Home Afloat

Perhaps wistful that his domain lacked the majestic vistas of Yosemite or Yellowstone, the first superintendent of Everglades National Park once observed: "To put it crudely, there is nothing in the Everglades that will make Johnnie Q. Public suck his breath."

He was wrong. Indeed, we had just arrived at the park and were heading to the slip that held our houseboat when we spotted the log-like reptile gliding our way across the still waters of the marina. We walked along the seawall watching it-three of us, all native Floridians, and all rather blasé about the approach of yet another alligator. But as this critter drew closer we noticed that its snout was a bit more pointed, its hide a bit darker, its teeth more... well, there were a whole lot of teeth.

"It's a crocodile!" blurted my brother, Danny. He edged away from the seawall, followed by his 12-year-old son, Curt, and me. The crocodile eyed us for a long moment, then sank like a submarine and glub-glubbed away. Only then did I stop sucking my breath.

Yes, welcome to the Everglades. While it is not the tourist-poster vision of Florida-no white-sand beaches, no dreamy blue seas-it is how most of South Florida looked when the Everglades was a 100-mile-long sheath of water, some 60 miles wide, that stretched all the way from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Then along came Hamilton Disston, a Philadelphia industrialist, who in 1881 bought four million acres of swampland, dug canals to drain it, and ignited the first Florida land boom. The wholesale dredging and filling, along with the intrusions of big sugar companies, subsequently launched the state's environmental movement, led by the indefatigable Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whose 1947 book, The Everglades: River of Grass, coincided with the creation of Everglades National Park.

"There are no other Everglades in the world," Douglas wrote. "They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them."

The first national park established not for its scenery, but its biology, the Everglades is home to 15 endangered species of animals, including the American crocodile. It's the only place on earth-aside from the U.S. Congress, as President George W. Bush joked when endorsing an Everglades restoration project-where crocodiles and alligators live side by side.

The jumping-off point for our Everglades excursion was Flamingo, an end-of-the-road outpost that sounds a lot more exotic than it really is. Perched on a limestone spine along the north shore of Florida Bay, it consists mostly of the Flamingo Lodge and Marina, a park concessionaire that rents canoes, kayaks, skiffs, and a small fleet of comfortable, well-appointed 40-foot houseboats, including the Grouper, which would be our home for three days and two nights. Since the houseboats are easy to handle and can only achieve a maximum speed of six knots, no license is necessary to operate one. Still, a basic familiarity with navigational charts, provided by the marina, proves handy when negotiating the bafflement of waterways and channels. The houseboats come ready-to-cruise-sheets on the bunk beds, towels for the shower, pots and pans in the galley, propane tanks for the refrigerator, stove and outdoor grill. There's no a.c., but that doesn't discourage would-be Huck Finns who keep the boats booked months in advance. Nor are they deterred by the fact that the screens on the windows provide scant refuge from the Everglades' most pervasive predator-mosquitoes.

"Cover your skin with bug juice," said Ed McGraw, the marina manager, as we set off from the dock. "And pray there's a little wind."

To say that the Everglades are mosquito-infested is like saying the Sahara has sand. The bugs are everywhere. Park service employees wear mosquito-net body suits and the marina store sells T-shirts that say: "I gave blood at Flamingo."

For our late-spring trip, with the weather already hot and the rainy season in full, mosquito-breeding swing, our party of five had stocked aboard enough DEET-based products to cover half of Miami. We puttered along narrow Buttonwood Canal, part of the 99-mile long Wilderness Waterway that runs between Flamingo and Everglades City, bugs buzzing us and swarming around our heads, barely kept at bay by repellent and the Grouper's forward motion.

"If we ever stop this boat, we're dead meat," said Hector Perez, a Miami friend who joined us for the trip.

But as the canal opened onto Coot Bay, a stiff breeze greeted us. So did bottle-nosed dolphins-dozens of them over the course of an hour, large and small, leaping and slicing through the water, drafting the Grouper as we stood on its bow, our whooping and hollering seeming to encourage their playfulness. There were loggerhead turtles, too, which bobbed up to study us as we passed, their ochre shells the size of coffee tables. We took the sightings as good omens. The wind prevailed for the rest of our trip, and we remained relatively mosquito-free.

There's a whole lot of room for getting lost in the Everglades, which occupies a wilderness larger than Delaware within an hour's drive of six million South Florida residents. While the inland reaches of the park typify its river-of-grass image, the portion open to houseboats, along the southwest fringe, is a jigsaw puzzle of mangrove islands and low-slung hammocks lush with gumbo limbo, red cedar and other subtropical hardwoods. Upon reaching broad Whitewater Bay, we jagged west and followed Joe River as it snaked northward. The channel is well marked, and while we never got really-truly lost, we did take several inadvertent detours down dead-end tributaries where snowy egrets speared meals with their beaks and fat mullet schooled in the flats.

By late afternoon we had reached Ponce de Leon Bay, about 25 miles from the Flamingo marina, and the northern boundary for houseboats. We anchored about a mile offshore, reveling in a sunset that seemed to light the Gulf of Mexico afire and, lulled by the lapping of the waves and the gentle rocking of the Grouper, falling asleep long before what otherwise might have been bedtime.

After that, our time aboard the Grouper was a lazy sojourn marked by greet-the-sunrise swims, occasional landfalls to explore tiny islands, languorous meals on deck and kayaking through the mangroves. We spent a great deal of time just cruising around, taking turns at the wheel while we nosed about Little Shark River and the maze of tributaries that feed Ponce de Leon Bay. Near the point of one island, where the outgoing tide rushed to the Gulf, we cast our lines and lucked into a feeding frenzy of mangrove snappers. My nephew, Curt, caught two fat keepers that we filleted, then marinated with key lime juice and olive oil, creating a wondrous ceviche.

When it was time to head back to Flamingo, we swung through Cormorant Pass, then across the girth of Whitewater Bay. Again, the dolphins came out to play. One of them was particularly gregarious, crisscrossing our path, turning on its side to consider us with a big bright eye, smiling its dolphin smile. I kneeled on the bow, reaching out, inching closer. With just a finger's length between us, the dolphin splashed and zoomed away.

Johnnie Q. Public might not have sucked his breath, but I sure sucked mine.