Out of the Loop

The most remote road in Florida is actually a battleground.

For 26 steel-belt-crunching miles, the legendary Loop Road meanders through Florida's last frontier: a gurgling and water-soaked netherworld between the civilization of cars and commerce along the Tamiami Trail and the jungly southern edge of mainland Florida. Battle scars of conflict haunt every godforsaken mile.

Blazed in part as a hunting path by hardy pioneers more than 75 years ago, the Loop Road begins and ends on the Trail (U.S. 41), looping through the darkest fragment of the historic Big Cypress basin. Sometimes gravel, sometimes asphalt, most of the Loop is maintained by the National Park Service as part of its 729,000-acre Big Cypress National Preserve-a watershed for next-door Everglades National Park.

And therein lies the main conflict: The Feds, as the Loop Road locals call the Park Service, are locked in a war of rights with a vanishing breed of rugged individualists making a last, defiant stand in these holiest of wilderness lands. Thirty years of environmental regulations, watershed protection, wildlife laws and the like have stalled their swamp buggies, silenced their hunting rifles, opened their secret world to outsiders and tamed their traditions. The last stand is kicking and fighting to survive.

"Lousy government intervention so folks from Michigan can see the swamp without getting wet," is the way a swamp bard named Joe Lord once described the cleaned-up Loop Road.

The Loop Road wanders through an area once so forbidding that it's made the list of places where Jimmy Hoffa might be buried. Al Capone had a speakeasy and hunting camp out here during Prohibition. You can still see the steps leading up to the front door. Miami fiddler Erwin T. Rouse wrote the Orange Blossom Special here at a joint called Gator Hook Saloon-reachable only by airboat. You can still see those steps, too, among hundreds of empty whiskey and beer bottles roasting in the muck.

Elaborate hunting camps-some four-bedroom concrete blockhouses-required fat-wheeled swamp buggies to visit. Settlers were scattered like shotgun shot all through the area. There were lumber camps, cattle pastures, vegetable farms, grass airstrips and oil explorations. Tough women vied for the coveted Miss Wild Hog title at an annual festival.

This was your classic lawless Florida wilderness, an area where even Bigfoot just wanted to be left alone. Dead 'gators on the road covered with vultures. Drive around them; they ain't movin'. Dead 'gators hanging from hooks baited with meat the poachers hung over canals. Huge potholes of washed-out lime rock, three feet deep. With alligator garfish swimming in them. Abandoned, burned-out cars in the middle of the road. Rumors of black jaguarondis escaped from the circus. Flying-saucer sightings. The sound of gunshots and the occasional woman's scream. Or was that the wail of a limpkin?

Today, however, loop road is relatively safe for tourists to traverse, or stop to picnic, or snap digitals of raccoons. Shorty-shorts joggers run this road, now, for God's sake! European bicyclists zoom past cypress domes where Florida panthers, occasionally sighted, lurk in the brush. It remains one of the least-traveled designated scenic routes in the National Park system. The Florida Trail begins here-at the Loop Road's southernmost point-and zigzags north-up the old Sawmill Road tracks and through Roberts Lake Strand to the Oasis Visitor Center on U.S. 41. It's an 8.3-mile, six- to eight-hour hike that's considered the scariest sector of the 1,300-mile state trail.

"I think its because you're in calf-deep water most of the way. It's hard to see what you're stepping on. One or two places it's hip deep," says Chuck Wilson of the Florida Trail Association in Gainesville. "Personally I don't think it's too dangerous. I'm very comfortable out there. The 'gators and snakes have hundreds of square miles to roam around in; they stay away from people if they can."

Loop Road was originally named Chevelier Road after an early pioneer Frenchman; local rednecks quickly chose to call it Chevrolet Road, a name preferred by old-timers to this day. Ivory-billed woodpeckers (now believed extinct) were seen more often than tourists in those days. But today the Loop Road has been genteeled. Park rangers patrol the road, keep the brush from growing out to car-scratch length, keep all-terrain vehicles in designated areas and generally maintain control in a law-and-ordered way that the folks who first settled these parts were desperately trying to avoid.

When the Big Cypress Preserve was first established in the early '70s, the government went about the transition with a particularly heavy hand. Pushed by environmentalists worried about the panther and other endangered species, the Feds cleaned house: They burned historic hunting camps, arrested drug smuggling good old boys, and gave petty "no-license" tickets to old folks fishing the clear tea-stained water for gar, bass, cichlid, oscar and mudfish. Other than a few homesteads exempted by the new law, most private property was condemned and reclaimed.

Rent asunder was a unique Florida lifestyle still smoldering in ruins today. A trip along the Loop Road carries one through the sadness of the pioneers' loss. Yes, it appears unspoiled, but gone is the edge-the special network of backwoods Florida humanity that flourished in these parts. Locals describe a bucolic world against the harsh swamp backdrop: the beauty of a clear Big Cypress night, the purple petals of a swamp sabatia, the Thanksgiving family reunions, the thrill of the 'gator, deer and bear hunts, that earthy smell missing in town. Several tiny, thriving communities are only memories now.

Best place to start a trip on the Loop Road is from the west end, about a half hour from the far outskirts of Naples. Look for the Monroe Station road sign, just up the road from the world's smallest post office in Ochopee. At the entrance stands a ghostly, whitewashed building, windows boarded up-the legendary Lord's (or Monroe) Station, where Joe Lord and his wife operated what was for a while the only place to get gasoline, food, or use a telephone between Naples and Miami. With his battered cowboy hat and bantam rooster ways, Joe articulated the anger of the swamp pioneers to all who cared to listen.

Then the Feds came in, closed down Joe's gas pumps in the early '80s (pollution) and the Lords left town, never to be heard from again. Deemed too termite ridden to preserve, the historic way station now languishes, and the Park Service seems uninterested in its fate. Boat trailers, port-o-potties and dump trucks are unceremoniously stored there. "I talked to one of the rangers about Monroe Station and he said they are waiting for a hurricane to come along and blow it down so they can get rid of it," says Big Cypress historian Jack Moller.

As you turn south onto Loop Road, your cell phone suddenly won't work. You begin in Collier County, ride through a portion of Monroe County, skirt the edge of the Miccosukee Indian reservation and emerge back onto U.S. 41 in Dade County. The speed limit is 25 miles per hour for most of the trip. To go much faster can ruin the underpinnings of your vehicle and prevent you from seeing wildlife. About 16 gravel miles into the trip, the road suddenly becomes asphalt for the last 10 miles. One lane means you hug the side, tighten your muscles and squint when you're approached by a vehicle from the other direction. Peer through the fussy edge growth at dwarf cypress prairies, covered by yellow wildflowers in spring. Fabulous pine ridges, eerie buttonwood swamps and the deep bald cypress strands that cover one-third of the preserve all flash by your window. Sandy slash pine islands, mixed hardwood hammocks, wet and dry prairies, brackish estuarine mangrove forests. Hawks, owls, tree snails and bromeliads in the trees. Broad sweeping horizons occasionally pop up between the mysterious enveloping jungle swamps. It is, of course, the slightly raised terrain, and requisite standing water, that separates the Big Cypress Swamp from the Everglades and its constantly flowing river of grass.

Birds are everywhere, especially from January through March, when Loop Road becomes an international destination for bird watchers looking for egrets, herons, wood storks, eagles, warblers, kingfishers, ibis, pileated woodpeckers, spoonbills, purple gallinules, anhingas, limpkin and all manner of birds of prey. This is a photographer's paradise.

You can see the Loop Road Education Center, walk the Tree Snail Hammock Nature Trail and witness what's left of the tiny community of Pinecrest, stuck in time. You'll probably see folks cane-pole fishing, maybe waving at you to slow down so the lime dust won't blotz them. "If I was wet, I'd be concrete," yelled one character. You might stop the car to watch a great blue heron waltz miraculously through a maze of cypress knees. Shut off the engine and you are struck by the quiet. It's an uncommon quiet that hangs on the Loop Road-the sort of lonesome quiet that comes over a man just prior to a surprise bear attack. In fact, the largest black bear in the country-624 pounds-was killed not far from here in 1988.