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The federal land office once called the Everglades a pestilential swamp, a forbidding morass too sickly and sterile to merit survey, better abandoned to the Indians and runaway slaves who sought sanctuary in its watery fastness. Bleak and lifeless at first glance, it does not yield up its riches easily. Unlike the awesome pastel sculpture of the Grand Canyon, the Everglades is elusive, subtle, a search for treasure in stark and hostile flatlands, a challenge to look and listen, to be ready with the special sense at the back of one's neck. In the dry winter months, especially, the Everglades seems a ravaged wasteland. The land is a mosaic of dried and cracked mats of algae. Blackened cypress stumps, rising from the water like pillaged columns in an ancient temple, stand in mute testimony to some fire of a long-ago spring. The Calusa Indians used to make dugouts from the rot resistant cypress wood, carved with sharp v-shaped prows to cut through the sharp, otherwise impenetrable sawgrass. This serrated sawgrass conceals the Everglades' nature. What appears a sedge prairie is really a shallow, marshy river, only a few inches deep in the dry season of the winter months, a giant tray of water, flowing over a tilting limestone plateau, drifting southward from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. At Long Pine Key, trails lead from the sawgrass marsh into pine woods rooted in riddled pinnacles of limestone—underwater in summer, now dry and white beneath the winter sun. The tall slender pine trees stand with limbs outstretched, lonely supplicants that could not survive without periodic fires to destroy competing vegetation. Fallen limbs are covered with ferns, which during the dry season retract like claws. The Florida panther lives here, but is seldom seen. What one may glimpse at this time of year is a raccoon scrambling past gray swags of spanish moss, or a white tailed deer belly deep in marshy plants.


38   MARQUEE   MARCH 1984