Crusader for a Century : As her 100th birthday approaches, outspoken writer and conservationist Marjory StonemanDouglas still devotes her energies to working on behalf of the environment.

Water drips from the weathered roof of her cottage in Coconut Grove as Marjory Stoneman Douglas eases into her favorite chair. Here, in this high-ceilinged great room, she has lived and worked for the last 64 years.

“Is that rain?” she asks. “Oh, wonderful. We need the rain.”

Rainfall and water have been on Douglas’ mind a lot lately. Drought still grips South Florida, and for a woman who has served as the state’s environmental conscience since writing the classic “The Everglades: River of Grass” more than four decades ago, the situation appears critical.

Nesting cycles of alligators and wading birds have been disrupted, Lake Okeechobee is choked with pollution and water restrictions are in effect for much of Florida’s southeast coast.

And water is not all Douglas has to think about. She’s overdue on a book she’s been struggling to finish, there’s a mountain of correspondence to answer and, her two secretaries tell her, invitations for everything from lunch at a local grill to accepting an award from the Garden Clubs of America in New York continue to pour in.

Now here comes her birthday, and it seems as though Florida has set aside the entire month of April to mark the occasion.

Among an array of events scheduled are a $100-a-plate black-tie dinner, several luncheons, a reception in honor of the publication of “Nine Florida Stories,” a collection of her early magazine work, a beach party, a gathering of friends at a nature center that bears her name, and a motorcade and parade with Gov. Bob Martinez.

And why not? She’ll be 100 years old on April 7, and, as Douglas says matter-of-factly, “It isn’t everybody who can have a 100th birthday, so they’ll probably make a fuss over this.”

But what does she make of being 100 years old? She tugs a shawl around her shoulders, straightens the print dress that falls just below her knees, then looks up at her visitor through thick glasses that magnify her bright blue eyes and allow her but a shadowy view of the world around her.

Though nearly blind, her vision remains clear.

“I think it’s crazy. To be 100 years old--isn’t that silly,” she says. “It sounds awfully silly to me.”

While silly is a word Douglas might apply to her age, it is not a word ever used to describe her or the determined swath she cut through the 20th Century.

An early suffragette, a feminist before the word was used, the very essence of an outspoken, modern woman, Marjory Stoneman Douglas was 57 years old when she published her first book and gained renown as an environmentalist.

The felicitous title, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” forever changed the way people thought of the vast wetland that spans the southern end of the Florida peninsula.

Long considered a swampy impediment to progress, the Everglades that Douglas discovered was a slow-moving river--a sheet of fresh water 6 inches deep and 50 miles wide--that recharged underground water reserves on its 120-mile path from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay.

Combining the bloody history of the Everglades with lyrical descriptions of its unique wildlife, she was the first to explain how the Everglades prevents South Florida from turning into desert and has made life possible for the 4 million people who now live around its edges.

The Everglades became a national park the same year Douglas’s book was published. She has been its chief defender since then, often venturing out, in her trademark dark glasses and wide-brimmed floppy hat, to confront hostile groups of developers, farmers and hunters with designs on her territory.

“She takes no guff from anyone,” says Joe Podgor, director of Friends of the Everglades, the lobbying group Douglas started in 1970. “She leads by living a life that is honorable, intelligent and enjoyable. She has served as an inspiration for others, and now she moves people just with her presence alone.”

Still nimble of mind and fiercely independent, Douglas lives alone, as she has since 1926, with only a changing coterie of cats. From watching cats, she says, she learned to relax.

“Relaxation is the key to a long life,” she says with practiced authority. “Women, especially, are called upon now to do a great many more things than they used to, and they can’t do it on a tense muscle. I’m a very ambitious woman, but I can’t do everything, and that’s a conflict. So I’ve had to relax to conserve energy. And energy is like money in the bank.”

Despite being nearly blind and dependent on a hearing aid, Douglas continues to spend her energy reserves freely.

In the last six months, she has traveled to San Francisco to receive an award from the Sierra Club and to Princeton University to speak to the student government. She receives visitors regularly, dines out often, and along with writing a book--her eighth--on 19th-Century English writer W. H. Hudson, she is also brushing up on her French and amending her autobiography.

“I realized there were some things I forgot,” she explains.

On the eve the centenary celebration, Douglas professes to be bemused by the hoopla planned for April. But those close to her know how she relishes the sociable times just ahead.

“Really, all the attention pleases her very much,” says Kitty Harwood, a friend of 30 years. “Her mind and actions are very clear. She lives every day, she’s interested in almost everything, and she likes to do her own thing. But she tries to do too much. I scold her about that.” Harwood, also a writer, is 92.

Marjory Stoneman was born in Minnesota in 1890, during the administration of Benjamin Harrison, 13 years before the Wright brothers flew, when what is now the city of Miami was little more than an Army fort and an Indian trading post on the river bank.

Today, when Marjory Douglas talks about her service in the Navy during the war, she means World War I. When she recalls her long friendship with Mr. Bryan, she means William Jennings Bryan, who died in 1925.

Her father, Frank Stoneman, was a man from what she calls a Quaker-abolitionist background; her mother, Lillian, was of French and English stock, raised in Massachusetts. The family moved to Providence, R. I., when Marjory was small. Soon after that, her parents split up.

Marjory, an only child, and her mother then settled in Taunton, Mass., Mrs. Stoneman’s hometown. Always interested in writing, Marjory studied Latin and wrote fiction at Taunton High School, then went on to take a degree in English composition from Wellesley College, class of 1912.

After college and the death of her mother, Marjory Stoneman was working as a $20-a-week salesclerk in a Newark, N.J., department store when she met Kenneth Douglas, about 30 years her senior, the church editor of the Newark Evening News.

In her autobiography, “Voice of the River,” she calls Douglas the first man who had ever paid attention to her. They met at the library one day and were married three months later.

“On my part, it wasn’t love exactly,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It was sheer delight. I didn’t know Mr. Douglas well enough to have loved him.”

They honeymooned in New York City, where the inexperienced Mrs. Douglas was introduced to sex. “I thought sex was a little crazy, really,” she wrote. “It almost made me laugh. My husband had excellent manners in bed. He was kind and instructive and the whole thing was very successful.”

But the marriage didn’t last very long. Within months of the honeymoon, he was arrested for passing a bad check and sent to jail. Although the couple got together again briefly after his release, the union was doomed and Mrs. Douglas soon headed for a Florida divorce and a meeting with her father, whom she had not seen for 15 years.

As for sex, Douglas now says, “I’m glad I had the experience, but sex is really more trouble than it’s worth. If you don’t have sex, you have all that energy to put into something else, such as writing books.”

So that was it for sex and marriage. Douglas, who says she has been celibate since 1914, has never lacked for energy.

In Miami, she found her father, a lawyer, running a newspaper called the Miami Herald, which he and a partner founded in 1910. When the society editor quit soon after Marjory landed in town, her father offered her the job. She wrote a column for several years, went to Paris with the Red Cross during the war and returned home in 1920 to become engaged to a man she calls Andy.

That romance didn’t work out either, and eventually Andy left. “I wasn’t the marrying kind,” she says. “I never wanted children. Oh, I liked children, all right, I just never wanted any. I wanted books.”

Books she got--and still has. Books line the walls of her cottage and spill onto the floor, joining a scattered tide of papers, magazines and blue plastic cassette boxes containing the tape-recorded novels she now listens to.

In the leftover spaces are plaques from conservation groups, carved wooden birds, rubber alligators, letters from schoolchildren, the talking clock and on a table, her floppy hat, in which she has been pictured countless times, sitting high atop an airboat skimming across the saw grass in the Everglades, just 20 miles west of town.

It is here in her double-walled, stucco home, which she designed to be air-conditioned only by the Florida breeze, that she began her second career as a free-lance writer.

She resigned from the Miami Herald because of what she calls “nervous fatigue” brought on by the pressures of writing a column, the breakup with Andy and disagreements with her father’s partner, the paper’s publisher.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, in the heyday of American magazines, Douglas made a comfortable living selling fiction, at prices of up to $1,200 a story, to The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal and others.

At the same time, she enjoyed an active social life that reflected the boom years in Miami. She cultivated a wide circle of friends, became a regular at tea dances on Miami Beach and began to develop an appreciation for Florida’s flora and fauna. In the 1920s, she even served on a committee dedicated to winning national park status for the Everglades.

But it was not until the early 1940s, when Rinehart & Co. asked her to do a book for its “Rivers of America” series, that she discovered the Everglades’ true nature.

“They wanted a book on the Miami River,” Douglas recalls. “But I said, ‘Oh, you can’t do a book on that river--it’s too short.’ But when a publisher comes into your house wanting a book, you don’t let him go quickly. So I said, ‘What if the Miami River is part of a system of rivers, including the Everglades?’ And he said, ‘OK, write a book about the Everglades.’ ”

“There are no other Everglades in the world,” begins Douglas’ graceful, prophetic work, which became a surprise bestseller in 1947 and still sells about 10,000 copies a year in paperback alone.

She went on to write five other nonfiction books, including works on hurricanes and South Florida history, and one novel, called “Road to the Sun,” which was published in 1952 and, in the author’s assessment, deservedly forgotten. “It wasn’t very good,” she admits. “After that, my publisher told me to stick to nonfiction.”

Ever since a serious kidney infection kept her bedridden for several months in 1987, Douglas tires easily. But her days remain full. Four afternoons a week, secretaries come in to help with her correspondence and household tasks. In the evening, an editor friend arrives to work with her on the Hudson book.

She rarely cooks and seems to subsist on a diet of skimmed milk and unsalted peanuts, along with meals brought in by friends. She is often taken to lunch and dinner, too, by friends who drive. She has never owned nor driven a car.

She still grants a generous amount of time to journalists from all over the world who come to see her for magazine profiles or nature documentaries; every few months, it seems, she agrees to be driven to the Everglades to pose for one more picture, in an airboat, or chatting with a group of Miccosukee Indians.

Ironically, picture requests probably account for most of the time she has actually spent in the Everglades. “I hardly ever go to the Everglades,” she has written. “It’s too buggy, too wet, too generally inhospitable. . . . I know it’s out there, and I know its importance. I suppose you could say the Everglades and I have the kind of friendship that doesn’t depend on constant physical contact.”

Nonetheless, Douglas and the Everglades are inextricably linked.

“Voice of the River,” her autobiography with John Rothchild, has been optioned for a movie to CPC Productions of Los Angeles. “I see it as a ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ type of picture,” says Peggy Chane. “She shows that a single person can make a difference.”

For the last quarter century or so, Douglas has followed a path of moderation.

“If you’re in your 90s and you’re still doing something overindulgent or stupid, you’d better stop it,” she wrote in her autobiography. “If you haven’t got the will power to stop it in your 90s, maybe you’d have been better off to have died in your 80s.”

Occasionally, she confesses, she overindulges in ice cream. She also has a Scotch and soda every afternoon at 5, but that, she asserts, is in no way indulgent.

“My uncle was a very fine doctor, and he told my father when he was growing old that one drink a day is very good for you,” she says.

Unlike many people who grow old, Douglas has spent little time wondering about how many years she may have left, but she adds, “I have a feeling I won’t live beyond 107. Why? I don’t know. It’s just one of those numbers.”

As for what may be beyond, she says: “Oh, I don’t think there is any afterlife. I don’t believe there’s a soul. In other words, I don’t believe in God. I don’t think I’m an atheist; I think I’m an agnostic. That is, I just don’t know.

“I believe that life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.”

But is she happy? she is asked.

“Happy? Yes, I am. I think some people today are almost afraid of being happy. You know, they may be trying to avoid the attention of the gods. But I don’t know why I wouldn’t be happy. I am living the way I want to. I have enough money to manage nicely. I have many friends. Life is interesting, very interesting indeed.”

A READER’S GUIDE “The Everglades: River of Grass” is available in hardcover from Pineapple Press Inc., Sarasota, Fla., and in paperback from Mockingbird Books Inc., St. Simons Island, Ga. “Voice of the River” is from Pineapple Press Inc. “Nine Florida Stories” is from University of North Florida Press, Gainesville, Fla.