This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate Demet.

When Lake Okeechobee flooded its banks in 1926, the levee that the people who lived there,

people who had moved there to build South Florida, to turn it from a pestilent swamp land

into a developer's idea of paradise.

The levee that those people had made with their hands out of muck and rocks and marsh grass

to protect the homes they had built by the water.

When that levee collapsed as it was bound to do one day, though they hadn't lived

enough days in South Florida to know it.

And the water rose so high and the water rose so fast that they drowned.

Three hundred of those people by the lake.

Because they didn't know that sometimes the rain just doesn't stop there.

And the people who lived in the bungalows in Miami Beach, the people who had traveled on

the east floor to railway.

That impossible thing that had been dreamed up by oil men and hotel magnets.

And made possible by other men who had macheteed mangrove forests and drain swamps and filled

land and laid tracks and lost their lives.

Many.

The people who had been lured southward by the vision of paradise described in newspaper

ads and real estate brochures and arrived to find that it was all true.

The skies were that blue.

The clouds, the sand were that white.

...