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Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Restoration Dreams
Without a Paddle (Cont.)

IT'S A WARM NOVEMBER AFTERNOON when David, Saranne, Steve, and I first step through the saw-grass curtain. We pull off the Tamiami Trail about an hour west of Miami. It's a desolate spot, the kind of place where dead bodies are tossed. Not a very auspicious launching point for our 50-plus-mile voyage.

It's hard to imagine that the boats are going to float, much less squeeze through this brush, since the combination of no rain and impeded flow means there's only a few inches of water. The

Russell and I paddled without any food. Our goal was to find out what the Everglades—and we—were made of. We found out we're made of stomachs. It was fun until the hunger pains and hallucinations set in.

Park Service doesn't promote this area, preferring to funnel tourists down to its overused water trail along the Gulf Coast or the visitor center in Homestead. But I've been that way and don't intend to go there again. My first two excursions to the Everglades, back in 1993, with my wife, and in 1999, with a friend, were canoe rides down the 99-mile Wilderness Waterway, where you sleep on wooden platforms called chickees and either come equipped with food or fend for yourself. On the second trip, my friend Russell and I paddled the route without any food. Our goal was to find out what the Everglades—and we—were made of. We found out we're made of stomachs; it was fun until the hunger pains and hallucinations set in. We ended up begging food off fellow canoeists by the third day. I remember the mangroves beckoning us like evil sirens. Climb in here and end your troubles, they crooned. Twist your leg and fall flat on your face as crabs no bigger than your eyeballs scour your bones.

No, thanks. This time I'll take my chances in the tall grass. "I give the order to proceed," I announce, and David laughs. Saranne and Steve look puzzled, so I have to explain that Hugh Willoughby, a gentleman explorer who crossed the Everglades with a local moonshiner and avian-plume poacher named Ed Brewer in 1897, started his own

Dirty Water: Droplets

Amount of U.S. population that gets its drinking water from rivers and lakes: 66%

1.2 trillion gallons of sewage and polluted storm water are discharged into American waters every year

13,000: number of U.S. beaches closed or under pollution advisories in 2001

40: Percentage of U.S. rivers and lakes unfit for fishing or swimming

Percentage of unfit U.S. estuaries: 44

Sources: PEW Oceans Commission; U.S. EPA; Ocean Conservancy

journey that way—an odd bit of theatrics, given that they were traveling alone. Willoughby wrote an unexpectedly entertaining account of their travails, Across the Everglades, which unveils the place as considerably more than swamp and stands out as an excellent handbook on what not to do when attempting to traverse a great morass. For instance, don't stand up on a slippery deck over a shallow coral reef the day before setting off, because you might fall and slice your nose off and have to sew it back on yourself.

I'm thinking about this as I stand in my canoe. I've never poled one before, and the 12-foot PVC pipes we're using are not ideal. A pole should be light and svelte; mine feels like some plumber forgot to flush it out. I find myself glancing resentfully at Steve, who pushes his streamlined Kevlar canoe along with ease. He notices me struggling. "You gotta go with the flow here," he cautions. "Don't fight it. Less is more. That's what works in the Everglades."

I consider whacking Steve over the head, but we'd be screwed without him. Instead, I jam my pole down hard and cause my body to fly backward, exiting the canoe. As the boat shoots forward, I take the Nestea plunge, and then my pole whacks me. Less is more, except when it comes to good footing.

Floating on my back, I am surrounded by the softest scene, the softest light, the softest water I've ever encountered. Imagine what it was like in the womb, coddled by all that nurturing amniotic fluid. Well, I don't have to. I'm in that pH-neutral oasis, feeling fine. I'm able to pause just long enough—a few seconds, on account of my fear of alligators—to soak it all in. Sunlight swarms through and over the pale-green saw grass, plays along the surface, dives down to the dark, mucky bottom, and spreads back up to engulf our little group. It's as if we're in some century-old sepia-tone photo.

We only go about two miles our first day, but already we've left CERP and all its confusion behind. As the sun sets, Saranne, David, and I stop in a patch of shorter grass, lashing our canoes together and laying plywood boards over them. This platform will be our bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom for the next eight days.

As Saranne and I heat up dinner, Steve pulls out his sleeping bag, sets up a cushion in the stern of his canoe, and goes into a kind of twilight trance state, looking out over the "pond" we're floating on. David, on the other hand, has put on a white two-piece hazmat-type bodysuit and is rigging an oversize mosquito net over the platform to protect the sanctity of our blood. As it turns out, the mosquitoes aren't bad at all.

The river flows imperceptibly, and the water's clearer than Paul Newman's eyes. I want to drink it unfiltered, and almost do, but I'm leery of giardia and dysentery. I drift off to sleep thinking of something else Willoughby said, and feel a little envious.

"The popular impression has always been that the Everglades is a huge swamp, full of malaria and disease germs," he wrote. "I had no hesitation in drinking [the water] whenever the canoe stopped, taking two or three glasses at a time...It agreed with Brewer and myself perfectly; we did not know a sick hour."

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