"The Lungs of the Planet"

Snow in New Orleans!

It snowed while we were in New Orleans. A big blustery blizzard that buried the city in inches of heavy snow and shut down pretty much every single thing around us. A once in a lifetime historic event. Lucky us. I buried myself in a blanket on the chair in our tiny living room and watched the snow fall through the same windows I had watched sand cranes and egrets pick their way across hot sand dunes just days before. We pick our way across the landscape like those birds, setting up and resetting up in new fields, parking lots, rows, and parks. And the scenery outside is ever-changing. 

I expected the constantly changing view outside of my window. Maybe even anticipated the weirdness of the weather. I did not, however, predict how deeply some of the landscapes would move my heart or how much some of the land of this country would haunt me long after I moved on. Certainly, I was surprised by how deeply I was affected by the bleakness of the Outer Banks. And how delighted I was by the crystal white sands that line the Gulf of Mexico. 

But the most surprising thing was how strongly the Everglades resonated in my soul. I was not prepared to love that swampy hinterland the way that I did. Or to love any part of Florida at all. As we drew near the Georgia/Florida border, I started feeling a vague sense of anxiety and trepidation and was prepared to hate all of it in every way. Because. Florida. 

Going back to Florida brought up some trauma-related stress. We lived in Orlando for much of my childhood. It’s where I graduated high school. I moved to Minnesota not long after graduation. And honestly, I do not have many fond memories of my time in Florida. Most are fraught with stress and a deep sadness for how incredibly messy my life was. How incredibly messy I was. I mean, I had my oldest daughter there, which is one good thing that came out of that state. Nearly every other memory that I dragged out of that state with me when I left hangs heavy in my heart. I hadn’t been back there in more than 20 years and the days leading up to the Florida border and over it were rough.

But let me back up a bit. 

We spent Christmas on a farm surrounded by beautiful live oaks dripping in Spanish moss in Savannah, Georgia. We adventured to Tybee Island, where we had dinner in a beach bar festooned with upside-down Christmas trees. And then, we visited Fort Pulaski National Monument. 

Christmas Eve in Savannah, GA

On Christmas Eve, we had cookies in a field by our campground, where Santa and Mrs. Claus entertained children, and I was grateful my kids weren’t too big to visit Santa yet. I watched them shyly tell the pair what they hoped for Christmas and offered a silent plea to the universe to slow down time and keep them little like this for as long as possible. We put them to bed with promises of Christmas morning cinnamon rolls and happiness. 

That night, we heard gunfire. Rapid shooting, bang bang bang behind our RV park, and within minutes, the road was filled with emergency vehicles. I lay awake all night, wondering if someone was dead. If this had been someone’s last night on earth while I waited for morning light in my RV. 

In the morning, we found one tiny news article announcing two injuries and got a quick apology text from the RV park, and then we were expected to get back to the business of Christmas. It felt...uncanny. 

Luckily, 9-year-olds are fickle creatures who can pivot fast when presents are on offer. 

We opened gifts, just the four of us here in the tiny space we call home. The girls giggled and oohed over each newly opened gift, delighting in tiny miraculous things like being able to ride their bikes in short sleeves on Christmas day. 

The day after Christmas, on the morning of our “move day,” we discovered a slow leak in our tire, and Trav found a nail sticking deep in the treads. We had a tight schedule to keep as we were picking up my sister, Chris. She was flying in to meet us in someone’s backyard in Orlando, courtesy of HipCamp, a sweet program that hooks up RVers with private landowners willing to rent out space for a night or two. We found a fella with a backyard near the airport and reserved space for just one night. We had that short one-night window to grab her and move on down the state to the Everglades. 

Now we had to take our tire to a garage to be fixed. That put us a good two hours behind schedule. But we got the tire repaired (it was a bolt! A whole entire lag bolt!), and we made our way down from Georgia to Florida. 

Traffic was a beast, and we got into our HipCamp site in the dark. It was the first time we had to park in the dark since we started. We spent the better part of the next hour yelling at each other in the dark as we tried repeatedly to park our beast in the small spot allocated to us. When we finally got set up, we opened the door to find our fridge latch had broken, and shit had gone flying everywhere. Food all over. On top of that, books had come flying out of one of the cupboards. It really felt like Florida or our RV, or both were telling me to GET THE EFF OUT. 

I was nearly in tears when my sister’s Uber arrived in the pitch-black to drop her off. 

But it was so good to see her and have someone beside me who understood why my stomach was in knots, who shared the same memories, and who could understand why I wasn’t so thrilled to be back in the state. She doesn’t carry the same trepidation and anxiety that I do, but she gets it. 

Yay! Reunited with my sis, Chris!

We gave her Uber driver a quick tour of our RV. (These kinds of things have become normal. Folks are always so curious about our lifestyle right now. I’m always like, “Sure! Come on in! Look around!” I have no healthy fear of serial killers, I guess. Nor did the Uber driver.) She oohed and ahhed over our crazy house on wheels and then wished us luck, and off she went into the night. 

After that, we popped open beers and toasted to the next two weeks together. I felt comforted. My sister is a safe home; having her with me in Florida was so good. 

The next day, we ventured down to the Everglades. 

I am not sure what you think of when you hear “Everglades,” but I would venture to guess your visions include large swaths of green swamp, alligators, and airboats. That’s what mine were, anyway. I had never been to the Everglades. We didn’t travel around Florida much when we lived there. My vision of that part of Florida was sweeping vistas of swamp grass punctuated by pockets of cypress jungles teeming with mosquitoes and all manner of toothy and poisonous creatures, much like the bayous of Louisiana that I have visited many times. And some of that image was accurate. But I was surprised at how much more there is to the Everglades. 

Robert is Here. I can't overstate the weirdness of this place. A must see.

As we drove through Homestead, Florida, carefully planned unfinished suburban housing estates gave way to broad fields of sugar cane farms, a prison industrial complex, and an insane fever-dream fruit stand/animal farm/smoothie stand/parrot sanctuary called Robert is Here. And then suddenly, we passed the National Park visitor center and plunged into the heart of Everglades National Park. 

Everglades National Park with Flat Livy (Aela's friend).

We headed to our campsite, an hour past civilization, at the southernmost tip of the park by the Gulf in Flamingo, Florida. 

Flamingo was once the home to the Tequesta tribe until sometime in the late 1800s when some intrepid (see also totally looney) settlers decided to tough out the inhospitable environment and colonize the area. 

When one naturalist writer, Leverett White Brownell, visited Flamingo in 1893, he described the village of 38 "shacks" on stilts as infested with fleas and mosquitoes. He claimed to have seen an oil lamp extinguished by a cloud of mosquitoes. He called flea powder the "staff of life" and said the cabins were thickly sooted from smudge pots. 

You can hear those mosquitoes in this picture, can't you?

Why anyone, including the indigenous folks, would make their home here is beyond me. But make it their home, they did. The town grew to 50 families by the early 1900s. This became a sweet spot for moonshiners during prohibition. 

It also was a mecca for hunters who came in response to the latest in ladies' fashion-bird plumage. Or, in some cases, entire birds. You read that correctly. Some women were plopping entire birds on their domes and calling it fashion. Poachers and hunters responded to this craze in kind, culling not only egrets and roseate spoonbills by the thousands, but in killing those birds, they left the nests untended, thereby destroying two generations of birds in one swoop. All because fashion. 

Of course, there was a bit of outcry, and one game warden was assigned to patrol the whole area, Guy Bradley. He and his wife and kids settled in a house on stilts, and he went to work policing the area. Unfortunately, he was killed during a confrontation with plume hunters. Finally, after outrage over his murder, legislation was passed outlawing plume hunting. 

Of course, poachers gonna poach. It was actually women who were largely responsible for ending the fashion craze and further helping to establish the park. Women started an anti-plumage campaign and began working to protect the Everglades. And it was the members of the women’s social clubs in Florida, like May Mann Jennings,  that spearheaded the creation of Florida’s first state park, Royal Palm State Park, making the Everglades a tourist destination for the first time.

And then along came Minneapolis’s own Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. Per the National Park Service: 

She was a journalist for the Miami Herald and dedicated herself to conversations about feminism, racial justice, and conservation. Douglas was particularly devoted to the Florida Everglades, which she affectionately called “her river.” She fiercely defended it long before scientists recognized the negative effects of agricultural and real estate development on the intricate ecosystem.

In 1947, Douglas wrote The Everglades: River of Grass. Her book described the immense importance and beauty of the natural ecosystems of south Florida and the need for protection from human interference. That same year, Everglades National Park was established. Douglas and her passionate, unwavering advocacy for Everglades conservation played a significant role in establishing the park. 

Yay, women!

Anyway, today, there is no real town of "Flamingo." (Also-sidenote, the flamingos the town was named after haven't been seen in decades thanks to that plume trade and habitat destruction. Although there was a rumor of a flock of flamingos spotted just a few weeks before we arrived. One can only hope they are returning.)

The residents of Flamingo were relocated shortly after the creation of Everglades National Park. The town dwindled to a restaurant and cafe, a gas station, a marina, a store, a gift shop, a campground, and a few houses for park rangers. In 1959, the Flamingo Lodge opened, and some cabins were built.

Sadly, most of these facilities were taken out by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. The cabins and lodge were razed. The marina and store reopened. The gas station remains closed to this day. Just last year, a brand new restaurant and hotel opened. The visitor center, aptly named the Guy Bradley Visitor Center after the murdered game warden, has been reopened as well. 

A Gumbo Limbo Tree. Also known as "The Tourist Tree" for it's peeling red bark.

On our first drive down there, I didn’t know any of this of course. I just knew we were driving into the middle of nowhere for a week. I watched out the window as the landscape shifted from settled suburban sprawl to wild, untamed expanses of loblolly pines, laurel oak, gumbo limbo trees (lovingly nicknamed tourist trees for their red peeling bark), and wide open seas of grass punctuated by hardwood hammocks. I marveled at how casually I could look out and catch a great blue heron or a snowy egret just chilling in the marsh grass. 

Oh, that lovely sea of grass.

In her book, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, Rebecca Renner captures the Everglades perfectly: 

For those who have never been to the Everglades, it may be easy to imagine that wide expanse as a turgid mire of foul water, dangerous creatures, humidity, and mosquitoes. There are definitely mosquitoes, but the real glades are neither turgid nor foul. The Everglades is a living thing. It filters our drinking water. Before it sinks back into the aquifer, the water flows over the lime rock, watering the plants, carrying their pods and polyps; a symphony of microorganisms connects one living thing to another, and the result is what seems to me like the glades exhaling. Anyone who has ever been to the glades and stopped for a moment to just take in their surroundings and breathe knows that they are surrounded by a vibrant cosmos of life. The Everglades isn’t a foul backwater or a hostile wasteland. Most of it isn’t even a swamp. It is part of the lungs of our planet.

That’s what I was gazing at through the truck window. The lungs of our planet. And they were breathing life right into me. I could feel my apprehensions about being back in Florida melt away as I watched the glades pass by. 

Sunset over our site at Flamingo Campground.

We made it to our campground, and I was delightfully surprised by how lovely it was. I had gathered from the website that we would be partially boondocking with only electric hookups (no water or sewer), and we would be far away from any kind of civilization. I had been expecting some backwater parking lot just big enough for a few campers.

Instead, it offered wide avenues and sprawling lots right down the road from a brand-new restaurant with a bartender that makes killer Boody Marys (and a sign that boasted 24-hour bar service! We did not test to see if this was true), a new hotel and a marina with a store that sold ice cream and booze! What luck. This place was sweet. We set up, popped open another drink, and settled in to listen to the night sounds. 

Cheers!

We ventured down to the marina the next day to see what was what. 

Now, I don’t know anyone on this planet who is more in love with manatees than my sister Chris. Like In. Love. She adopted a manatee named Merlin when she was 16. That was 34 years ago. She is obsessed. She has a ton of manatee tchotchkes lurking around her home, and she is a regular donor to the Save the Manatee org. We had already planned a trip up to Blue Spring State Park for the following week, where Chris first saw manatees and fell in love with them. 

But honestly, I don’t think either of us ever associated manatees with the Everglades. So when we were walking along at the marina, she saw a park ranger with a manatee bone, and of course, she stopped to take a look. 

Meanwhile, Trav and I noticed a crowd gathering at the water's edge. I looked out into the water and saw actual manatees swimming around! There they were, those silly floaty potatoes right in the bay! I started waving like a maniac to get her attention without scaring the manatees away. 

When she realized why I was hopping around like an idiot, she threw the bone aside and started pushing people, objects, and children aside to get to the end of the dock. The couple next to me watched her with their mouths hanging open. I turned to them and shrugged. “She really loves manatees.” 

For sure, she was the only adult lying on her belly on the dock.  I was kind of terrified she would fall in. But I have rarely seen her so happy. What a treasure to see her and the girls watch the manatees swimming around. 

This might be the moment I fell in love with the Everglades. 

Or it might be when we sat in on a talk about Women in the Everglades given by a National Park volunteer, perched on benches in an amphitheater as the sun set over the water behind her. 

Or it might be when we went hiking through the Gumbo Limbo forests, stopping to marvel at the peeling bark. 

Or when we saw the crocodiles perched on the marina walls, unbothered by the kayakers pushing off into the canal right beside them. 

Or when we biked to the marina beside the quiet lapping water. 

Or maybe it was during our boat ride through the backcountry where we drifted beneath the mangrove trees dripping in Spanish moss and bromeliads and beside buttonwood trees wrapped in strangler figs as we looked for alligator slides. 

Maybe all of those moments.

But I can tell you that by the end of the week, I was hooked. The Everglades had gotten under my skin, and all the trauma-bound tension had melted away. 

We sat in the evenings, batting away mosquitoes and watching the sunset over the palm trees, and I felt myself breathing slow and deep. 

Of course, it was hot. And humid and sticky. Even in winter. And you can’t underestimate the mosquitoes. They own that place, for sure. And we had a wicked storm blow through that brought millions of flying insects on its heels that struck our window in such thick swarms I thought it was still raining. 

And then at one point I saw a young man emerge from the swampy water beneath a mangrove forest in nothing but swim trunks and a snorkel mask and I was so dumbfounded that anyone would snorkel in the swamp like that,  I couldn’t even speak. I tried to get out, “That guy is snorkeling!” But all that came out was, “What the..that guy..I…scuba doobin’!” Scuba Doobin’ quickly became a catchphrase that week. 

But the point is, as much as I admired and loved that wilderness, I still harbor a healthy fear of the fact that it is indeed WILD. 

And maybe that’s why I love it so much. It’s why I love the Outer Banks. The wildness of it all. The fact that Mother Nature refuses to be tamed.

And trust me, people have tried to tame the Everglades. And they have done untold damage to it in the process. They have mown down hardwood hammocks and dredged marshlands, and cut perfectly straight canals to divert the waterways to try to convert that wild land to farmland. Humans have always tried to conquer and destroy nature and tame it for their own benefit.

But just like the ocean is swallowing the homes on the Outer Banks, the Everglades persist. It is still beautifully wild. 

We took day trips to the Keys and Biscayne National Park. Day trips that filled us all with the joy and wonder of exploration. After each of those trips, we would make the hours-long trek back into the glades to our spot, and I would fall asleep to the beautiful wild sounds of the park.

I was super sad to leave the Everglades. Like a deep still sadness that hung in my heart. 

But we headed out after a week and drove to Orlando. And I was so delighted to see my daughter, Sarah, and our grandkids, Charlotte, Vivienne, and Olivia, and our son-in-law, Alex. We did the whole Disney chaos for a week. It was awesome. Every day was a treasure. I had never been a true “tourist” at Disney, and we did it up right--mouse ears and all. We even stayed at the Disney RV park. Each day was a gift. I have never had so much fun with my family. 

And seeing my daughter was healing. I have never been away from her for so long in our lives, and it has been so achingly hard. I cried when I finally was able to hug her tight. 

But I needed the wild of the Everglades first. I genuinely believe that if I had driven straight into the chaos of Orlando with that anxious trauma-stress in my heart, I would not have been in the right mind to just bask in the absolute joy that is Disney with my family. I needed to go deep into the wilderness and sit with that stress first. I needed the Everglades, the lungs of the planet, to breathe calm stillness into me first.

I will always be grateful to the Everglades for giving me that.