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February 23, 2010

Trip Report: Everglades

Trip Report: the Everglades

Being as it's wintertime for many of you right now, I thought I'd take time to share some highlights from my time in the Everglades this month.

A little backstory: I've recently taken up an occasional gig helping guide backcountry trips into Everglades National Park and the Ten Thousand Islands, so that's how I was able to score two weeks in the Glades on a nonprofit salary! I'm also from Florida, so I love to share my enthusiasm for what's left of its natural landscape after so much development.

Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, and the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge are unique: The Everglades is the world's only river of grass, the combined area is the largest stand of mangroves in North America, and their combined area is 2.26 million acres - somewhere between the size of Delaware and Connecticut. The original Glades covered essentially all of South Florida from Lake Okeechobee and the Caloosahatchee River on down, but only a fraction remains. The environment is like nowhere else in the US, a great flat sawgrass prairie across which water from Lake Okeechobee slowly sheets, broken up by cypress strands and domes, gradually given over to a dense maze of mangrove swamps, bays, and rivers as the water turns from fresh to brackish to salt in the Ten Thousand Islands and the Gulf of Mexico. And yet you could drive right across it on I-75 or Highway 41 and never know what you were seeing - or missing.

After all the time I've spent amidst the crush of humanity at Yosemite or Yellowstone, the Glades feel empty - we never shared a campsite and passed only a few fishing guides along the way. It's a notoriously lonesome place, especially in the dead heat of the day when even a winter sun burns and every living thing seems to be taking shelter elsewhere. But it's also gorgeous, and, if you know where to look, full of amazing things:

-- Every morning we went out at dawn to watch the birds take off into the sunrise. The pre-plume-trade days of skies black with birds are long gone, but if you know where to look you can still find an entire island festooned with birds - ibis, egrets, herons, cormorants, pelicans - and watch thousands of ibis alight at once and move in great white skeins above your head, silent but for their wingbeats.

-- Birding on the whole was outstanding. Highlights: flotillas of white pelicans, an array of herons, white-crowned pigeons, nesting osprey, shy limpkins, and the occasional wood stork pair feeding along the shore. We paddled down to Gopher Key along a waterway popular with the birds, and around every corner flushed squawking herons (such a graceful bird, such an awkward SQUAWK) and ibis.

-- Piloting the skiff, laden with kayaks and gear, through the bays was no joke. One reason so few folks get into the Everglades backcountry is it's challenging to boat - a long, often arduously windy trek by kayak and/or a navigational nightmare by motorboat. The bays don't look it, but they're often inches deep at low tide, and rarely more than 4 feet deep, making knowledge of the sandbars and channels essential. Roaring across Sunday Bay, Oyster Bay, Chevelier Bay, Alligator Bay, all you can see in any direction is blue sky, black water, a long thin line of mangroves, and the occasional osprey overhead.

-- If you know where to find them, there are narrow waterways and mangrove tunnels so tight you can only use half a kayak paddle - or just pull yourself along by the dangling limbs overhead. From the outside, the mangroves look impenetrable, their arched "walking" roots revealing only muck and black water underneath, but the tunnels are used by birds, gators, and kayakers like us. Even big gators - ten feet or more - are scared of people this far back, and we startled a few big daddies coming around a bend; they slipped silently underwater (toward the kayak!) to safety. In one clear pond between tunnels, I looked down into the water to see a sandy bottom and the clear shapes of two gators as big as my boat just as still as could be on the bottom, just inches below my boat. In another pool, spotted gar circled beneath our boats, and elsewhere along the way dense schools of grunts glinted past.

-- Epiphytes - they cover the mangrove limbs effusively, a mishmash of cardinal wild pine, resurrection fern, spanish moss, and orchids. Some are as small as your pinky nail, others with a span of two feet or more. Most of the orchids don't bloom this time of year, but we did find some blooming night-scented orchids, in addition to butterfly orchids, helmet orchids, cigar orchids, and a snakelike leafless orchid, vanilla barbellata, close relative of the plant that gives us vanilla beans.

-- Sometimes you can paddle up from the mangroves into the sawgrass flats, where the sky opens up and the water is fresh.

-- Everywhere we went, the mullet jumped and slapped against the water. In one place the bay through which we paddled was so shallow the mullet kicked up swirls of mud and flashed their tails as they hustled away from our boats. Nearby, a couple of pelicans made a killing paddling in the muddy water, scooping up fish. What I wouldn't give for some smoked mullet out in Oregon!!

-- Follow the salt water far enough and you'll hit the Gulf of Mexico and the Ten Thousand Islands, tiny mangrove islands with spits of sand covered in worm-rock coral and pristine shells (no pre-dawn beachcombers here!). Nothing like a horizon that's all sky and water.

-- Campsites along the Wilderness Waterway - the route from Everglades City to Flamingo, 7 hours by boat, 7 days by kayak - are either old homesteads or Seminole-style chickees, raised platforms with thatched roofs above the water. The mosquitoes are omnipresent year round no matter where you camp. It was hard to believe our main camp, Darwin's Place, was once the home of a series of pioneer families, a patch of farmland, and finally the last full-time Everglades hermit (there were many - I guess they don't all go up to Alaska seeking solitude), who kept hundreds of fruit trees and a small cottage until the late 1960s, of which only the crumbling foundation remains. Ruined cisterns are wrapped by the limbs of strangler figs, and an array of voracious jungle plants hold court on what was once cleared land. I was particularly taken with the old Watson Place on Chatham Bend, a popular campground that was first a sacred Calusa site and then the home of the infamous E. J. Watson, brilliant businessman and farmer, caring family man, notorious Key West and Tampa roustabout, and cold-blooded killer of an unknown number of souls. Peter Matthiesson's fictionalized account of Watson - starting with Killing Mister Watson - is a must-read for Everglades visitors.

-- When I wasn't out on the boats, I was either in Everglades City taking in the local nightlife at Leebo's with the rest of the staff (basically a big screen porch with ice chests of Bud, a couple bottles of liquor haphazardly stacked on the bar, and that particular breed of old Florida fishing folk with thick leather-brown skin and worn-out baseball caps and a penchant for offering protective words of wisdom to young women whose skin and attire bely many years gone from the Florida sun. My parents made the trek down from my hometown 2 hours to the north, and we did the day tripper's circuit of cypress dome boardwalks and gentle walks through the sawgrass, plus local stone crab and king mackerel for dinner.

It was a mighty good trip.

Don't Cuss, Call Us

As seen in DeSoto County.

Everglades

I had the pleasure this month of spending 2 weeks in the Everglades. Trip report coming soon. Freakin love that place.

January 13, 2009

Mottos

It's times like these I am bummed that Florida has the lamest motto of all of the states - "In God We Trust" - they just copied it off somebody's dollar bill or something.

Maybe I should get a New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die") or Oregon ("She Flies on Her Own Wings") shirt instead. Some of these are really incredible.

50 States' Mottos

Sheesh, Florida.

(via friends' shared google reader... link here)

December 14, 2008

Freeze

I've gotta say - it's not such a bad thing to be in Florida on vacation when it's 11 degrees in Oregon right now...

November 26, 2008

On the TV box

So I had heard through the grapevine already (of course) that some folks I went to school with were on an HGTV home improvement show, but then ZOMG I had that very channel on tonight, because I cannot seem to turn the TV off while I house-sit, AND THEN SOMEBODY'S SAYING ARCADIA FLORIDA.

And there's these kids I vaguely recall from high school, now engaged, trying to move their new home across somebody else's pasture to their 5 acres of pasture. These kids are younger than I am but there they are, with their camo ball caps and Nextels on their belts, and their glorious rural Florida accents, on the TV as a young couple with a home.

And here I am, living out of boxes and nowhere even close to near to committed to this place or these people or this boy or this job.

But that's not what I'm really thinking about. It's the unexpectedly huge pleasure of seeing home - the cows and the particular look of the pasture, the quality of the light, the way the voices sound, the familiar highways, the live oaks and palmettos. Wow, it's hitting me hard.

HOME!

January 17, 2008

Who's That Eco Man?

Who do you think said this?

Each and every day, I wake up early and I work out. It gives me the opportunity to watch the sun come up, and it's so joyful for me to be able to see that. It renews my spirit and it gathers me up again to try and do more to preserve the environment and protect it for future generations.

A) Carl Pope, the Sierra Club
B) George W. Bush, President
C) Charlie Crist, Republican governor of Florida
D) Ted Kulongoski, Democratic governor of Oregon

Hint: he also blocked a massive coal-fired power plant in 2007, is pushing for more stringent CO2 emissions cuts to slow climate change, and has kind of a scary perma-tan.

Yes, friends, it's C. I was pretty pissed when Crist got elected, because, well, he's a Republican. But as far as they go, he's pretty alright. Especially when it comes to the environment.

(The above quote was from an interview in Grist)

April 3, 2007

Voting Rights in FL

This is great news for Florida:

Gov. Charlie Crist said Monday that he hoped to persuade members of the Florida cabinet this week to end the practice of stripping convicted felons of their right to vote.

Florida is the most populous of three states whose constitutions require withdrawal of voting rights from all convicted felons, and it has the nation’s largest number of disenfranchised former offenders.

There are nearly a million Florida residents who would be affected by this change.

“I believe in my heart that everybody deserves a second chance,” Mr. Crist said. “And I’m hopeful that maybe later this week we’ll have an opportunity to restore civil rights for Floridians and give them that right to vote.”

Now he just has to convince one more cabinet member to side with him - Alex Sink, the Democratic chief financial officer, supports lifting the ban. The two Republicans on the cabinet don't.

(via NYT)

February 7, 2007

Small World

So here I am at work, doing a little internet research on USDA Rural Development grants for some projects out here in high desert country, and I start skimming the menu bar for what I'm lookin' for - the money - when something catches my eye. There's a news feature over there - and wait, does that say DeSoto?

Here, Dorr meets with Ken Harrison, President, DeSoto County Farm Bureau (right) at DeSoto Memorial Hospital in Arcadia, Florida. USDA Rural Development supplied a $20 million loan for construction of the hospital's new 58,000 square foot, 32-bed emergency, surgical and outpatient wing.

So yeah, that's pretty neat, eh?

January 27, 2007

Swamp Folk

Why I love SotB (you've gotta click to see the picture that accompanies this caption):

Ladies, if you can't grow old, wear a funky crochet short-sleeved blouse, pick your nose and drink a beer in public, what's the point?

Also, she found this feature on Lucky Cole, who's kinda amazing.

Behind the barrier, a rusted metal sculpture of what can only be described as a medieval warrior guarded the entrance. A hangman's noose dangled in the wind behind it. The place looked as if it belonged on the set of The Hills Have Eyes, the Seventies horror flick about a lost family that becomes prey for psychotic killers. At the rear of the property, two trailers were connected to each other via a deck, a covered front porch, and a kitchen made from sturdy wood.

A blue-eyed bear of a man wearing a floral print short-sleeve shirt, black Wrangler jeans, and black cowboy boots sat before two computers inside one of the mobile homes. When he stood to greet me, he looked larger than a Florida black bear romping through Big Cypress. He sported a salt-and-pepper mustache and beard, but had a youthful smile.

That is so the Everglades.

September 23, 2006

Oh, Miami

Classy.

The Miami-Dade water and sewer department has a new director, and he's been noticing some real interesting stuff in his department.

With 2,600 employees, Renfrow anticipated about 15 percent of his staff, or around 400 of his senior managers might have county-issued cell phone.

After some checking, he found about 400 authorized cell phone accounts, as he had suspected. However, the department had an additional 3,800 active cell phone accounts unaccounted for.

(source)

August 31, 2006

Crist v. Gallagher

The Florida governor primaries are pretty hot down here - with a lot of the focus being on the two conservatives vying for a shot: Charlie Crist and Tom Gallagher.

Gallagher's the worse of the two; he's been smearing Crist for supporting "some rights" for gay couples (neither support gay marriage). He's about as conservative as they come as far as social issues go (but when it comes to taxes, well....)

Race to the bottom indeed.

The two Dems look alright, though it's shaping up to be a bit like the Lamont-Lieberman thing - two different ideas of who's an electable Democrat. More on that later, though, I need to do some more research on both. So far the newspapers down here are almost evenly split on who they endorse.

Downtown K-town

This is an older piece from the St. Pete Times that I want to put here mostly for future reference:

City officials acknowledge they have no grand plan for downtown beyond preserving as many of its fine old buildings as possible. To that end, they credit Martha and Chuck Craven for their revitalization efforts. Although Arcadia's population of 6,800 has remained relatively flat, City Administrator Ed Strube agrees with the couple that the area is on the verge of a boom, one that will inevitably drive up real estate prices and affect the character of downtown.

There's some drama going on around here about the character of Arcadia's downtown - it's now almost exclusively antiques, and the dealers like it that way. Unfortunately, many of the store owners are also really shortsighted, and staunchly oppose anything downtown that's not, well, an antique store. Everyone now is kinda just waiting for the population boom - it's like a massive boulder perched on the edge of a cliff, teetering unsteadily, waiting for the right wind to send it careening on down.

August 28, 2006

Ernesto Round I

First hurricane of the season! His name is Ernesto and he's pretty mild, looks like. My family is conveniently located at all major hurricane-prone areas (west coast, east coast, southern tip), so one way or another someone will probably evacuate to stay with someone else. People are on hyper-alert around here - after Charley, my mom did some major hurricane-prep pantry stocking, in addition to storm windows (also known as "sheets of plywood") and such necessities. Here's hoping it doesn't do any big damage.

August 1, 2006

Plastic bags

This is a perfect example of why I often have a hard time applying my New England lifestyle back home in Florida. It's constantly considered weird to be at all environmentally friendly.

greenerMIAMI goes and attempts to re-use a plastic grocery bag at Publix (something that we did all the time at the Co-Op in Hanover):

Me (to bagger): "I brought my own bag, thanks, just use this one."

Bagger: Gives me a strange look, but comprehends. Puts bananas, cream cheese in my bag.

Cashier: Bagging my bread in a new bag.

Me: "I brought my own bag."

Cashier: Gives me really strange & confused look.

Me: "I only want to use the bag I brought." Take bread out of new bag.

Cashier: Throws new bag that bread was in for 2 seconds directly into trash.

Me: "Don't throw it out!"

Cashier: Confused. "Why?"

(read the rest of the exchange here)

Of course, the flip side to this is that if one person's doing it, that's fantastic and makes it that much easier for the next person who does it, and the next, and so on - and somebody's gotta start the ball rolling...