Word: hinsley
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...boosters insist the long-legged dwellings are a romantic reminder of how people and nature once harmoniously co-existed in Florida. "My son is studying to be a biologist because of the love for wildlife he nurtured out here," says J.R. Hinsley, a plant-nursery owner whose stilt house--a furnished, air-conditioned "hunt camp" he calls the Fontainebleau--sits above alligator nests deep in the Everglades, southwest of Boca Raton, accessible only by airboat. "People can call us swamp rats and rednecks all they want," says Hinsley's neighbor Don Kirk, 59, "but folks are supporting us because most...
Some "swamp rats," of course, have been known to treat the Everglades like a trailer park. But most, like Hinsley and Kirk, say they just want to preserve Florida's version of outback cowboy life--and a rare piece of history. Since the pre-Columbian era, the stilt house has been as much a part of the Caribbean waterscape as the windmill in Holland. Venezuela got its name when conquistadors marveled at the Indians' stilt huts and dubbed it "Little Venice." The Spanish dotted the Florida coasts with stilt houses, often built from wrecked galleons...
...that he's a little too clumsy and stumbly and naïve, he is you and me. He is simple irreverant, and romantic - an honest warrior against the overwhelming force of the big people. And Robert Morse pulls it off perfectly; he writes poetry (They tell me, Francis Hinsley,/They tell me you were hung/With red protruding eyeballs/And black protruding tongue...) and does lots of things we've all--well, some of us have--been tempted to do, like kissing the breast of a piece of sculpture...
...with his high-pitched Yorkshire-Irish brogue expressed his "unbounded indignation" at the Italian attack on Ethiopia (and defended the silent Pope as "a helpless old man"). What Pius thought of this remark is not on record, but twice afterwards when His Holiness created new Cardinals, he passed over Hinsley...
...however, Hinsley got the red hat. "I have been called a clothes peg," he said, "but I have had to submit to it because this is settled by authority, and not by my choice or liking." When he returned from the Vatican in his red Cardinal's robes, Londoners gave him an ovation, strewed flowers in his path...