Hikers Find ‘Day Of Creation’

By Domeni­ca Ghanem

Imme­di­ate­ly, the crowd was skeptical.

Bleu Waters, a ranger at Ever­glades Nation­al Park and the guide for this walk, hand­ed out walk­ing sticks. “These are for fight­ing off the alli­ga­tors,” she said, stone faced. “If you see one, hold its head down with this and yell for me to come over.”

Every­one exchanged sur­prised, ner­vous glances, not sure if she was being serious.

“My socks are going to get so wet,” one tourist complained.

As each per­son took that first step into the mud of the slough slog they instant­ly knew that their socks would be the least of their prob­lems. The sen­sa­tion was strange. The mud was much warmer than expected.

They were at Ever­glades Nation­al Park, tak­ing part in a wet walk through the swamp, a unique expe­ri­ence that makes adven­tur­ers out of tourists.

Bleu tried to encour­age them, “I want you to expe­ri­ence things, to touch things, to take a clos­er look at it.”

“Do we real­ly have to do this?” a tourist mum­bled under her breath.

Each step was dif­fi­cult. The mud weighed their shoes down, the walk­ers had to fight against grav­i­ty. Now they knew why the short walk was sched­uled to take so long.

Ear­li­er on their trip, after walk­ing along the Anhin­ga Trail in the park, get­ting up close and per­son­al with birds, tur­tles and alli­ga­tors, the group start­ed to feel like they were on vaca­tion. On Lake Okee­chobee, rid­ing on the air­boats gave them a rush of adven­ture, and some­times they were scratched as the dri­ver tore straight through cat­tails with­out a sec­ond thought. But com­pared to this swamp walk they might as well have been sun­bathing on the beach.

The Ever­glades are not Dis­ney World. Lin­da Fri­ar, pub­lic infor­ma­tion offi­cer for Ever­glades Nation­al Park, tried to warn them.

By now the hik­ers had trav­eled maybe 20 feet from where they start­ed. Bleu stopped every few min­utes and wait­ed for every­one to catch up.

It used to be you could look up at the sky and it would be blocked by migra­tions of birds, Bleu told them. The envi­ron­ment has changed dras­ti­cal­ly after humans began try­ing to drain the Ever­glades, to make it more hab­it­able for them­selves but not nec­es­sar­i­ly for oth­er species.

Some tourists lagged behind, sweat trick­ling down their backs.

“It needs to burn dur­ing the wettest time of the year,” she said, talk­ing about the con­tra­dic­tions of the swamp in the tone of a moth­er in awe of her child’s accom­plish­ments. “You’ll be walk­ing through a field of grass, and all of the sud­den, ‘boom’, there’s a tree island,” she marveled.

Some­where in the back­ground there’s an “oof,” fol­lowed by frus­trat­ed laugh­ter. The trees were taller here, and the water deep­er. It had passed their ankles and reached their shins. But one tourist, who didn’t want to be here in the first place, fell and now she was soaked. She looked like she was about to cry, but the group car­ried on.

A few of the hik­ers whis­pered to each oth­er.  “Maybe this is why they want­ed to drain the swamp so bad in the first place,” they chuckled.

Amer­i­can sol­diers dur­ing the Semi­nole War in the ear­ly 19^th Cen­tu­ry prob­a­bly mut­tered sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments.  Jacob Mott, an army sur­geon, wrote about the swamp in his journal.

“The troops spent so much time slog­ging through wet­lands in the Ever­glades and Big Cypress that their ankles swelled like bal­loons, and grue­some inflam­ma­tions cov­ered their legs,” Mott wrote. “The Amer­i­cans had to drag their canoes, rifles, ammu­ni­tion and pro­vi­sions through razor-edged saw grass that ripped their clothes and sliced their skin, through much so deep and stick that one pri­vate dropped dead in his tracks from exhaustion.”

The attempts to drain the swamp have now turned to an effort to restore these lands.  The swamp hike is Friar’s favorite place to bring con­gres­sion­al staff and oth­er offi­cials who may be able to help, and who need to under­stand the true nature of the Everglades.

The water became deep­er, but the tourists moved a lit­tle faster than before; they were start­ing to get the hang of it.

The hik­ers were sup­posed to use their sticks to feel the ground in front of them and be more aware of holes they might fall into. But it has been a full-time task to keep their bal­ance and some­times they would for­get about the sticks, trip over one of the holes and find them­selves waist-deep in the warm water. The water was clear.

So far there was no sign of snakes; Bleu said the snakes could hear them com­ing and would avoid them. But some peo­ple remained wary.

Final­ly, they made it into the cypress dome.

And then, there was noth­ing but silence and tran­quil­i­ty. Instant­ly, it became clear why Fri­ar took gov­ern­men­tal offi­cials here.

Patrick Boyce, a swamp walk guide at near­by Big Cypress Nation­al Pre­serve, said arriv­ing in a cypress dome, with nobody around was like  “the first day of creation.”

Both the water and trees were at their peak here. Where just a few min­utes ago a seem­ing­ly end­less land­scape of tall grass scratched their legs, the vis­i­tors were now sur­round­ed by float­ing aquat­ic plants. The water was still, but it smelled fresh; the air was clean.

“The Ever­glades pret­ty much lives in a glass jar,” Waters said. “You drop the glass jar, what hap­pens when you drop any piece of glass? It shat­ters. That’s how vul­ner­a­ble this ecosys­tem is.”

Here, in the silence, that vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty was palpable.

Then, it was time to leave the silence behind. Out of the cypress dome, no longer pro­tect­ed by the shade, it was hot again. There was less and less water, more and more mud. Feet searched for rocks to make the trip back easier.

The group was com­ing toward the end of the hour, and they could see the road that ran par­al­lel to the swamp. They could see the van that some had been so reluc­tant to leave.

All too soon, they began to miss the silence of the swamp.