Cypress and water @ Corkscrew Swamp
Guide Book: Motorist's Guide to Everglade National Park
by Florida National Parks & Monuments, Inc.
Beach Book: As Told At The Explorers Club
by George Plimpton, The Lyons Press
Local Book: The Book Of The Everglades
by Susan Cerulean, Milkweed Editions
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The Gulf Coast
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Dean found it almost impossible to haul me out of bed this particular morning. He got up and worked out, came back, I was still in bed. He went out, got breakfast and coffee from the breakfast buffet, came back, I was still in bed. He went out to the store to get supplies for a picnic lunch, came back, I was still in bed. Boneless and limp.
The Everglades National Park is the bottom tip of the state. It goes from almost the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico and covers the Florida Bay up from the curve of the Keys. After all the driving the day before, we stayed on the Gulf side of the state. First stop, the National Audubon Society's Corkscrew Swamp Bird Sanctuary, a nesting ground of the endangered wood stork. The drive to the park was beautiful, the swamp water lapping up against the road and spreading out under the roots of cypress trees, filled with wading flocks of white cattle egrets. The sky, the blank blue of morning before the afternoon thunderheads build up.
The park itself was a lovely wandering wooden boardwalk over the water, packed with families with screaming bored children because there were few birds to be found. There was a couple osprey, a red-shouldered hawk, an 6 foot fat black snake, several turtles sunning themselves, the obligatory alligators looking plastic and motionless. The trees a mile off on the horizon had small white dots that might have been wood storks. But towards the end of the trail, where the foot traffic thinned out because the parents took the short cut back to the bathrooms, was the most beautiful calm blue heron, walking slowly across the swamp lettuce. Proud as a fashion model on a runway, it completely ignored me.
From there, Everglade City, an odd collection of mobile homes, motels, and air boat tours. The air boats, massive propellers attached to the back of small metal skiffs, roared up and down the canals. And we considered it, but the lines were long, and our time was limited. We headed instead to the visitor's center which turned out to be more an odd 50's government building on the water, a bait and junk food shop and a wide lawn down to a bay dotted with tiny mangrove islands. There were no hiking trails at this end of the park. It's the jumping off point for a 99 mile Wilderness Waterway complete with camping platforms on stilts above the tide, you reserve in advance. Very popular with small boats, like kayaks and canoes.
We spent the money to take the park service boat tour of the bay and the mangroves islands in the purple near-dusk. The clouds so fat and prefect they looked like cartoons from a Monty Python movie. All the birds that had been avoiding us all day were perched in the trees. The water filled with manatee and dolphins.
We drove a bit further down the shore to a small beach to watch the sun go down. A French couple pulled up next to us and pulled out two metal masks and several odd pieces of iron. With this and driftwood pieces, they videotaped each other building a small art installation a foot into the water, kneeling down to tape the sun falling through the eyes of the mask. I turned to Dean and said, this really ruined it for me. When I am doing something weird and artistic and I don't want people to hassle me, I speak in a thick French accent. And here was the real thing I always mocked, and they were being more weird and more artistic than I ever dared be.
For dinner, we cruised the town eyeballing each of the 4 restaurants in town, finally choosing the one with the most pickup trucks out front. We had alligator and crab and conch and hush puppies, all deliciously fried.
After dinner we managed to find the center of Naples and it looked like a hopping place, the sidewalks and restaurants packed with glittering people. We parked on the beach and walked down to sit on the soft, dark sand, cut off from the traffic and lights by a row of trees. And I could imagine, sitting there with the warm breeze in our faces, how people see UFOs in this soft friendly starlite sky. A dark beach in Naples is the sort of place where you see dreams. |
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