Everglades Part II

I arrived in town on that same Tamiami Trail, now U.S. 41. Naples impressed me for the quantity of traffic choking its six-lane highways and not for much else. A few miles southwest of town the road narrows in short order from six to two lanes, the speed limit goes up, and the development disappears. Welcome to Big Cypress Country.

Those used to driving through the Southeast, where 60+ foot trees hem in the roads on either side, will find the Big Cypress country a misnomer. The biggest trees aren’t much more than twenty feet tall, with frequent breaks for wet prairie grasses and palm hammocks. Twenty-five miles from Naples there’s a gas station. The highway sign says “Carnestown.” Perhaps it’s intended as a joke.

Turning right and leaving the Trail behind, you drive through mangrove swamp and finally cross the Barron River on a low bridge. The river isn’t more than twenty feet across, if that much; it was once called the Allen River, after the area’s first settler, but Barron Collier renamed it with his customary humility.

‘River’ is a bit of a misnomer anyway, as the Barron is mostly tidal. The Tamiami Trail is paralleled for most of its length east of Naples by a dirty brown canal that looks almost exactly like the Barron River. The Barron is even connected by canal to Halfway Creek—and the canal is in places wider than the river itself. One can be forgiven for confusing canals for rivers, as canals crisscross the entire Everglades and Big Cypress, relics of our attempts to drain and control the swamps.





Long before the first canal was cut through the swamp or the first levee was built around Lake Okeechobee, long before Napoleon Broward and his map, the water was running downhill. Lake Okeechobee, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the United States, has for eons acted like a sponge, absorbing rainwater from much of the Florida Peninsula, then releasing that water to drain slowly as a giant sheet through a southerly arc, fifty miles and more across in some places, entering Florida Bay along the southwest coast of the state. At the eastern edge of that arc a low coral ridge built up, and in the late 19th Century Henry Flagler built his Florida East Coast Railway along that coral ridge. The sliver of Florida left east of that ridge is where Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami were developed.

To the west of the ridge was the unreconstructed wilderness, at least for many years. Agriculture and other development started creeping in from the east, but to the far west, on the Gulf Coast, only a handful of mostly former military outposts developed at all. It was this egregious oversight that Barron Collier set out to fix.

Deep in the mangroves along the southern edge of the state lies Chokoloskee Bay (natives pronounce it “Chuck-a-luss-kee”), a body of water so shallow that hurricanes have been known to literally blow all of the water out of the bay. The bay lies between the 10,000 islands and what passes for the mainland, though the “land” part is under water half the time as well. In the middle of this narrow bay is Chokoloskee Island, earlier known as Big Island. Three rivers feed into the bay, the Turner, Barron, and Halfway Creek. The island and all three river mouths supported substantial Calusa Indian settlement, and, after the Calusa disappeared, remained empty until after the Civil War. In the late 1860s south Florida was as much a new frontier as the West, and some of the hardier pioneers and fugitives made their way south to the Chokoloskee Bay.

Hard as it is to believe from modern photographs, five settlements developed around the bay, all of them based on agriculture. Sugar cane, tomatoes, bananas, guavas, cabbage, and numerous other cash crops were raised, though the Big Island and the settlement at the mouth of the Turner River were the most successful. High tides frequently swamped the lower lying areas, leaving the soil inundated with salt and hence worthless. Lack of fresh water meant rainwater for irrigation and personal use was collected in cisterns made of sand and crushed seashells.

Chokoloskee island is unique in the area, for here the land rises as much as 20 feet above sea level. This is positively mountainous in the Everglades, and as such the island was almost never under water. Artesian wells brought fresh water to the settlers, and by the 1880s there was a significant settlement there with a school, church, and post office.

At the mouth of the Barron river a fellow named William Smith Allen built a home and farmed winter vegetables, especially tomatoes, which are moderately salt-tolerant; across the river another family did the same. In the late 1880’s Allen sold his holdings, over 800 acres (much of it under water), to George W. Storter. Storter cleared and graded out some of the land in the holding and gradually encouraged a few more families to settle down. By 1893 Storter applied for a post office; he originally wanted the name Chokoloskee, after the bay, but as the post office on the island already had that name, he settled on Everglade. Storter’s home became the focal point of the community, and visitors from across Florida often came to stay at the Storter home to spend a few days fishing or hunting the area.





The Storter home, like most every significant building that’s ever been built in the Chokoloskee Bay area, burned down. But it burned only in 1969; before then, it had formed the nucleus of the Rod & Gun Club. The Club got its start from those visitors to Storter’s home back in the 1890’s—Storter was forced to add to his home several times to accommodate the guests. Changes in the town’s status and leadership never affected the club’s popularity.

Nowadays the Rod & Gun hosts what passes for a fine dining restaurant in the area, in a 1920’s-era lodge that was the only part of the complex to survive the 1969 fire. The food is excellent, the service casual; the wide screened porch is a perfect place for dinner. Guests come in very casual dress. The Rod & Gun also has rooms to let, 17 of them, one of several hotels in the city. Yet in a town that lives and dies by tourist dollars, the Rod & Gun is one of the larger accommodations; the town has less than 150 rooms available, fewer than a single resort hotel on nearby Marco Island. This only enhances the open and unpopulated feeling of the town—and you get the feeling the locals like it that way. So do plenty of the tourists.





Though it, unlike the settlements at Turner River and Halfway Creek, survived the 1909 and 1910 hurricanes that salted most of the ground in the area, Everglade remained a remote outpost (with a population under 150) until 1922, when Barron Collier bought the entire townsite. He dug a channel in the Barron River, laid the extra fill on the townsite and graded it, laid out a series of streets, and made plans to build the place up. It’s been said he at one time hoped Everglades—he added the ‘s’ in 1923—would become the Miami of the west coast. Maybe he did, maybe not. If he did he was more delusional than his business success would indicate.

In 1923 Everglades became the seat of the new Collier County. Collier built a hotel, laundry, and county courthouse, and the town soon boasted a variety of businesses. In 1924 the Atlantic Coast Line railroad built a spur into the town. Later that same year Collier laid rails down Broadway, the main east-west road, and had a streetcar shipped in. The streetcar ran a total of five blocks, but it put Everglades firmly in the rank of up-and-coming towns. The old Storter house remained at the west end of Broadway overlooking the river, and became the Everglades Rod & Gun Club; Collier, who’d made his money in advertising, built up a legend around the club and before long had guests including leading writers, industrialists, politicians, and world leaders.

Work on the Tamiami trail continued and the town might have had a bright future but for the 1926 hurricane. The hurricane inundated most of the land around Chokoloskee Bay, rising to the second floor of most buildings in Everglades. Some parts of Chokoloskee Island remained dry, but the island wasn’t even connected to the mainland and did not serve as a viable alternative to Everglades. The city was rebuilt, but the shine was off. The streetcar was shipped of to a more accommodating location.

The Trail opened in 1928 to great fanfare, but it in reality did little to boost Everglades’ fortunes. Though the city’s population climbed as high as 630 before the end of the decade, much of the land remained undeveloped. Large-scale agriculture disappeared and the fishing industry—the only one remaining of any significance—was not sufficient to sustain a larger city.

By the end of the 1920s there were calls from some prominent residents of Florida’s east coast to preserve the Everglades, making further development in the Everglades City area unlikely. By 1934 activists had succeeded in persuading Congress to authorize the creation of a new National Park in the area. Developers—and most residents—opposed the idea of a park, and the situation languished until 1947, when Marjorie Stoneman Douglas published River of Grass, her natural history of the Everglades. Thus mobilized, supporters succeeded in setting the original boundaries of the park, which was dedicated later that year. President Truman came down to Everglades City to formally dedicate the park, and stayed at the Rod & Gun. It was the last notable event in the history of the town.





Few visible reminders of that era exist any longer. The Rod & Gun is still around, of course. The old Everglades Bank building still stands in its original location, facing west where ships would dock on the Barron River; nowadays it’s hard to imagine why the bank would face that direction and it took me some time to figure it out. The old county courthouse still stands, though Hurricane Wilma in 2005 put four feet of water in the first floor and the building is now vacant, awaiting rehab. A dormitory that housed workers in the 1920’s now serve as part of the Ivey House Lodge, where I stayed. And the old railroad depot is now a restaurant.

There is also the old town laundry, now the Everglades History Museum. The museum is staffed by volunteers and, though small, provides an interesting look at the history of this incongruous little town (one of the handouts at tourist stops around town is a handbill-sized item entitled “Why is there a city here?” Everglades City may be the only place in the country willing to ask such a question). The museum staffers are nice people and more than willing to carry on a conversation at length if you care to spend the time—topics like the health of the Florida panther population (always a concern), active oil drilling in the Everglades (though not in the confines of the park), and whether we’re planning to invade Iran (consensus among the five people in the museum that afternoon: yes. The reality is: no).

I had read this about Everglades City before I booked my trip down there—it’s a friendly place. Locals are more than willing to have a chat with you and will even offer you a ride someplace if you need it. The small airstrip at the south edge of town is one of the most popular small airports in Florida, and every lodge and restaurant in town will send someone around to pick you up if you fly in there and want a ride into town—just place a phone call. The Rod & Gun owners put up much of the funding for the airstrip and are more than willing to pick you up, give you a room, and cook up your catch for dinner before you fly home.

This is in contrast to a good number of small towns I’ve been through in my travels, even very pleasant towns. A lot of small towns in the South are inhabited by people who are more than willing to say hello and put on a smile, but don’t want to get any further involved with you than that. Everglades City is not like that. At various times, in addition to my hour-long chat at the museum, I inserted myself into conversations in the ice cream shop, the city hall, the Rod & Gun, the airport (not a surprise, really; FBO operators are always ready to talk), the Chokoloskee post office, and flirted shamelessly with the waitress at the Seafood Depot restaurant. At no point did I feel like I was intruding.

But then there was Plantation Key.

I rode out there Friday morning, just looking for something to do. It had been my goal to ride on every street in town, and I managed to do so (it is a small place, after all). One of the roads led over a bridge and through the mangrove to what is listed on my road map as a “trailer park” (DeLorme’s atlases are very forthcoming), in an area called Plantation Key. The trailer park has some canals and backs up on Halfway Creek.

I had previously been impressed with the quality of housing in Everglades City. There are a number of older homes, some in disrepair, but it’s a quaint and studied sort of disrepair, almost as if the owners of the homes come back from time to time to cut the grass and tidy up so the place will look nice as it falls apart.

Plantation Key reminded me that even the nicest towns have poor people working in them. In Naples the poor people can all be shoved off in an out-of-the-way suburban area you’ll never see. Everglades City is so remote that the poor people have to live somewhere, and they live out at Plantation Key.

Not that the place is horrible; by world standards it's very nice. Several of the homes are nicely kept, but the majority are not. Some are quite awful, too awful to live in, frankly. Only a handful are up on stilts, which surprised me; Plantation Key is if anything lower than Everglades City itself. A heavy rain floods the streets.

Perhaps a quarter of the homes were for sale. Some had signs advertising “motivated seller,” proof that the housing boom has gone bust, at least in Everglades City. One of the places had a tube with information sheets rolled up inside. I stopped and took one.

This was one of the more unpleasant homes. It was a single-wide trailer, probably twenty years old, with small windows that weren’t square in their frames. The middle of the roof sagged just slightly. The wheels had been cut off the bottom and the whole trailer was jacked up on six steel beams; the sides of trailer sagged dangerously between the beams. The whole was probably seven feet in the air, with a rickety looking staircase on the backside to get in. The trailer sat on a lot perhaps 60x80 feet. It was occupied.

The going rate for this slice of heaven? $349,000.

I about choked on my breakfast. The property wasn’t worth $349 grand. The home only detracted from the potential value. These sellers were not yet “motivated.” I’d argue they must have been motivated by something, perhaps insanity, to price the place that high.

I would have taken a picture but the owner was about and I didn’t want to photograph his squalor with permission. He didn’t look the type to grant it. Like most of his neighbors, he was of uncertain race, probably a mix of Seminole and Latin American. Most of the lower-wage workers in the restaurants and hotels in town were of this uncertain heritage. Still, at least he owned his home—owned an expensive home, at that. If he manages to sell the thing at the asking price he can move his family to a low cost area and buy a real house and still send his children to a state college. The American dream is definitely alive.

Farther along I ran into another charming fellow, white this time. He was sitting on a wood porch tacked onto his wilted-cabbage colored single-wide. He had a Busch Light in one hand and was polishing a gun. His mangy mixed-breed dog was chained to a gumbo-limbo tree in the front yard. He stared me down as I rode past.

On my way back by him, he called out to me. “Lookin’ for something?”
This was not the same charming tone the residents in town used.
“Nope, just out for a ride.”
“Why’d you come out here?”
“Just looking around.”
“Ain’t nothing to see out here.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Then I stopped. I didn’t actually want to engage this guy in conversation.
“Don’t really got any reason to be here, do you?”
I didn’t have a response to that. I decided to leave the comment and its speaker and rode away without saying anything.
“Fuckin’ pogue,” he said as I rode off.

I don’t know what a ‘pogue’ is. Or if I spelled it right. Presumably not anything charitable.

If you go to Everglades City, stay in the city and don’t go out to Plantation Key.

In past decades, Everglades City was a haven for drug smugglers and fugitives because of its isolation. Though this kind of activity has been much reduced through good county policing and increased NPS law enforcement presence, it’s entirely possible the town still sees more than its share of dirty deeds. For all I know this guy was up to no good and didn’t like the idea of outsiders possibly finding out. Or, he could just have been a mean drunk.





In 1959, the last Atlantic Coast Line train left the Everglades City depot. They started pulling up the tracks the very next day. In 1960 Hurricane Donna swept through the area, inundating the town and flooding the county courthouse. The county seat moved up to Naples in 1962, to be nearer the center of population and on higher ground. Everglades City—and the village on Chokoloskee Island—got down to the business of rotting away in the humid air.

Tourism related to the Everglades National Park kept the town from disappearing into the swamp permanently, but the place hardly thrived. Weeds grew up in the roads. The old depot fell into disrepair before being rescued for gustatory activities. The bank closed down (it’s now a B&B and day spa). Hurricane Donna in had flattened several of the older buildings. Fires over the years have took down most of the remaining landmarks, leaving only the handful I mentioned earlier. The Rod & Gun continued to host dignitaries—Richard Nixon was a frequent visitor—but little else went on.

Still, by the 1980’s the place was making a bit of a comeback. The population has grown consistently since then, though land prices are outrageous and there is still much empty ground. The fishing industry has made a comeback, and numerous boats dock along the Barron River. Along the northern edge of the city are at least six or seven fish processing operations, all quite small. The city’s fleet takes in a sizeable catch of shrimp, grouper, and stone crab—most of the state’s stone crab catch comes from the waters near Everglades City. But the thing that stands out about the town is its openness.

Words cannot adequately describe the town’s emptiness, nor can pictures convey it. There are 20-some blocks and over 800 acres, which house perhaps 500 residents. Some blocks are entirely empty; many more have but two or three homes on them. Where land sits empty, it is a flat featureless field. Someone comes along to mow the grass (I saw two men mowing a half-acre lot with weedwhackers). This emphasizes the sparseness of settlement and makes the place feel at least twice as big as it is.

Everglades City is simply a quiet, isolated town. Its only industries are hospitality and fishing—and most of the fishing catch is consumed locally. There are no large hotels, no resorts or condominiums, no golf courses. At 2400 feet, the local landing strip can handle only the smallest light aircraft.





I stayed at the Ivey House Lodge (Ivey House also maintains a Bed & Breakfast and an “inn” at the same location). The Lodge was built in the 1920s to house the workers who laid the Atlantic Coast Line’s tracks and paved the first few roads, and is now the least expensive place in town. I was attracted by the price and the free hot breakfast—though this isn’t the usual B&B type of fare, but buffet-style instead. The 14 rooms in the Lodge share two bathrooms.

Being accustomed to spending months at a time in a tent where the nearest bathroom or shower was 40 yards away and was shared with several hundred other people, I thought this sounded almost paradisiacal. It is not, however, what most American tourists are looking for in a hotel—so I should not have been surprised to find that almost every other guest in the Lodge with me, all four nights I was there, was foreign. The few other Americans who stayed along the hallway were college students stopping through on Spring Break.

Because of this, it took me a few days to realize that most of the tourists in town were foreign, not just the ones at my hotel. This did surprise me. I’m not saying every tourist was foreign, but easily half of the ones I saw were. Perhaps most of the American tourists were out deep in the glades camping at chickees and eating beef jerky and dried apricots. I did run into a number of people who planned on doing just that for two or three nights; many of these people were in their fifties and up. Still, the contingent of foreign tourists was a surprise—though whether it shows that we don’t appreciate our national parks, or whether it was just a busy week for out-of-towners I can’t say.





I had planned my trip quite specifically to take advantage of four opportunities offered at the National Park, two bike rides and two guided paddling trips. I missed the first bike ride because of equipment malfunctions (actually, it was user error; I left a small but key bike part behind home, no doubt lying on the ground in my parking lot having rolled off the top of the car, where I’m sure I put it for what seemed a good reason at the time) and spent the morning driving to and returning from Naples. This is the first thing about isolated towns: they are isolated. It’s a 15-mile drive from town before you reach the first thing that could reasonably be called civilization, and another ten before you reach that part of Naples that resembles every other part of America, with Wal-Mart and drug stores and strip malls (strip malls with bike shops in them).

Everglades City has a small grocery and two convenience stores, but otherwise has no significant services. I bought a Miller Lite in one of the convenience stores, and found it to be the usual convenience store with the usual convenience store people.

Not to knock the Circle K; the folks in line to buy lottery tickets and beer were plenty real. The same people are buying lottery tickets and beer at Circle Ks and Kangaroos and Kwik Stops all over America every evening at the same time. I decided to buy a lottery ticket, to fit in. I didn’t win anything. While waiting in line several of the customers and the clerk had a conversation about whether the money really went to support education. One of the customers mentioned that he’d feel worse about playing if he knew where the money really went.

Friday afternoon out of curiosity, I dropped by the grocery. They had little that wasn’t already available at the Circle K, a few vegetables and a better selection of boxed and canned food, some breakfast cereals and milk by the gallon instead of the quart. Some frozen chicken, but if you want a steak you either eat at the Rod & Gun or go shopping at Naples.

Naples, I was told, was in fact much more expensive than Miami and it was worth taking the longer drive—a hundred dollars might buy you seven bags of groceries there, vice only four at Naples. Naples is now considered the richest metro area in the state, leading even Palm Beach. Everglades City, technically a part of the Naples metro, gets to deal with the price inflation such wealth brings.





Still, in a growing metro area, in a remote town where peace and quiet are the only sure bets, you’d expect some construction. This is America, after all; we can’t let a paradise go unmolested. And sure enough, there is some construction going on. A collection of three-story condominiums are being built, about 12 of them total. They had two-car garages and apparently all the amenities you expect from new condo construction. I had the feeling they would be marketed to people to commute to Naples, rather than to work in Everglades City.

Given housing prices in the area I assume no one will be able to afford to work locally and buy a new condo. The sticker shock from the horrible trailer in Plantation Key was bad enough, but while riding around Friday night I picked up a flyer for another home, a 2400 square foot beauty on a double lot, on stilts, with a hot tub and screened lanai. This was an inland lot, two blocks from the water. And it was selling for $407 per square foot.

Think about that. That’s more than twice the value of my home, a condo in downtown Tampa. Downtown Tampa. Blocks from the new Trump Tower where places are selling for over $2 million. The home had vinyl siding, for God’s sake; no home with vinyl siding should be selling for a million dollars. And with as much open land as exists in the city, it’s just hard to understand.

There was a second construction project in town, a bit more surreal. This was advertised as a resort, complete with a sand-bottom pool, a marina for your yacht, and other amenities of the high life (no golf course, though). The entrance was by the airport. I noticed the first time I’d driven by that there were weeds growing up around the cinder-block guard shack, and the place looked dead.

It was dead. I don’t know exactly what killed it, but the roofing struts on one of the buildings had collapsed and no effort made to set them right. I suspect they collapsed during Wilma. The whole site had the feeling of having been abandoned for several months. The dock had partially fallen into the river. On one of the buildings, someone had spray-painted “Hard Hat Aera,” then crossed it out and corrected the spelling with “Arae.” This was also crossed out.

But it was a nice place to sit and watch the sunset. If nothing else, the abandoned construction project has given the townspeople that much; I was not the only person there, as an older couple were walking their dog and two kids were riding bikes around the grounds.





Friday night I had planned to go on a moonlight paddle with the park, but there was a 15-20 knot wind blowing in off the bay at 5:00, and the trip was cancelled. With that breeze you wouldn’t get across the bay before you’d have to turn around to make it back by nine. This was somewhat disappointing, as I’d been looking forward to this as the most exciting event of the trip. Since I’d missed Thursday’s bike ride as well, I was batting .000 at this point. Fortunately I’d passed a fairly pleasant day, Plantation Key notwithstanding.

Earlier in the day I’d gone out to Chokoloskee. This is not an incorporated town, but settlement here predates settlement at Everglades City. It was once the larger of the two towns—the first to have a post office, a store, a school, or a church. But it remained isolated, cut off from the mainland.

Hope had arrived in the form of the road link to the Tamiami Trail, but that road stopped at Everglades. Chokoloskee’s residents had pushed for construction to continue to the island, but Collier saw no profit in it and the state couldn’t justify spending the money for the 200 or so residents on the island.

Chokoloskee remained isolated until 1956. That year the road finally crossed the bay, though by that time many residents had left. The school had consolidated with the all-grades school in Everglades, and students were picked up in a county-owned School Boat every day to get to classes. The boat is still around, most recently having been used by the Everglades City mayor in a procession.

I’d ridden the three miles over to Chokoloskee the day before, but had not been impressed. Much of the island is given over to two large RV parks. There are some vaguely Polynesian-looking condos on the north side of the island just as you come in from the mainland. One huge RV park is to the left; the other is farther back on the western side of the island. There is the post office, a store, a church, a restaurant. There’s a museum in the historic Smallwood Store at the southern end of the island, but I didn’t go inside. There are numerous private homes, many of the trailers, several others in serious disrepair. And there are three enormous mansions, one three stories tall and probably with 6000+ square feet under roof. Given the price of the single-wide and the stilt home, I can only imagine what the appraisal on that home is.

There’s also an abandoned hotel, the old kind they used to build along the U.S. highways with a dozen or so rooms stretched out in a single story L-shaped building around a parking lot. The parking lot was gone. In the sloping front lawn were trucks to a full-sized railcar. There were more wheel trucks elsewhere on the hotel property, and another two sets at the Smallwood store site.

There was never a railroad on Chokoloskee. Why were these here? Who went to the trouble of carting them over there? Were the Chokoloskites trying to build a streetcar to compete with Everglades? This is the Chokoloskee equivalent of Stonehenge.





Almost from my first day in town I thought there was potential here for an artists colony of some sort. Of course with land prices what they are there’s no way that could happen. But the town seems to be perfect for such a thing—lots of open land that could become artists’ bungalows, a ready tourist infrastructure, and a clear need for something for people to do. Many artists like to work with some amount of seclusion, and the town has that in spades. The Everglades themselves are gorgeous and certainly could inspire anyone’s muse. The local population is fairly young and mostly bored, and a coffee-house/art gallery/restaurant that stayed open late would probably bring in a local crowd as much as the tourist set. It all seems so perfect.

Everglades City would work for this. Chokoloskee is another matter. The RV parks were inhabited by the RV people, mostly older folks with little interest in seeing an artists’ colony or in late-night poetry readings at coffee shops. The island was actually quite densely settled, in stark contrast to Everglades City. And yet here was the place I’d been envisioning. It’s called JT’s Island Grill and Gallery. On Fridays and Saturdays a man in at least his late 50s parks a Prius a couple blocks down the main road in Everglades City and dances around like all his joints have become disconnected, holding a sign for JT’s.

The building itself, right across the street from the smaller western RV Park on Chokoloskee, is painted in funky south Florida colors and houses a gallery of local art and kitsch, plus books, T-shirts, and other standard tourist paraphernalia. The restaurant serves organic whole foods and vegetarian meals, fresh salads and a variety of meals not found anywhere else in the area (most seafood in Everglades City restaurants is fried, though most places will broil if you ask and the Rod & Gun also does grilled and blackened), and is staffed by an energetic German man and two or three twenty-something leftists.

JT’s is a requisite sort of establishment for any artists’ colony and the food is excellent, perhaps the best in town. I got the feeling they were struggling. A handpainted sign out front indicated that the building and business were for sale, though it was hard to tell how seriously they meant it.

Still, with housing going for $400+ per square foot, this is a dream that will never come to pass. Everglades City is likely to remain half-empty.





Saturday I had two events planned, and surprisingly both worked out. In the morning I met at the ranger station for a guided paddle through the 10,000 islands.

Most of the 10,000 islands are little more than mangroves, often with no dry land whatsoever and frequently surrounded by oyster beds. As one mangrove island tends to look exactly like another, this is not the place to try out your navigation skills. Stories abound of people getting lost in the mangroves and not coming out for days or longer. This is why you go with a guide.

All the other paddlers on the trip were in rented canoes. I own one of the fastest kayaks available commercially at a reasonable price. Consequently it seemed I had only to paddle four strokes to be a quarter mile ahead of the rest of the group. The trip across Chokoloskee Bay to the islands thus went slowly—but it was enjoyable nonetheless. There were dolphins to watch, and airplanes in the pattern for the airstrip.

We took a brief break before paddling around and through the islands, each one more flat and mangrovey than the last. We took a break to watch an osprey catching fish, then struck out for Sand Fly Pass and Sand Fly Island.

Sand Fly Island, despite its inauspicious name, is the only one of the 10,000 islands apart from Chokoloskee to ever support human habitation. The Calusa built shell mounds on this island to control the tidal flow and ease their fishing. The island is perhaps four acres in size and three or four feet above sea level.

Once the Calusa left, American settlers reached the place and set up camp. The island supported one or two families at the most, usually only one, and did so from about 1880 until the 1930s.

You cannot imagine it from the pictures, but this island was once heavily cultivated in tomatoes. The mangroves and buttonwoods were cleared, and only a handful of gumbo-limbo trees dotted the landscape amid rows of tomatoes. The fields are overgrown now—and there aren’t any wild tomatoes on the island (which is disappointing; I’d hoped there would be some survivors)—and the only sign of habitation is an old cistern, some blocks that once supported the house, and an artesian well. The well was dug by either the state or the Collier company in the 1920’s (accounts vary), and although it is quite deep the water it produces is still just a touch salty. This a flowing well and you can taste the water. Once you do, you’ll understand why even after the well was dug the families continued to get their drinking water from the cistern. By the 1940’s the island had been abandoned.





After showering off the salt and taking a quick nap I headed down the Tamiami Trail toward Miami. About halfway between there and Everglades City is the Shark Valley visitor’s center of the national park. This stretch of road has a real “river of grass” feel that the earlier stretch from Naples lacked. Every few miles a green highway sign says “Indian Village,” and there will be a little cluster of homes and thatched-roof buildings on one side of the road or the other, always with several enormous pickup trucks outside and lots of “No Trespassing” signs.

Just before you get to Shark Valley you cross through the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, which looks mostly like a Levittown with a four-story glass building that I think houses a casino. It looks very out of place in the middle of the Everglades, and offers conflicting emotions. Is that level of development appropriate in the middle of the River of Grass? Probably not. But what are we supposed to tell the Miccosukee? Move to Oklahoma? Or resume the pastoral nomadic existence of your ancestors?

Incidentally, don’t speed through the reservation. The Miccosukee are very serious about their 45 mph speed limit and enforce it aggressively.






The Shark Valley Moonlight Bike Hike, offered on the Friday and Saturday nights nearest the full moon every month from October through April, is the must-do event at Everglades National Park. If you see nothing else and do nothing else at this park, do this.

The main attraction of Shark Valley is a 15-mile loop trail from the visitors center to an observation tower in the middle of the swamp. You are free to drive this trail during park hours, or take one of the park service’s trams and hear the ranger’s discussion of the view during the trip. You may also hike or bike the trail, and you can do this any time day or night whether the park is open or not. Park out along the highway and ride to your heart’s content.

Joining the sponsored Moonlight Bike Hike gives you several benefits. You can leave your car parked in the parking lot instead of along the highway. You get a free glow stick. And the program is designed to take you to the observation tower as great flocks of egrets, herons, and other birds are arriving in the area to roost for the night. Going in spring or fall means you see migratory and resident birds both.

The ranger who gave the talk Saturday night said the goal of the program was to provide visitors with an emotional connection to the park. If you ride down the loop road in that golden hour before sunset and arrive at the tower as the birds are flying to roost, thousands of them, then watch the sun set and the moon come up and ride back in the light of a (nearly) full moon, and fail to feel any emotional connection to the park, then you are a hopeless cause.






This trip was a little different from last spring’s National Park trip. And while I hope to take another trip to another park next year (perhaps this time with friends along), I’d like to come back to the Everglades. Being a Floridian I’ve always felt a certain connection to the park, even before the moonlight bike ride. Everglades National Park was the first park created solely to preserve a unique habitat and biodiversity; earlier parks preserved natural and scenic wonders. This makes the Everglades special, but much more than that, the Everglades are themselves special. There is no other habitat like it on Earth, and no other geology like it, either.


The legacy of Everglades drainage continues to put the future of the river and its wildlife in doubt. The diking of Lake Okeechobee and building of canals put an end to flooding and made large-scale agriculture possible in the northern section of the glades, but it also irreparably damaged the ecosystem. Water levels in the glades are now managed by the South Florida Water Management District rather than seasonal variation in rainfall, and where once there was a river 50 miles wide and six inches deep there is now a prairie with dry areas and wet areas, and some channels as much as four to six feet deep that present significant obstacles to deer, panthers, and other megafauna in the park.

The state of Florida and the federal government have produced a plan for Everglades restoration, but the jury is out not just on whether the plan will work, but whether it will even be implemented. It may be too late make much difference, and the reality is that without eliminating the agricultural zones south of Lake Okeechobee and opening the lake up to more natural water flow the glades will never really be restored and will continue to decline. Miami-Dade county keeps pushing its own urban development boundary deeper into the glades, and the needs of the region’s six million citizens (a number expected to double by 2020 and double again by 2050, though that last number seems highly suspect) for drinking water and the like will continue to pressure the Everglades and their champions.

The park ranger who gave the talk at Shark Valley pointed out that we aren’t trying to restore the Everglades solely for the birds and animals, cute as they may be. The truth is that the glades are a vital part of the Floridian and Biscayne aquifer system, and if they are destroyed the water in those aquifers will cease being replenished. Indeed, if Everglades restoration fails entirely, south Florida could well become “the only desert in the world that gets 70 inches of rain a year,” as governor Reuben Askew said during the muck fires of the 1970s. Indeed, without the Everglades to cleanse and replenish the aquifers, future residents of Miami might take a page from Sand Fly Island’s history and construct cisterns to collect rainwater for their needs.

It would be a shame if governor Askew’s vision came true in the name of short-term gain for developers and cane growers. Still, the battle is hardly over. Visit the Everglades while you still can.