The Flight of the Iguana (34 page)

The Okefenokee is a relatively young ecological system, the wild vegetal growth and the buildup of peat (dead and decaying plant material) having begun about seven thousand years ago. The swamp holds a very large volume of water that is very gently in motion. Prevented from percolating downward by impermeable clays underneath, and slowed by the sponge-like peat and the network of living vegetation, the swamp water flows down an incline that varies by only ten feet of vertical drop from the
northeastern edge of the swamp to the southwestern edge. It is drained away by two separate rivers headed toward two separate seas: the St. Marys River, emptying from the swamp's southeastern corner into the Atlantic, and the Suwanee River, meandering off from the western border of the swamp to the Gulf of Mexico. Within the swamp the divide between St. Marys flow and Suwanee flow is by no means clear cut, though a much larger share of the total finds its way into the Suwanee. The current of the Okefenokee itself moves in broad, shallow sheets more than in narrow channels, especially during times of high water, passing over and under and through the vast, filtering mass of vegetation and peat. For a number of complicated reasons related to ground-water seepage and the configurations of islands and troughs, as well as to the general incline, this current proceeds in a roughly circular pattern: a great mandala of dark water, moving around counterclockwise.

The submerged vegetation and peat strain out organic impurities, while also turning the water black with tannic acid. It's the same process that gives color to certain flatland jungle streams, like the Zabalo of eastern Ecuador or, most notably, the Rio Negro of Brazil. Plant life is burgeoning and dying within the drainage much faster than it can decay, much faster than the drowsy current can carry its products of decomposition away.

The result is an acidic blackwater tea, ideal medium for culturing cypress trees, carnivorous plants, alligators. On a bright day that blackwater tea casts back reflections of a complete swamp world seen upside down, as on a surface of polished and oiled ebony. And it's as potable, I learned eventually, as it is beautiful.

•   •   •

We set off from a point called Kingfisher Landing, the Red Ace and I paddling one canoe, Crawfish standing in the stern of the other, easing his boat along with what seemed to be effortless strokes of a twelve-foot bamboo pole. For an hour or three we moved down long tunnel-like corridors through thick brush, riding
the current in a channel that was often no deeper than a bathtub and no wider than a sidewalk. In some places the brush arched overhead into a darkening canopy. In others it closed so tightly ahead that we had to spread branches by hand as we went through. Always the water beneath us was that lovely, inscrutable black. Crawfish led one detour to what he said was a typical gator hole—a small, muddy pond not far off our channel that had been scooped out of the peat by force of reptilian will. It was deeper than we could measure, more turbid than the channel, but apparently unoccupied. Crawfish probed his pole down into the center and made some strange muted yelping sounds into the end, like a drunken jazzman struggling with a clogged trumpet.

“That's it. Our guide has flipped. He thinks he's a sea lion,” said the Red Ace. “We're doomed.”

“Sometimes that brings them up,” said Crawfish.

“Do we want them up?”

The first of the rains began, which seemed inconvenient only until we stopped trying to stay dry and surrendered ourselves to the cooling effect. A drenching in rainwater seemed preferable to a drenching in sweat, after all, and the temperature had plummeted right into the eighties. Then the sun returned, bringing with it the deerflies. Slim chartreuse vines groped outward like green snakes from the overhanging brush, slender stalks reaching for light, for support, for the brush on the opposite side of the channel, for a passing canoeist, striving to get hold and tighten down, to knit closed on daylight and motion. The vines were called smilax, Crawfish said. It was his swamp and he knew the names of everything. He said the buds and the terminal leaves of the vines were sweet and tasty.

“You can eat them.”

“You
can eat them,” said the Red Ace.

My hands had started to swell from the deerfly bites. A curious new experience for me, who could not even spell anaphylactic shock. I remembered the tale Crawfish told about a city dude he
was once required to evacuate out of the Okefenokee by moonlight. This fellow had coated his whole body with layer upon layer of the fiercest insect repellent; then, when the afternoon heat got serious, started dunking his terry-cloth hat and letting the cool runnels trickle down his face. Soon he had one eye full of
N-diethyl-meta-toluamide,
but the doctors just managed to save it. A little parable, Crawfish seemed to imply, about where insect repellent would get you.

We made camp an hour before dark at Maul Hammock Lake, a modest patch of open water clotted over only partly by water lilies and another big-leafed floating plant that Crawfish called spatterdock. Our appointed campsite was the Maul Hammock platform, a bare structure of planks and pilings just big enough for three tents and an Optimus stove and a billion mosquitoes. It looked like a little lakeside dock, the kind you would scamper down to from the summer cabin and use as a diving board if you were a kid—except here in the Okefenokee there was no real lake to dive into (unless you craved to pack your nostrils and ears full of peat), nor adjacent dry land on any side. The platform, at day's end, was it. Step off it, try to stride out into that tangle of floating shrubbery that passed for the landward side, and you would sink to your waist. Lie down in your sleeping bag on some comfortable patch of sphagnum moss, and you were liable to wake up drowned.

“Who would like wine?” said Crawfish.

“Yes, yes, yes!”

It was a pert but amusing Chablis in a large plastic jug bearing a label that read ANTIVENIN.

That night I thought and dreamed intermittently about missing digits. Thanks to the mysterious toxic deerflies of the Okefenokee, my hand had continued swelling and I had waited too long to transfer my wedding ring; now the ring was bound on at the base of a finger that looked bloated and pale as a boiled bratwurst. I did not want to see this particular ring, which means
a lot to me, taken off with a Swiss Army hacksaw. But I had also begun wondering, more than idly, which would give first—the gold band or the blood flow to that finger. It put me in mind of a story Crawfish had told about the time he was snakebit and decided against seeing a doctor.

Crawfish, you must first understand, is one of those singular folk born with an incurable affinity toward reptiles. He is a self-taught herpetologist of professional rigor and a passionate admirer of the animals he knows. Every lizard, to him, is a creature of arresting beauty. Every alligator is like an old friend. Every snake is a poem. The particular poem in question here was a small copperhead.

He found it one day on the long woodland drive that led to his house. Captured it easily and, holding the snake in his left hand, resumed driving with his right. He had handled thousands of poisonous snakes over the years, including a pygmy rattler that lived in his bedroom when he was a kid. But this time, according to Crawfish, he got careless. Climbing out of the vehicle, he relaxed his grip slightly and the snake jerked back, nailing one fang into Crawfish's middle finger. “It was like a hot poker jammed in there,” he told me. “Worst pain I've ever felt.”

He turned down the horse-serum antivenin because a human body sometimes reacts drastically to that stuff; a friend of his once in the same situation had nearly died from it. He didn't even phone a doctor. “I like to let my body try and heal itself,” Crawfish told me in the most unassuming and matter-of-fact manner; he would have dismissed the whole subject if I hadn't prodded him for details. “Heal itself
if possible,”
he added. “Within reason.” On this occasion his arm swelled hugely, all the way up to the shoulder, and stayed swelled for three weeks. Evidently he judged that to be within reason. His finger puffed out bigger than he had imagined a finger could puff. Then it turned black. “I thought it would probably just fall off.” But it didn't. After three
months the finger was back to normal, except for the lingering numbness near the tip.

“What happened to the snake?” I asked.

“You mean did he get sick?”

“I mean what did you do to the sucker?”

“Oh, we kept him around as a pet,” said Crawfish. “Just awhile. Then let him go.”

So this was not a man you would wake from sound sleep with squeaky talk of evacuating your fat little finger. By midafternoon the next day, my ring could be quietly moved.

•   •   •

We paddled for several hours through an open area called Sapling Prairie, near the northern edge of the swamp. With clear lines of sight for miles across the horizon, and little chance that a predator can come up by surprise, Sapling Prairie is one of the favorite habitats of the swamp's biggest birds: three species of heron, several kinds of egret, several ibises, and a good population of sandhill cranes, whose loud ratchety calls sounded at three hundred yards like the complaint of a rusty barn hinge broadcast by loudspeaker.

When they say “prairie” in the Okefenokee what they mean is a large shallow marshy pond, a zone bare of trees and bushes but covered almost entirely by grasses and other small foliage such as spatterdock, floating hearts, a couple of species of orchid, the carnivorous sundews and bladderworts. In the prairies, water stands two or three feet deep over a substrate of peat, the current is nearly imperceptible, and the only pathways are those kept open by canoeists and alligators.

Large rafts of peat occasionally rise up from the prairie bottom, lifted by the buoyant force of methane gas, a by-product of anaerobic bacteria at work on the decomposition of the submerged plant muck. Sundews especially seem to favor these risen rafts, colonizing them early and supplementing the marginal diet of available nutrients with insects caught in their own sticky, fistlike
leaves. After the sundews, other small plants and even pine saplings get aboard, stitching out a network of roots, until the raft may become a soft, anchored island.

In the distance across Sapling Prairie, giving a skyline to the flats, are another sort of island-like feature called cypress domes. Cypress is a water-loving hardwood with seeds that require long submersion (as well as a dry interval) before they will germinate, so the clusters of cypress originate without benefit of a raft, sometimes growing right up out of the peat through a layer of standing water. One tree takes hold, dropping seeds, offering some stability of conditions for other recruits, and a colony of cypress expands outward over the marsh, dome-shaped against the sky because the oldest and therefore largest trees are at the center. Eventually, such a stand will become carpeted at the base with a tussocky layer of mosses and peat and brush—almost but not quite like solid ground. The cypress may be joined by black gum trees and maple and several species of bay. Local slang refers to these patches of soggy forest as “houses,” possibly because they provide habitat for a big share of the swamp's mammalian wildlife. But the Okefenokee, with its meager supply of real solid ground, is not nearly so hospitable to mammals as it is to birds and reptiles and amphibians. Most of the mammalian species are small: cotton mouse, gray squirrel, marsh rabbit, raccoon. Flying squirrel. Evening bat. Big-eared bat. Seminole bat. Animals that don't
need
much solid ground.

Swimming and flying are the optimal modes of travel here. Climbing is also an option. Walking is problematic. It's hard to imagine how even a small deer could support its seventy pounds over those tiny hoofs on a platform of floating peat. When a creature as large as a human strides through this terrain, the ground bounces and the tall trees shudder. The name
Okefenokee
itself comes from old Indian words—
ecunnau finocau
—that meant “the trembling earth.”

*   *   *

“Watch out for cottonmouths above in the bushes,” said Crawfish.

“You got it, buddy,” said the Red Ace.

“And be careful when you step over fallen logs.”

We were bushwhacking through the understory of a cypress dome, sunk to our knees in a lush patch of yellow-green sphagnum, clutching at saplings with each step to avoid sinking farther. In the softest places we had to knee-walk, using our shins like snowshoes. The water was warm, the sensation was surprisingly pleasant. Hiking this way, we could cover a mile in about two days. Crawfish was barefoot.

Lichens in four colors were wrapped like gaudy decals on the trunks of loblolly bay trees. There were some amazing shades and configurations of shelf fungi. In the center of the thicket we paused to admire one especially majestic cypress. It was a hundred feet tall, naked and straight along the trunk, its canopy hung with long beards of Spanish moss—very possibly it had been the patriarch of this whole dome. Then we slogged on in a wide loop back toward the boats. Suddenly Crawfish reversed course, backing hastily out from under the limb of a bush.

He was clutching the side of his face and wheezing in pain. By the time I got near him, though, he already seemed calm again. His left eye was beginning to swell shut.

“It's okay. Only a wasp. Yow. Stings pretty good, but what a relief,” he said. “I thought I'd been tagged by a snake.”

“What's the first aid when a cottonmouth bites into your eyeball?”

“I can't imagine.” He looked at me cheerfully with one good eye and one gone slimy and red. “Just don't put a tourniquet on my neck.”

His body would heal itself. Once after a trip in the Ogeechee River drainage, Crawfish had told me, he pulled fifty-two ticks off his body, every one of which had already gotten itself plugged in. Around that time, he suspected, he must certainly have had a
case of tick fever. All the symptoms were there. But his body had healed itself.