Acts of Nature

pinging off the reflected blue of the sky and for a moment the scene was like a still life painting, the colors too perfect, the lack of movement too unreal. Sprigs of marsh grass spiked up from the sheet of glass before us and I actually watched the small ripple of wake from our bow move out for ten yards ahead of us until its offensive disruption was absorbed. For a full two minutes, neither of us spoke, maybe afraid to break the spell.
    “Humans don’t belong here, Max,” Sherry whispered from the bow and I let the statement stand until a breeze rose from the west and rustled the grass and nipped at the water and life moved back in. I knew that once you got over the immense feeling of the place you could focus down and see the scarlet skimmers working the water surface and if you closely inspected the sawgrass you’d find the apple snails working the stalks. Then up in the sky we watched the dark body of a low- flying snail kite swoop in from the south and utter a low grunt as she went into one of the grass outcroppings.
    “All we would do is fill it in and build suburbs on it,” I said, and it may have been the last environmental statement I would make throughout the trip.
    Spotting an outcropping of tall grass that cast a slab of shade on the water, we paddled over and broke out some lunch. While we ate I tried to point out some of the vegetation and insects that lived here and we counted three alligators that showed themselves in the distance, exposing only their snouts and the humped orbs of their eyes as they cruised across some open water. They made no attempt to come our way, which seemed to ease Sherry’s distress a bit. Then I made the mistake of bringing up the story of rangers from Everglades National Park who last month came upon the aftermath of a fight between a thirteen-foot-long Burmese python and a six-foot gator out here. The snake, probably released by some owner because it was getting too damn big, had tried to swallow the gator and ended up bursting open at its sides after it had the reptile midway down.
    Sherry stopped and put half of her sandwich down and stared at me.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    She just shook her head and looked out in the direction of our last gator sighting and after a long silent treatment asked: “Didn’t you say this boat is thirteen feet long?”
    By three in the afternoon I was sweating. We’d moved well west and the sun was high and there was no shade. Sherry had peeled off her long-sleeved shirt and was paddling in one of her simple runner’s jerseys. She’d done her hair in a ponytail that was sticking out through the hole in the back of a baseball hat. I kept the broad-brimmed, plantation-style straw hat on and had gone bare-chested but still built a sheen of sweat on every exposed inch of skin.
    We were working toward a gathering of pigeon plum and strangler fig trees that had started off looking like low bushes an hour ago but had now grown to a thirty-foot-tall hammock. Jeff Snow used the outcropping as a landmark to take a clear shot north to his fishing camp. Although the sawgrass and other vegetation was always changing and shifting, this season the GPS setting from this small island ran through a fairly open-water trail due north to his place and would be easy canoeing. He had explained to me, as I now did to Sherry, that inside the thick hammock we now approached was a cabin that had been built by one of the early Gladesmen. The owner had brought in most of the trees as small saplings with the idea of someday providing himself with shade. He had been more prescient than he could have imagined. Now you could not even see the structure inside and the root systems had eventually trapped enough moving soil to establish a foundation and the seeds the first trees dropped had proliferated.
    “Snow says he’s only seen an airboat slip into the place one time in all the trips he’s taken out here. Usually folks are pretty friendly, swapping fish stories and helping each other out,” I recounted to Sherry. “But he says he’s never met anyone from the place.”
    As we slid by some one hundred yards from the northern edge of the small island of old growth trees, the place looked deep green going almost black in the interior. An entrance stream actually looked cold to me and not in a way that beckoned one out of the heat. I kept paddling.
    “Shame to be out here and not take advantage of the view,” Sherry said as we passed. I checked the reading on