Canal Idea Dries Up, Leaves Future Muddy for Route : Some want a greenbelt. Others say existing development prevents any wildlife preserve.

The idea died hard, perhaps because it had endured for so long.

It was a notion to dig a canal across Florida, a shortcut for waterborne traffic between the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Folklore traces it back to the time of the pirates. Congress authorized a government study of it when John Quincy Adams was in the White House.

In the midst of the Great Depression 110 years later, men with shovels and mule-drawn scoops actually began excavations that are now overgrown by trees and vines.

During World War II, federal construction was authorized, and in the mid-1960s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers arrived to dig in earnest.

Today, 167 years after it was first considered by Congress, and more than two decades after former President Richard M. Nixon called off the corps, the late and largely unlamented cross-Florida canal is again the source of hypertensive local debate.

The corridor of the never-completed canal is to become a greenbelt. Most people, it seems, find that much preferable to the canal, in which the corps had invested about $72 million before opposition from a newborn environmental movement halted it in 1971.

But that is where agreement ends.

“Stopping the barge canal was one thing, but deciding what to do with the corridor now is quite another,” said Fred D. Ayer of the Florida Barge Canal Commission.

Environmental activists want a greenbelt insulated from development and restored everywhere possible to a natural state.

Others contend that development already has foreclosed the possibility of a large wildlife preserve.

Outside Ocala, the largest town next to the corridor, the right-of-way passes within a stone’s throw of a commercial campground, a subdivision and a mountainous landfill.

In the area where excavation was carried out in 1935, target shooters now congregate. Other remote places have been turned into illegal dumps, and elsewhere archeological sites have been pillaged by souvenir hunters.

Still, Ayer has a vision of a strip that can accommodate the aspirations of environmentalists, conservationists and county governments, making it possible to hike, bike and canoe across the state, and to camp and play baseball.

Already, he contends, there are initiatives that can make the area not only a refuge, but also a laboratory.

“I know how crowded this state is going to be like 20 years from now,” Ayer said, “and I believe we can accomplish something truly awesome with this if we do what we ought to do.”

While the land use options are under consideration, the state’s canal commission is in the process of returning to the six counties affected by the project about $32 million they had collected in taxes for the canal. Efforts are also under way to determine the future of about 8,000 acres of private land that the Corps of Engineers had yet to acquire when the canal work was stopped.

In all, the greenbelt will amount to 77,000 acres, some of it, such as the 26,000-acre Marshall Swamp in Marion County, still prime wildlife habitat.

Next September, a University of Florida advisory committee is due to present Gov. Lawton Chiles and his Cabinet a management plan with detailed recommendations for the greenbelt.

But battle lines already have formed around the issue that stands to dwarf nearly all of the others: the fate of the winding Oklawaha River, which the Southern poet Sidney Lanier once called “the sweetest water lane in the world.”

Setting to work on the canal, the corps smashed down 6,000 acres of trees, dammed the stream a few miles before it reached the St. Johns River and created a shallow 10,000-acre reservoir.

Florida Defenders of the Environment and Marjorie Carr, a nearly legendary figure in the canal opposition, have been crusading for years to drain the reservoir and restore the river.

“Our whole reason for stopping the canal was to save the river,” Carr said. “We haven’t really won until we have the river running free.”

Among outdoorsmen, however, the reservoir--called Lake Oklawaha by the corps and Rodman pool by environmentalists--has a loyal constituency. Included in it are conservationists such as T. W. (Tommy) Needham, a former president of the Florida Wildlife Federation, trustee of the Nature Conservancy and conservation adviser to Democratic and Republican governors.

In Needham’s view, the reservoir has come to play a vital recreational role for fishermen and hunters and is a valuable habitat for bird life.

“Rodman,” he said, “shouldn’t be arbitrarily destroyed. And I think that a way can be found to have a reduced area and management of different levels and produce benefits for everybody.”

Florida’s Ditch to Nowhere

The corridor of a never-completed canal is at the center of a Florida controversy. Some want to turn it into a greenbelt that would make it possible to hike, bike and canoe across the state. Others contend that development already has foreclosed the possibility of such a preserve.

Key facts about the canal:

* Project authorized: 1942

* Construction begins: 1964

* Project halted: 1971

* Army Corps investment: $72 million

‘Sweetest water lane in the world’

The fate of the Oklawaha River, which poet Sidney Lanier once called “the sweetest water lane in the world,” pits environmentalists against outdoorsmen.