“Marta looked as if she might throw up again. The last time that had happened, Mrs. Starch had barely waited until the floor was mopped before instructing Marta to write a paper listing five major muscles used in the act of regurgitation.” 

Initially, Mrs. Starch’s behavior in the classroom—especially the particularly humiliating assignments like this one—seems brutal and excessively punitive. She inspires nothing in the students other than extreme fear. Over the course of the novel, though, her redeeming qualities as a teacher are slowly revealed. She says she pushes her students hard to focus them, and she also does not strictly focus on textbook curriculum the way Wendell Waxmo, her substitute, does. 

“The ride took almost an hour because a truck full of tomatoes had flipped over on State Road 29, blocking traffic. A fire-engine crew was hosing the ketchup-colored muck off the pavement. Nick spotted a dead buck by the side of the road, and figured that the tomato truck must have struck it in the early fog.” 

The dead deer and the wrecked truck are pointed reminders of the damage industrial agriculture is doing to the local environment.

“When he pressed the Play button, the cypress strand came into view. The picture, though wobbly and somewhat out of focus, was easier to see on a TV screen than in the camera’s viewfinder. 

“‘There it is!’ Nick exclaimed when the tannish form crossed between the tree trunks.

“After a few seconds of stillness, the screen went blank.

“‘That’s it?’ his mother asked.” 

The encroaching eye of technological modernity is unable to penetrate this hazy, dense, and still wild domain of the Everglades. Although the expectation is that that Nick’s video, taken on the field trip before the fire breaks out, will end up containing evidence of a crime—the arson—it is actually the hardware store surveillance videos that end up solving the arson case.