Ken Faver organizes a canoe/kayak trip for a few of his friends.
Ken is the guy grinning with his arm around Mrs. Phred. I'm the one on the left with the big hat and "Chicken, Alaska" t-shirt.
The trip takes about two hours and we all have lunch at the take out point.
The river is close to Tampa but there is no development along this stretch. We see lots of birds, turtles and big gator.s
Back in High School we took a sanctioned day off our senior year and tubed down the river with cases of illegitimately obtained beer. That would have been the year 1960.
It's a warm day in February, approaching 80 F or around 26 C, so some big gators are snoozing on the banks.
When the air is warm and the water is cool they come out to nap.
FDR made this area a wildlife refuge by a stroke of the pen in 1937. I'm still waiting for Obama to take up his righteous mantle and create some things like that. I wonder if he has a Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, Cordell Hull or Bernard Baruch to whisper in his ear? What's that? Geithner? Gates? Hillary? Oh Dear!
"3am At The Border Of The Marsh From Okefenokee" is a track on Tangerine Dream's 1976 album Stratosfear.
I loved the album and liked the swamp even more. You might have missed the Krautrock movement which came out of West Berlin in the early 70s. That's OK...I did too.
A big gator approaches us as we stop for lunch ten miles into the swamp. I throw a crust of bread which lands between his eyes.
I've never suspected that gators are very good at problem solving. This one crosses his eyes and keeps turning and snapping, but can't get at the bread crust on his nose.
Here, Mrs. Phred says goodbye to Gordie, Mark and Darwin. They asked her to play doubles with them early Easter morning.
There is one theory that the squadron of lost Navy fighter pilots associated with the Bermuda Triangle may have actually ended up here in the swamp. It's a huge place, about 700 square miles, mostly impassible on foot or by boat.
The green orbs of glowing swamp gas float around everywhere here. They are very annoying and seem to follow us wherever we go.
We spot a red cockaded woodpecker just off the trail pounding on a log. It's an endangered species. You have to wonder about the niche it has selected for itself....looking for bugs by beating apart logs with its nose. The pictures are all blurry. This is the best of the lot. We also spot two skunk apes (both a little over nine feet tall). They smell like a cross between ground pepper and an open sewer. The pictures don't turn out.
Okefenokee Swamp is possibly the most unloved and least visited National Recreation Area.
This is the alien abduction capital of America. The theory is that the lack of roads and people make it a good place to grab the occasional human or cow for closer observation and/or mutilation.
We'll rent a boat today and penetrate the mysterious Okefenokee a little more deeply.
His brain is squirmin' like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If ya give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
At age 66 I seem to live more and more within a memory palace and think about the past.
My first memory is of a snake sticking its head out of a hole in the front yard of my grandmother's house in New York. It was probably the Spring of 1945. I also remember attacking my father with a toy hoe after he came back from Germany in early 1946 and tried to assert his authority. I was astounded with the ease with which he disarmed me. I have lots of other childhood memories. I hope they don't just slip away.
Mom's memory is gone at age 86. She knows who I am so far, but that may not last long.
I remember the Junior High School hazing that we had to endure. They painted us with lipstick on our way to class in the seventh grade. Then there was the bully Billy Mitchell. He had been held back so many times that he towered over everyone else. Also there was Provo, a very muscular bully who was later fried in the electric chair for murder. I had to fight them both, knowing I was doomed to lose...but A man has to do what a man has to do.
It was double session Junior High school for me so I was left alone in the morning. My brother and sister were in regular sessions in grade school and both Mom and Pop were working. Sometimes I made donuts with a can of Crisco. I remember doing push ups to try to develop my strength and playing 45 RPM records very loud like Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire".
The girl next door was really hot and she often sat with me in a tree and tried to make me interested in her, while not really being interested in me. I often wonder what she looks like now at age 66. At 13 she was special. There's a certain memorable fire in being 13 and getting your first fondling and French kiss from a pretty girl. Maybe I won't forget.
Anyway, most of my friends are dead already. Some at 19, some at 21, some in airplane crashes, some at 35 and others at 53. I sometimes think that my life is somehow charmed and I'm immune from death from lung cancer or other causes. If I died somehow, the universe would immediately cease to exist.
Last summer I took Mrs. Phred to Jurarez, sister city of El Paso. There are 3,000 murders a year there related to drugs and we are the only Americans crossing the border that day. We bought some wallets and had lunch. Last night Mrs. Phred saw a TV program about the out of control Juarez murders and chastised me for taking her there. I explain that by standing tall with a steely-eyed glint it protects her from cowardly miscreants
We lived on a Tampa street where the city kept dumping oyster shells to keep the street passable. The Mosquito control people kept coming by with the Fog trucks and we all ran behind them breathing in the poison. At least we didn't get Yellow Fever or Malaria.
We had some really good food today. For lunch I had a shrimp ettoufee and then, for dinner, fried eggplant with a crab topping. Yesterday we split a “Po-Boy” sandwich with fried oysters, tomatoes, cheese and sautéed onions. The Cajun Creole cooking here is a real culinary experience.
We went on a swamp tour today with Brian. As we pull out from the dock he does a 360 and says. “That was the tour You’ all. Did you enjoy it?”
We see a lot of alligators. One was trying to digest a big garfish. Brian suggests that the gator may need to hide the fish under a log until it becomes more digestible.
Brian’s boat holds 15 people and draws about ten inches of water. It’s very quiet and bumps over many sunken logs.
The cypress trees can live 1500 years. The oldest one in this swamp is about 600 years old. They logged these trees in the late 1800s, but the new growth cypress is lovely. Some of the old logs were “sinkers” that went to the bottom. Cypress never rots in water and the big old “sinkers” now sell for as much as $10,000 a tree, when recovered.
Brian is very knowledgeable about the local birds, turtles, vegetation and gators. He has a Cajun recipe for almost everything we see on the tour.
Henry Ford used Spanish moss to stuff his automobile seats in the 1920s. The moss harbors biting insects and led to one of the first automobile recalls.
We see some unusual nesting birds, gators and turtles. They pulled out a 14 foot gator last year that had been wandering inland and eating dogs. The food supply for gators is good with fish, turtles, ducks and the occasional dog.
Myakka River State Park, Florida – 27 November, 2006
We spent the night in the park. I woke up at 1:30 AM. There are no cell broadband signals here so I finished the new Stephen King “Cell” paperback.
We drove to Myakka Lake before dawn and set up the camera and tripod. Hundreds or thousands of raptors flock back and forth, landing in the treetops. I think they are rare ospreys until daylight breaks and I realize they are turkey vultures.
In the 1960’s I worked at Florida State University with Dr. Pate, who had an Army grant contract to study turkey vultures. She would pay “good ole boys” $75 for a turkey vulture. Her study involved injecting increasing amounts of botulism into the vultures until they developed what she called “limberneck” and died.
There are many tiny Florida deer, hogs and gators here. It’s nice that they have preserved a few square miles of Florida. Most of the state is now condos, parking lots and interstate highways.
The State park has rental canoes and bicycles as well as airboat “barges” capable of carrying 30 tourists.
When I was young we lived on a lake where the gators ate our dogs and ducks. Rattlesnakes crawled into the yard. We gathered burlap bags of oysters from Tampa Bay. The wild places were just next door.
