"We rented our houseboat at a place called Flamingo, in Everglades National Park, waaaaay down on the bottom of Florida. At that point, Florida has totally stopped pretending to be a normal United State such as Pennsylvania, the kind of state that has been constructed in compliance with the Official State Building Code on a solid foundation of dirt and rocks. Lower Florida looks like solid ground in places, but it's actually a gigantic floating clotted mass of decaying vegetation and shed snakeskins, drifting on a sea of aromatic water and muck. You get the feeling that you need to keep moving, because if you stand still too long, you'll sink into the clot until the only thing sticking up is your head, which a bird will come along and build a nest on.
There's wildlife everywhere down there. Maybe too much of it. For example, when we arrived at the Flamingo marina, we drove into a parking lot, which sloped down gently to a boat-launching ramp into the water, and lying on this ramp, watching us, were three major alligators. They were lined up parallel to each other, halfway out of the water, as though a National Park Service employee had been in the middle of launching them, but then he stopped for some reason, such as they ate him.
That evening, we dropped anchor maybe 100 yards from a mangrove island, many miles from any sign of civilization. We stood on the deck, and, as the sun set, we experienced a sensation that I will never forget: the sensation of being landed on by every mosquito in the Western Hemisphere. There were so many of them that they needed Air Traffic Control mosquitoes to give directions (''OK, No. 86,742,038, you have clearance to land on his left elbow, but make it quick, because he's almost out of blood'')."Thanks for that Dave.
No comments:
Post a Comment