These are the same American peculiarities that Alexis de Tocqueville noticed when he journeyed here in 1831, at the age of twenty-five. A European observer would probably be struck by the unpeopled landscape and the alligators, the intense local and voluntary involvement (a congregation, a united small community), but also by the defiant individualism-the solitary seeker rigged up as if for nineteenth-century missionary work-and, of course, the slightly insane theological certainties. Setting aside the always troublesome exceptionalism of such “miracles” (their logic dictates that every missing girl not so fortunate was being either punished or neglected by the Lord), what was remarkable was how very American the happy story was, as if James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Cormac McCarthy had collaborated. The local police chief told reporters that if he had not believed before in miracles he certainly did now. “God sent me and pointed me directly to her,” he said later. As he slogged through the marshes, quoting Scripture and calling out Nadia’s name, he wonderfully heard a response. Armed with a machete, a G.P.S.-equipped BlackBerry, trail mix, and a Bible, the devout father of five let the Lord guide him to Nadia. Well, not quite, because he had divine assistance. A local church congregation had mobilized teams of searchers, but the man who discovered her, James King, was on his own.

Last month, Nadia Bloom, an eleven-year-old girl who had been missing for four days, was found, unhurt, in alligator-infested Florida swampland. Tocqueville is always tacking from anxiety to optimism and back again.

De tocqueville