The Last Floridian is the heroic journey of Clayton McIver, whom we meet as a boy-man on his 25h birthday and part with as a man, a candidate for political office as Florida bows under destructive over-population and the ills that brings to the state.
Clayt is an environmental hero, an ordinary young man at 25, whose father tells him to leave his home in Welaka because of the Greening Disease, a bacteria plague— like that of “scorpions of the earth”—has not only destroyed the elder McIver’s citrus grove service company but made it impossible for young Floridians to find employment in the ways of their fathers. The elder McIver tells Clayt to take his kayak and head south, that there is no employment for those like him in Welaka while the state fills up with 2000 strangers a day in population explosion. The new residents all need housing, causing construction of one new residential development after another, annihilating Florida’s wild, no longer vast, natural habitats. Worse, the water, that elixir of life itself, was poisoned by their run-off, and Florida became an endangered species.
Clayt follows his father’s suggestion and kayaks the length of the St. Johns River, nearly three hundred miles, day and night, camping out, alone, observing and learning and maturing with each, some shocking, always enlightening, experience. This takes him all the way to the St. Johns headwaters, seemingly primordial Blue Cypress Lake in Indian River County. Midway, he meets a young, beautiful, talented nightclub singer, Joleen Rebecca Jackson, who is performing at a St. Johns riverfront bar-restaurant. She is impressed that he Is “for real.” He is enchanted by her beauty, talent and ethic.
Their romance, known but not explicitly shown, rounds out each of them, giving Joleen a passion beyond her singing and giving Clayt the inspiration of her artistic beauty to enter the political fray in his acceptance of the mission to save the natural environment of Florida.