Hilary and Theresa's Road to Nowhere: River Of Grass

It was time to switch gears, tune back in to the National Geographic channel, and head for Everglades National Park. We didn’t have to wait long to see some serious action. The Everglades hit us with one of its best shots at Royal Palm, about 5 miles into the park. We took the Anhinga Trail, a ½ mile loop that offered one of the best opportunities to view the wildlife up close and personal. We immediately began to see the alligators, lounging in the sun, lying on top of each other, some with their mouths wide open. Part of the trail consisted of an elevated boardwalk and I felt pretty safe looking down at the alligators from above. But some of them were only 6 feet away from us as we walked along the portion of the trail that wasn’t elevated. The biggest alligators were 10 feet long and with no wall or fence or canal between us, my heart would skip a beat when I’d turn the corner and see one face to face. Yet they didn’t seem particularly interested in me; sometimes they’d open an eye, but then they’d just shut it again. We were told by a ranger that stories of alligators chasing people across parking lots at 35 miles/hour were just stories. Still, we did see an alligator move 3 feet out of the water, in about 2 seconds flat, to grab an unsuspecting bird from a branch above the water. So I tried to make sure there was someone (usually someone named Hilary) between me and the alligators when I walked past the closest ones.

We returned to the Anhinga Trail many times during our visit to the Everglades. It was the closest thing to a zoo that the Everglades had to offer and many of the birds we came to see were right there. The usual suspects along the Anhinga Trail were, of course, the anhingas, cormorant-like birds with beautiful striped patterns running down their feathers and iridescent blue rings around their eyes, They would stand on the branches of the trees and the fences along the trail and flap their wings like little capes. The other regulars were great blue herons, little blue herons, tri-colored herons, and the beautiful green herons. There were hundreds of ibises, easy to spot with their distinctive hook shaped bills. And there were so many great white herons and snowy egrets that we practically ignored them by the time we left the park.

The biggest stars in the Everglades are probably the wood storks. Put on the federal Endangered Species list in 1984 when their numbers dropped from 5000 nesting birds to only 500, they are the face of the Everglades and an indicator species whose numbers measure the success of conservation efforts. They were also regulars along the Anhinga Trail. It was fascinating to watch them wading in the shallow waters, sweeping their submerged bills from side to side. They’d sense the small fish by stirring up the mud with one foot and they’d balance themselves with grand flourishes of one wing and then the other. Photographers from all over the world were in the Everglades just to capture this show.

But the most beautiful birds we spotted on this trail were a pair of purple gallinules, gorgeous creatures full of iridescent purples and blues and greens. We only saw them once, but they performed for over an hour, and watching them move in and out of the grasses and dance across the water lilies was the highlight of my visit to the Everglades.

We couldn’t find everything we were looking for along the Anhinga Trail. Besides, it was a little on the crowded side. We were told that if we really wanted to experience the Everglades we needed to drive another 40 miles to Flamingo, at the very tip of the park and right on the shores of Florida Bay. There used to be a lodge in Flamingo, but it was beat up by Hurricane Katrina and then destroyed by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. So we would be camping again, this time in sites described as “primitive,” meaning no hot showers. That hardly fazed us at this point. But it was pretty isolated out there at the end of the continent. It was just us and the mosquitoes.

We hoped that a cold spell (which hardly seemed like a cold spell with temperatures in the 70s during the day), would mean fewer mosquitoes. And I’m sure they would have been much worse during the rainy season (May through October), when they are described in the literature as “unbearable.” Unfortunately, the ones that were there managed to find us no matter how much DEET we sprayed on ourselves. But the mosquitoes at the campground were nothing compared to the ones on some of the trails that ran along the shallow, muddy waters of the Everglades. Still, we didn’t want to miss anything…

The name of the trail - Snake Bite - should have warned us that nothing good would come from following this one. But a ranger told us that we might find flamingos on Snake Bite. He failed to mention that this trail was infamous for having more mosquitoes than anywhere else in the park. Since we were in the Everglades, this meant there were more mosquitoes on this trail than anywhere else in the world. We wore long pants, long sleeved shirts, had headaches from the DEET on our faces, necks and hands, and we were still eaten alive. Right before we turned around and bailed, there were at least 50 mosquitoes hovering around Hilary’s shirt. “Fuck the flamingos,” I said as we ran back to the car, “they’re really stupid looking birds anyway.” “Yeah,” said Hilary, “and they are not even indigenous to this fucking park.”

After watching a Key West sunset in Flamingo, we turned in for the night. I awoke at 3 a.m. to the sounds of Hilary ripping duct tape, never a good sign. Sure enough, a zipper had broken and it was now impossible to close the tent. “This is not happening. You did not just break out tent in the Everglades,” I screamed, starting to hyperventilate. We had learned earlier in the day that there were 26 kinds of snakes in the Everglades, 4 that were poisonous, and that if we walked around the campground at night we’d be able to count hundreds of pairs of eyes in the dark. We had also learned that Flamingo held the distinction of being the only place on the planet where both fresh-water alligators and salt-water crocodiles lived side by side. “No. No. No. This not happening,” I knew I was repeating myself. And I knew I was behaving like a child. But I couldn’t help it. Even in San Francisco, I hated spiders and bugs and anything that crawled. I knew I had no business camping in the Everglades. What is the world was I thinking?

As cold air started blowing through the tent, I thought about getting in the car and leaving. It would serve Hilary right for breaking the tent, I thought. But I was afraid to go alone. I’ll take Layla with me, I thought. But what if the snakes got her first? Ultimately, it was the fear of fending off snakes and mosquitoes and alligators that kept me paralyzed in the drafty tent. I took some deep breaths and my nervous breakdown began to subside. Then I started ripping pieces of duct tape and handing them to Hilary.

The next morning, we gave the ranger an earful when he made the mistake of asking us about our night. But as luck would have it, he offered us a tent that someone had left behind (probably someone who’d had a night like ours and sworn off camping forever). Not only was it bigger than our tent and in better condition, it actually had a walk in closet. There was some sort of a lesson here that did not go unnoticed. One zipper breaks and another door opens. Or something like that.

The upside to making the trek to Flamingo was, of course, the birds. They migrate to the mudflats along Florida Bay during the dry season and, at low tide, thousands were visible from the campgrounds. They were mostly egrets and herons and white pelicans. We’d hear the thunder and turn to see fifty or more taking off or landing at the same time. And we’d never seen so many ospreys. Sometimes they flew as close as 10 feet over our heads and when they carried fish in their talons, they looked like small water planes. More exciting though, were the flocks of roseate spoonbills that we regularly saw in the trees along Mrazek Pond, about a ¼ mile up the road. Not quite as long a flamingos, but bright pink and with spoon-billed beaks, these birds were very entertaining as they flapped their beautiful wings, preened themselves, and gracefully moved from branch to branch. The trauma of the previous night was behind us, our marriage was still intact and we were already planning our next trip to the Everglades.

I had fallen in love again, this time with a “River of Grass,” the name given this landscape by conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Composed of more than 1.5 million acres, the Everglades are the largest wetlands in the United States. Water is everything here in the Everglades and problems with the quality, quantity, timing and distribution of water continue to ripple throughout the park. Everglades was the first national park created to protect a threatened ecological system. The most obvious remaining threat to the wetlands is, of course, the human population explosion (according to one statistic, 800 people a day move to Florida) with its competing demands for water. Pollutants from agriculture and other human activities only add to the problems.

The impact on the wildlife is heartbreaking, with the numbers of wading birds nesting in the Everglades declining 93% since the 1930s. But efforts to save the remaining Glades and restore a semblance of their original function are underway. Congress recently authorized the world’s largest environmental restoration project. Over a period of 30 years, the goal is to return the waters to a more natural and balanced state. One of the rangers told us he was “guardedly optimistic.” I hope his optimism is founded because there is something very special about this giant swamp. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas said it simply and perfectly: "There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them..." Amen.