The Sunny South # 4: Crossing the River of Grass

Today's project was to cross Florida from west to east, driving along the older of the two roads that traverses the width of the Everglades.  

The entire history of America's interaction and interference with the Everglades is a fascinating story with important lessons for environmental protection everywhere.  Going through the whole tale is beyond the scope of this blog, but I have read some accounts that were real eye-openers.

Briefly, the early American settlers in south Florida regarded the Everglades as a gigantic, stagnant, pestilential swamp which would be far better drained and turned into useful agricultural land.  Of course it didn't work out that way, because -- as we now know -- the Everglades, so far from being stagnant, is in reality a gigantic river.  It's often called "the River of Grass," a term originally coined by author Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

The Everglades are actually the natural drainage from Lake Okeechobee in the centre of the peninsula (which in turn collects drainage from the Kissimmee River in the Orlando area to the north).  The lake is itself a remarkable phenomenon, having a vast surface area but an average depth of just 3 metres.  Although the natural drainage is severely disrupted by the dike along the southern edges of the lake (built by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to facilitate swamp drainage), the water still makes its way, by various diversionary routes.  As it gathers all together into its proper place, it forms a vast, shallow sheet of water sliding slowly downhill across a broad shelf of limestone towards the Gulf of Mexico.  The sheetflow (its technical name) moves at an average pace of 0.8 kilometres or 0.5 miles per day.

It's hard to believe, as you drive across on either I-75 ("Alligator Alley") or the older US41 ("the Tamiami Trail" that you're actually crossing a river.  This is what it looks like.

Apart from the clumps of trees, which rise on semi-solid patches of somewhat dry ground (known locally as "hammocks"), all the area you see in these pictures is underlain by the gently-flowing sheet of water.

Needless to say, the two roads crossing the Everglades seriously disrupt this natural flow.  There are numerous bridges and culverts to facilitate passage of water and wildlife, and the eastern end of the Tamiami Trail is being raised, section by section, onto low bridges to further reopen the flow.  The western portion of the road traverses the Big Cypress Swamp, where the dynamics are a little different due to the forests growing there.  But the ongoing flow of the water continues even in Big Cypress.

There are a number of picnic grounds and campgrounds along the Tamiami Trail, and several parking lots at trailheads.  The two main stops for me were both in the first half of the trip.  At Route 29, I turned south a few miles to the small town of Everglades City, originally built as a work camp and port of entry for supplies and workers to build the Tamiami Trail.  It's an unremarkable looking small town which I had visited before.  This time, though, I went further -- right to the end of the road at Chokoloskee on the eponymous island.

Here I visited a unique museum which was originally a general store.  The Smallwood Store was established by Ted Smallwood in 1906 to serve the scattered residents of the Ten Thousand Islands district along the coast.  Every way you look out from the store, you see a view much like this, of mangrove islands with channels threading between them.

The Smallwood Store could only be reached by boat before the causeway to the mainland was built, so the store was built on the coast with boat dock outside for the customers and shippers.  The side facing the water was in fact the main entrance for trade and family use alike.  Since 1990, this old building has served as a museum of the pioneering days on this remote coastal region, with the store containing a treasure trove of authentic tools, merchandise, books, and magazines from days long gone by.  It's a true time capsule of earlier times, and a fascinating diversion from the through road.

Back north on Route 29, and farther east on the Tamiami Trail, there's a visitor centre on the north side of the road.  When this highway was built (it opened in 1928), a canal was blasted right across the Everglades, with the excavation debris used to build the highway along its south bank.  At this visitor centre, there's a boardwalk along the north side of the canal, which allows visitors to look down on the banks and view the alligators which love to bask there in the sun.

In the upper picture, there's a shallow bank extending some distance out under the water.  The last time I came here, the water level was much lower and that whole bank was exposed to the open air.  It provided a great tanning bed for the gators.  The lack of that beach explains why the alligators are now crawling up onto the grass by the fence east of the boardwalk. 

At the time of my first visit, there was a huge old alpha bull gator sunning all by himself at one end of the beach.  The ranger explained to us that all the younger alligators kept away from him for self-protection.  No sign of the big old boy this time, but plenty of others to watch -- including one drifting in the canal with just the top of the head showing.

The road across the River of Grass isn't terribly long -- it would take about 2 hours to cross on the Tamiami Trail from Naples to the outskirts of Miami if you didn't stop -- but it seems far longer because of the endless sameness of the surroundings, and because of the perfect straightness of so much of the road.  Mile after mile unrolls without any sign of a bend, and certainly without any rise or fall in the pavement.  The speed limit is 60 miles per hour on this two-lane highway, yet it can feel as if you are just crawling along.  At last, though, a lone high-rise hotel appears on the horizon (it's a casino) and you realize that you are finally across the river.