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Even bumping into gators can be fun in the Okefenokee

By Laura Hambleton, Globe Correspondent, 09/08/02

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FARGO, Ga. — The perfect backdrop for any childhood nightmare is a swamp. Murky water teeming with people-eating alligators, the air thick with mosquitoes, tree branches draped with hissing snakes, and spiders crawling on every decaying log.

These images were most certainly in the mind of my 10-year-old daughter as we slid our green canoe into the tea-stained waters of the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia on a clear April day. As we propelled ourselves down a curvy brook with a few short strokes of the paddles, we went neither swiftly nor straight.

We frequently brushed against the banks. With each wrong turn, my daughter's fears escalated.

"We are heading straight into alligators, Mom," she screamed, and we were.

Smack into the snout of a six-foot sleeping gator.

But that's exactly why we came, to buck up against our worst fears.

And paddle backward like hell.

Exploring a swamp is the thrill of the primeval: coming close to alligators, those most prehistoric of creatures, even bumping into one, but knowing full well that unless we fell into the water, we would escape.

We've been sloshing through swamps for the last decade, mostly in the Everglades in Florida. This spring the "land of the trembling earth" — the Okefenokee — just north of the Florida line, beckoned my husband, my three children, and me. We needed a comparison. We spent four days in the Okefenokee and four days in Big Cypress National Preserve, near Everglades City.

The beauty of a swamp is subtle. From a car window it can look like an undistinguished, endless prairie with a bird here and there. Once we stepped outside, though, and rambled down a hiking trail or maneuvered a canoe through murky water, we discovered a rich range of plant and animal life.

In the early years of our explorations, we went at the height of summer. Mosquitoes feasted on us. We know better now. Autumn until the middle of spring is the most luscious time to visit a Southern swamp. We also have learned that these vast wetlands are fragile and increasingly encroached upon by development and mining interests. It's all the more reason to consider swamps jewels in disguise, or as my children do, enchanted fairylands with darkness lurking around the bend.

We drove into the Stephen C. Foster State Park, an 82-acre pocket in the western side of the nearly 400,000-acre Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and Wilderness Area. Thousands of swallowtail butterflies danced around our car through a classic Georgian forest of slash, loblolly, and longleaf pines. This fanciful entrance had to end. "Park is within a wildlife refuge. Alligators, bears, etc. roam the park," the information with our reservations said. Rangers stress that visitors should not feed or harass any of the wildlife — 10,000 to 12,000 alligators, more than 700 black bears.

Nor were we disappointed in Florida's Big Cypress swamp. After counting 150 alligators, we stopped keeping track. We never did see a bear.

In early spring, the temperatures in the Okefenokee are in the 70s and 80s. Alligators are waking up after a sluggish winter. We set up camp and then walked to the park headquarters to get out into alligator habitat.

Renting a canoe or motorboat is easy. Both cost $8 for two hours and $20 for the day. Settled into his canoe, our 5-year-old son was almost immediately on his feet, shouting, "Alligator, Mom!" The gator was hiding in the lily pads close by; it had no interest in us. Too bad my daughter and I nearly clipped its snout. It slowly submerged and we paddled past.

Sitting at the headwaters of the Suwannee and St. Mary rivers, the Okefenokee is laced with 121 miles of canals. The Suwannee Canal Co. dredged these more than 100 years ago in an attempt to drain the swamp for farming. When that failed, another company bought the land and logged about 431 million feet of cypress lumber by 1927. Ten years later, the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge was established to save what was left of the swamp.

Boating these canals is the best way to see the swamp. Hardier canoeists can load up with equipment and paddle from camping platform to platform. Throughout the refuge there are 15 trails, and eight to 12 miles between platforms.

Our first day of canoeing gave us a taste. The next day we were ready to take on a motorboat and ply the far reaches of the swamp. We felt pretty confident, as we had once roamed the southern regions of the Everglades near Flamingo in a motorboat.

But boating experiences aren't necessarily transferable.

A worker at the boat yard taught us the basics: Turn the rudder right to go left and left to go right. Push in the choke to start the engine.

Yeah, yeah, we knew. Or thought we did.

We putt-putted off, toward Billy's Island. We meandered down crooked canals past water lilies, alligators, and cypress trees draped with Spanish moss. The trees had gnarled knees and trunks shaped like triangles. The colors were a patchwork of grays and greens. The land of spongy peat was mysterious.

"This is God's garden," said Jim Burkhart, a park ranger in the refuge since 1978. "I will never be closer to God than I am here."

God's garden isn't always kind to neophytes. Trouble started in the narrow passageways. Jerking the rudder too far to the right, we swerved into the left bank and a tangle of vegetation. We righted ourselves enough to do it again on the other side, pushing our way into a grove of trees with a snake coiled around one branch. My husband was convinced it was poisonous; later we learned it was just a common rat snake.

We bumped our way up and down, trying to look cool and in control whenever another motorboat zipped by, until finally our engine conked out. No amount of help from fellow boaters could revive it; we had clogged it with greenery.

The two-mile paddle back tested our definition of family fortitude. "Row! Row!" I shouted as my children and I tried to paddle as one to propel this flat-bottomed hulk and counter my husband's brisker strokes.

If the Okefenokee provided the backdrop for our fairy tale trip, the Big Cypress National Preserve provided the characters.

The name Big Cypress doesn't refer to the size of the trees — any large ones were logged out years ago — but to the amount of land. The preserve is 729,000 acres, which was set aside as a kidney of sorts for the Everglades National Park, a buffer to keep water clean and uncontaminated. The preserve, unlike a national or state park, allows hunting, mining, and off-road vehicles.

But similar to the Everglades and the Okefenokee, larger-than-life characters are as much a part of the fabric of the place as the wading birds and alligators.

As often as we can, we visit our friends Sally and Duffie Matson at their hunting-lodge-like home on a dirt road off the Tamiami Trail in the preserve. They have five daughters, ages 2 to 13, born and bred in Miami but weaned in the swamp: sharpshooters, snake handlers, anglers, birders, and expert canoeists.

My 7-year-old son tried to show off his canoeing skills honed in the Okefenokee, only to witness the Matsons' 8-year-old deftly put the canoe in the pond in front of the house, jump in, and paddle away to an island. My son was left on the bank, wide-eyed.

Nightly, at dusk, we piled into one of Duffie's collection of World War II trucks for a drive down a dirt road alongside watery prairies of saw grass and clusters of palms, live oaks, and cypress. It's easier to see wading birds in the prairies, and the Matson girls pointed out every gallinule, anhinga, hawk, alligator — as well as a cottonmouth snake on the road.

Emery, their 10-year-old, knows the names of ferns, palm trees, and flowers. On an extraordinary hike through the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, a sliver of preserved land 20 miles long and three to five miles wide, Emery knew more plants than any of us. The ferns here grow to seven feet tall. And the strand contains the tallest native royal palms and largest concentration of orchids in the country.

Back at a shooting range near their house, 2-year-old Hunter Matson, wearing a pink dress, her hair wild in the wind, closed one eye and hit a soda can 50 yards away. My 5-year-old, a reluctant target shooter until then, swaggered from the car, claimed his weapon, and with the help of my husband shot at the can.

To our surprise, he hit his mark. It was a kind of storybook ending to a swamp slosh where we skirted snakes, matched the marksmanship of the Matson girls, and used our paddles to shove off from alligators. We knew it was time to leave after a bull's-eye.

Laura Hambleton is a freelance writer who lives in Chevy Chase, Md.