The River of Grass

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2010 MIAMI, FL – This morning we walked the perimeter of the Miami Everglades Campground, while we waited for the RV freezer to defrost! We’re keeping a close eye on it to ensure we get the best performance out of it, especially in this warm and humid weather. The campground is really nice, with lots of grassy areas and shady trees. It looks like it used to be a KOA Kampground, complete with little cabins, and there are no permanent park models here. It’s situated in an area where there are fertile farms with mango trees and vegetables, and huge nurseries, growing palm trees, ferns and landscaping plants. We really like it. After lunch, we headed back west along Highway 41 to the Shark Valley Visitor Center for a guided tour of the Everglades. There are lots of airboat companies along that route, but we were more interested in a slow tram ride with a guide who could explain the flora and fauna. That’s exactly what we got! We first got an explanation of how the Everglades came to be by Lydia, a park ranger with muddy hands, who talked about the limestone base that was established millions of years ago, and about oceans that flooded and receded from the southern tip, building up the waterway and its ecosystems – including bogs of peat. Lydia dug up a small container of peat to show us, and didn’t take the time to wash her hands before she came to her presentation. She told us how encroaching civilization changed the flow of water across the expanse of land that had become the Everglades, and the efforts that are being made to amend some of that. One project is raising the roadbed of Highway 41 to restore the flow of water under it. There’s a mile-long stretch of construction near Miami that we passed on our way out, which is the first of five similar stretches in the works. Next, it was Bob’s turn to take us out – about 40 of us in a covered two-car trolley – through some of the terrain for a two-hour guided tour. Bob was entertaining and highly knowledgeable about the grasses, the plants, the fish, the bugs, the birds, and, of course, the alligators that we passed along the way. All of these were plentiful, and our driver, Rachel, was sharp-eyed, slowing and stopping as soon as something interesting came into view. One of the first things Bob wanted to do was amend the popular notion of what the Everglades are. So many who haven’t visited (and we were among them) think it’s a jungly swamp with spooky, dripping trees that hide the sun. In reality, it looks more like a prairie of grasses, blowing in the wind under a huge bright sky. Of course, at the base of the grass is water – acres and acres of it, flowing a quarter of a mile a day from the north into the Gulf of Mexico. In that environment, an entire food chain survives, from tiny insects burrowing into mossy plants, up to the heavily-armoured alligator, all adapted to live in a place that’s drenched in rain half the year, and scorched dry by the sun for the other half. Bob told us about the male gators’ romantic bellowing, in mating season, that draws the female for a slow, elaborate ritual that ends with her laying some 40 eggs in a nest she constructs on her own. We were fascinated from start to finish!