Voyager: Travel Writings (20 page)

But then, suddenly, you drive through the entrance to Everglades National Park, and it’s as if you’ve passed through a gate into another time altogether, a distant, lost time eons before the arrival of the first Europeans, before even the rumored arrival of the Arawak in dugouts fleeing the Caribbean archipelago and the invading Caribs. Out on the Anhinga Trail, barely beyond earshot of the cars and RVs lumbering toward the lodge and marina in Flamingo, at the southern end of the park, the only sounds you hear are the wind riffling through the saw grass and the plash of fish feeding on insects and one another and the great long-necked
anhingas diving or emerging from the mahogany waters of a sluggish, seaward-moving slough. You hear a hundred frogs cheeping and croaking and the sweet wet whistle of a red-winged blackbird. A primeval six-foot-long alligator passes silently through the deep slough to the opposite side, coasts to a stop in the shallows, and lurks, a corrugated log with eyes. An anhinga rises from the water and flies like a pterodactyl to a cluster of nearby mangrove roots and cumbrously spreads and turns its enormous wings like glistening black kites silhouetted against the noontime sun.

A rough carpet of water lilies—clenched, fist-size buds about to bloom—floats on the surface of the slough, while just below, long-nosed gars luff in threes and fours, and bass and bluegills collect in schools, abundant and wary of the next upper link in the food chain, but strangely secure, like carp in a Japanese pool, as if here they have no unnatural enemies. A large soft-shelled turtle hauls herself out of the water and patiently begins to lay her dozens of eggs in the gray limestone soil, depositing them like wet vanilla-colored seeds. Farther down the embankment lies the wreckage of an old nest broken open by birds, the leathery shells smashed and drying in the sun. A dark blue racer snake slides into the brush. Mosquitoes gather in slow, buzzing swirls. The sun is high and it’s hot, ninety degrees, with a slight breeze blowing from the east. It’s mid-May, yes—but what century?

In our time, much of travel that is freely elected by the traveler is time travel. We go to Paris, tour Venice, visit Athens and the Holy Land, mainly to glimpse the past and walk about the cobbled streets with a guidebook, a sun hat, and a furled umbrella—emulating as best we can Henry James in Rome, Flaubert in Cairo. Or we fly to Tokyo, Beijing, Abu Dhabi, perhaps, for a safe, cautious peek into the future. Sometimes, for both the past and the future at once, we make our way to cities like Lagos, Mexico City, Lima. It’s time travel, but it’s strictly to the past and future of humanity that we’ve gone.

For some of us, that’s not enough. We want to travel even farther in time, to view and imagine anew the planet without billions of human beings on it. For this we get up an expedition and float down the Amazon on a raft or we go off to Africa and clone ourselves a Teddy Roosevelt safari and shoot the large animals with cameras instead of guns. Some of us traipse off to the Arctic or to uninhabited deserts or to mountaintops—journeying to the last remaining places where a traveler can be alone, more or less, and view the planet as it was before we started killing it.

But who can afford that? Who has the time? With only a week or two available and a modest amount of cash in hand, most of us are obliged to look for places closer to home. For me, when in search of this type of time travel, one of the most satisfying places to go is the Florida Everglades. The reasons are many and complex. Of no small importance, the Everglades is easy to get to, especially for a traveler living in the eastern United States. The park is a smooth seventy-mile drive from downtown Miami. And it is vast in size; you can get lost there. It is the second-largest national park in America outside Alaska—twenty-two hundred square miles, an area approximately the size of Delaware. And despite its proximity to one of the most densely populated regions in America, it is, for its size, one of the least visited parks in the system, especially from April to November. You can be alone there, or nearly so.

But more to the point, every time I climb into my time machine (usually an air-conditioned rental car picked up at the Miami International Airport) and travel into the Everglades, I journey to a place that has a shivering personal resonance for me. I almost always go by myself. It’s less distracting that way, and I don’t want to be distracted, because, once there, my imagination is instantly touched at its center, and all the world seems significant and personalized, as in a powerful dream. It’s my dreamtime, and I don’t want anyone, even someone I love and trust, to wake me.

Most people, if they’re lucky, have a place or two where this happens, but for me it occurs in the Everglades. Who knows why?
Childhood visions of pre-Columbian Florida and the Caribbean, maybe, induced by stories of Columbus, de Soto, and that master of time-travelers, Ponce de León, in which I helplessly identified with the wide-eyed European conquerors. Followed years later by adolescent pilgrimages to the Keys in naive search of Ernest Hemingway’s source of inspiration—as vain an enterprise as Ponce’s, maybe, but who knew that then? And over the years, repeated visits to the Glades, by accident or casual circumstance, building up a patina of personal associations, until now I enter the park with an expectancy based on nostalgia for a lost self—nostalgia for the New England boy reading about the Arawak Indians and Columbus, for the youth trying to become a novelist, for the reckless young man footloose in South Florida.

It’s an expectancy that is almost always met. I park my time machine and walk out onto the Anhinga or the Gumbo Limbo Trail, step by step moving along the catwalk of my own personal time line. I keep returning, and with increasing clarity I see more of the place and more of my past selves. And more of the past of the planet as well.

Beyond any other national park, the Everglades bears repeated visits, justifying a traveler’s return trips, but maybe requiring them, too. Without intending it, over the years I’ve acquired from these visits a gradual accumulation of information—about my layered self, I suppose, and, more important, about the place—which has helped me learn to look at the Everglades and see it for what it is, instead of what it isn’t.

The first few times I didn’t get it. There are no high mountains, no rushing cataracts, no grand panoramic vistas. There’s no rain forest, no powerful continent-draining river, no rocky seashore. The Glades is quiet and low and slow, a shallow, almost invisible river of grass, an intricate, extremely fragile subtropical ecosystem that seems shy and difficult of access to the human eye, which is, of course, one of the reasons humans have come so close to destroying it—and may yet succeed.

To see the Everglades for what it is and not what it isn’t, you have to develop a kind of bifocal vision, as if you were floating down the Mississippi on a raft with Huck Finn. You have to learn to switch your gaze constantly from the concrete to the abstract, from the nearby riverbank to the distant sky. You need an almost Thoreauvian eye for detail and for the interrelatedness of nature’s minutiae. It’s a 1.5-million-acre Walden Pond I’m talking about here, the largest wetland in the United States. From November through May there are between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand wading birds in the Everglades. More than one hundred species of butterflies have been identified in the park. Fifty species of reptiles, including twenty-six species of snakes and sixteen of turtles. Eighteen species of amphibians. Three hundred forty-seven species of birds. Forty species of mammals. More than one thousand species of plants. There are fifty-two varieties of the small striped Liguus snails that you see clinging to the trunks of the live oaks along the short Gumbo Limbo Trail, where, as you stroll, you can catch the skunklike smell of opening white stopper buds, used in ancient times by the Arawak and the first white settlers as a specific against dysentery.

The Gumbo Limbo Trail winds through great, twisted old live oak trees with epiphytes clinging to the trunks and upper branches, and dead-looking brown resurrection ferns at the roots that burst greenly into life after a rain. The trail is circular and begins and ends at the hundred-foot-tall royal palms of Paradise Key. The key is a hummock, a gentle, almost imperceptible rise in the blond watery plain, more like a solidified limestone sea-swell than an actual key or island. The majestic palms, which these days tower photogenically in front of Miami hotels and cluster around the old Bebe Rebozo compound on Key Biscayne and a thousand other estates, appeared first on the continent here in the Everglades, their seed carried by wind and water from the Caribbean thousands of years ago to catch and eventually prosper on this very hummock. A short way off the trail, I notice a small, still pool of water covered
with bright green slime—duckweed—which, seen up close, turns into a glistening skin, as clean and beautiful and serene as snakeskin over the dark, turbulent, fecund water below. I lean down and look closer and imagine I can see into the thrashing molecular soup of life itself.

But the swarming details of the Everglades can overwhelm you. It’s almost too much to absorb and organize. In this finely delineated and particularized landscape, to gain perspective you have to step away from time to time and abstract it. Along with Thoreau’s eye, you need to develop an almost Emersonian appreciation for the vast circular canopy of blue that stretches unbroken from horizon to horizon and the broad watery swale under your feet. It’s as if you are at sea and stand upon a shimmering grassy plain that floats like a Sargasso between the firmaments, above and below. The light is spectacular and shifts constantly as clouds build and dissipate and build again. The intensity of the light and its movement are dizzying. To steady yourself, you shift your gaze almost involuntarily back to what’s close at hand, clinging to it as if to the rail of a ship. In so abstract a landscape, to ground yourself you have to look again at the details.

And so it goes—back and forth, the long view and the short, the abstract and the concrete—for here you are situated in an infinitely complex world whose parts and the tissue of connections between them can be seen only if the viewer keeps shifting his focal point. By comparison, the city of man, the anthrosphere, from nearby Miami to distant Mumbai, seems stilled, frozen, caught in a snapshot in relatively recent time, serving either as all foreground or all background, with no movement between them. The central figure, the subject, is always us; humanity is the figure and the ground; we are content as well as context. In the Everglades, the central figure is the ancient planet itself and its immense plenitude.

Sometimes, instead of visiting the southern end of the Everglades, I drive out from Miami along Route 41, the old Tamiami Trail, cross through the Miccosukee Indian reservation, past the
airboat rentals (banned inside the park but ready to rent all around it) and the solitary fishermen sitting by the canals built by the Army Corps of Engineers, to reach the north side of the park and spend the day at Shark Valley. It’s less a valley than a broad, shallow slough twelve miles wide, a one- to three-foot-deep scimitar-shaped depression in the limestone bedrock that carries the overflow from Lake Okeechobee in a tectonically slow drift south and west at barely one hundred feet per day, sliding the fresh, nutrient-rich waters across the saw grass plain to the mangrove estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico. Out here, South Florida seems freshly emerged from the ocean, still dripping and draining back into the Gulf, as if the Ice Age ended only yesterday. Its highest point is barely eight feet above sea level, but from it you can see for miles.

At the Shark Valley Visitor Center there’s an open, rubber-tired tram that carts tourists into the Glades a ways, with a Park Service guide on a loudspeaker who’ll describe what you’re seeing. There’s a bike-rental shop and a fifteen-mile bike path to an observation tower and numerous trails where you can walk in silence. In a half hour, I’m under the hot May sun a few miles out on the bicycle path, pedaling the wobbly old one-speed bike I rented next to the visitor center. I’m finally far enough into the Glades that I can no longer hear the visitors or their cars and RVs or the guide on the tram, so I pull off the path and stop.

Purple pickerelweed is flowering everywhere, and bladderwort, like yellow stars, blooms against the dark water of the slough. Deerflies cruise by and then swerve hungrily back toward me, a new warm-blooded mammal, and hairless, too. All I can hear now is the clank of the links in the food chain. Herons and egrets stand knee-deep in water, waiting motionless, like the fishermen I saw earlier alongside the canal on the Tamiami Trail, and now and then I hear the splash of a gar or a bass busting the air for a low-flying dragonfly. For a long time, without making a ripple, a six-foot alligator on the far side of the slough stalks a spindly white egret, drawing closer and closer, undetected, until suddenly there is a great
furious roil and splash of water, then feathers floating, and silence as the gator slides away.

Later, out at the observation tower, I pause halfway up and look down, and in the copse below, a rust-colored fawn with pale spots across its belly lies curled and hidden by its mother. Intent only on protecting her offspring from the huge gator snoozing in the slough fifty feet away, she obviously has not considered aerial reconnaissance, especially by a human. Down below, the fawn lies as still as a statue in the cool shade of the copse. I feel oddly invasive for watching and resume climbing to the top of the tower. There I gaze out across the watery veldlike plain of saw grass. In the west a bank of cumulus clouds piles up above the Gulf near Everglades City, promising rain. For a moment I consider hurrying back to the car, but then decide no, let the rain come down. And within the hour it does, and as I walk my rented bike the eight miles back to the visitor center, I feel finally invisible, lost in time and space, afloat inside a dream of a lost and coherent world.

Crossing Shark Valley by foot in the warm torrential rain, it’s almost inconceivable somehow that my points of departure—Keene, New York, and Miami, Florida—are in the same time zone as the Everglades. Not just longitudinally, as on a map, but literally, as on a calendar or a wristwatch. Here and in Keene and Miami, today’s headlines and stock quotes are the same, the historical facts still hold, and thus all three places bear, at least abstractly, the same relation to the onrushing millennium, to its ethnic cleansings, genocidal massacres, famines, global floods of refugees, men and women and children gunning one another down with automatic weapons, wanton destruction of the planet—everything that drives a modern man or woman nearly mad with grief and despair, so that finally all one wants is to get out of this time zone. “Anywhere, so long as it’s out of this world,” said Baudelaire. And here I am, out of that world. Astonishing!