A Walk in the Swamp

© The Gut

A small aligator makes his pressence known.

A twelve-foot alligator as big around as a beer keg lolled on the bank of the canal. Dark water eddied past. The alligator's open mouth reminded me of the hood of an injured car. Except scarier, and with teeth.  

"There's another one," I said. My swamp-walking partner didn't answer. Instead, he squinted along the rough blacktop of Florida State Highway 41, looking for Clyde Butcher's Big Cypress Gallery, where we made plans to go on a guided swamp walk. Maybe, seeing some of the swamp’s sharp-toothed inhabitants was making him nervous. Maybe it was making me nervous.

The less-renowned brother of the Everglades, Big Cypress Swamp sprawls along the lower third of the Florida peninsula. The difference between the swamp and the river of grass is apparent even from ground level. While speeding along the highway you see miles and miles of flat grassland stretching to the horizon. That’s the river. A little further on, a line of gnarled cypress blocks the sun. That’s the swamp.

© faulReally, really, old cypress trees in a really, really old cypress forest.Tucked into a stand of tall bald cypress, Butcher's gallery resembles a modest home with an outsized driveway. In the driveway, a strange collage of Hummers, Corvettes and Prius hybrids ticked and cooled in the sun. A crowd chattering at crowded-restaurant volume and a pre-schooler obsessed with the horn on his father's Jeep Cherokee shattered the vaguest illusion that we'd left the city behind.

A rangy man with a sunburned neck and a stout walking stick introduced himself as our swamp-guide Bob. "We're all gonna get wet today," he assured us. "Water was 'bout right here." He held his hand about crotch-high. "We all here?” he asked. “Good. Everybody grab a stick."

We'd need a stick, Bob assured us, because a tangle of cypress roots and loose stones littered the pitted limestone floor of the swamp. "Put your stick out in front of you. Take big steps, and let your feet do the seeing. ‘Cause the water's too murky to see with your eyes. If you start to fall, lean on your stick. You reach out to steady yourself on a tree trunk you're more likely to get a handful of poison ivy or Keys fishing spider." Then he showed us how big a Keys fishing spider was. (Put it this way, if your hand reached up and met one, you’d be high-fiving it.)

We hadn't walked more than two hundred yards down an asphalt path from the parking lot and the gallery, yet nearly everything had changed. The air under the spreading cypress branches felt cool and moist. Occasional patches of sunlight the size of quarters reached the ground. Someone had silenced the horn-honking toddler and no motorcycles blatted down the highway. Silence. Not the primeval absence of sound I'd expected and hoped for, but at least a breath-holding silence, for a moment anyway.

Before we stepped into the swamp, we reached the final trappings of civilization – men's and women's changing rooms. A final admonition to leave behind anything likely to be ruined by prolonged immersion in swamp water. Then Bob led the group of nine intrepid Muck-Abouters armed with broom-handles and cameras to the edge of the asphalt path. "We step down right here," he said. "One big step." He demonstrated. Water the color of tea steeped all day long swirled around his buttocks. "Little cool today," he commented.

© Anthony BanksWould you walk in that?Bob had a bit of the devil in him. In fact, the weather had been uncommonly cold for weeks – so cold that iguanas rained from trees, frozen and then, dead; sea turtles came down with pneumonia, and frost destroyed a double-digit percentage of the state's citrus crop. The water probably hadn't been colder any time during the last decade. The group hesitated for a moment. I took a deep breath and went in after Bob.

Fortunately, I stood a good four inches taller than our guide so the water ranged no higher than my upper thighs. And oh yes, it was indeed cold. I stumbled almost immediately on a particularly troublesome root but managed to stay upright. I soon developed a rhythm: plant the stick deep in the muck ahead. Take one long step, then another. Plant the stick again.

Soon as I was confident in my ability to walk, started to look around. Broadly-spaced cypress trunks studded with opportunistic clinging plants gave the impression I waded through a flooded cathedral. Bob told us the green tangles studding the trunks were orchids. When not in bloom, an orchid looks depressingly like any other plant. (Big Cypress is home to many exotics including the celebrated ghost orchid featured in Susan Orleans's wildly popular book, The Orchid Thief).

I divided my attention between walking and scanning the swamp for alligators. And, after about ten minutes, I was ahead of the pack. I stopped to wait for the rest of the group to catch up. I felt the toe of my right boot slide into a rough hole in the limestone bottom.

Then, the strangest thing happened. The hole closed over my boot. Then began shaking my boot insistently back and forth. "Death roll," I thought, channeling Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee explaining a carnivorous crocodile's dining habits. I extracted my foot and slogged three quick steps backwards. I didn't know what else to do. I held my stick like a quarterstaff until the rest of the group caught up.

© sharlochBig Cypress at sunset.After that I hung back toward the tail end where another guide, an older and mustached man named Dan herded us along. Before long we left the shade of the tall cypresses, into a sparse field of much smaller trees. Bob explained that they were in fact dwarf cypress, a drought-resistant adaptation of their larger brethren. He used his stick to point to a specimen five feet tall.

"This one here's about six hundred years old." This plain fact seemed impossible to believe. Dan pointed to a two-inch frond peeking out of a cleft in a cypress trunk. "See that? That's a whisk fern. They're as old as the dinosaurs." We also saw an orchid in bloom with flowers the size of collar-buttons, the yellow blot of a single Everglades daisy, and the ridged backs of juvenile alligators breaking the surface of the water in the shadows of the silent trees.

Bob brought us back after about an hour. I stood on the asphalt path letting brown water drain from the vents in my boots. I didn't talk for a long time because words didn't seem adequate to describe the ancient patience and solitude of the cypresses. Walking through the swamp under them felt almost like a desecration and yet I was glad I had done it. For the first time I understood why Clyde Butcher is a photographer rather than a writer.