bank buildings, art centers and small parks” (399). With no children to carry on the family name, a brand is all the MacIvey name will ever be.
The end of the novel recalls Toby’s words to Sol in Chapter 1: “You are trying to capture the fog, and no one can do that” (6). Sol’s last lines are directed at the ghost of his deceased father, whose philosophy and lifestyle Sol has strayed from so dramatically: “Where did it all go, Pappa? Where?” (403). As Toby suggests, all that is left of the MacIveys and the wilderness they loved is lost in the fog of memory and ghosts.
