Day 3 (13 March 2010): Canoeing the Okeefenokee

Yesterday we decided that since most of this place was underwater anyway, the best place from which to get a sense of the park would be the seat of one of those ungainly silver canoes beached on the canal. We started our journey at eight o'clock, in #17 and #18. The going was easy, the first few miles, up to Billy's Island (or as the sign says, Billys Island). We felt like creations of Robert Louis Stevenson disembarking the Hispanola as we landed, amid cool shade and dense vegetation, in total isolation. The only signs of human life were some hundred-year-old rusted-out metal vats strewn across the landscape. As were about to retake the boats, a juvenile hawk mewing at the top of a tree arrested our attention. He clearly wanted his mother, and so did we.
Next, northward to Minnie's Lake, where the wide canal narrowed and became tortuous to navigate, which afforded much opportunity for learning to manage the canoe as we shot and weaved through tight turns and openings barely large enough for our boat to pass through. We had to push our oars off the cypress tress to keep from crashing. This swamp, at least right now, is cowbird heaven; we saw more cowbirds than alligators, and we saw twenty-five alligators today. Corinna the park naturalist says that one can estimate an alligator's total length by the size of its head: take a ruler and measure the distance between the creature's snout and its eyes in inches, and you have the total length of the animal in feet. Using this method we determined that most of the alligators we saw were 6-8 feet in length, and a few slightly larger.
The wind and waves were against us on our return to the canal. When we exited the dense canopy of the winding northern way up to Minnie's Lake and returned to the main waterway, the wind broke upon us from the right with surprising force, making it difficult even to turn the boat into the wind. If we paddled even moderately we lost ground against the current, and the shifting wind kept turning the boat's nose off course. When we finally landed at the dock, we were exhausted and sore, but very satisfied, campers.
Stephanie led another night hike on the boardwalk this evening, complete with periodic listening exercises. These quiet times I cherished more than any we had on the trip. A listening exercise is sort of like turning off a bright light on a very dark night; just as your eyes slowly become accustomed to the darkness they are able to make out more of the landscape and skyscape, so your ears, as they become accustomed to quiet, are able to pinpoint more and more sound sources, even very faint and remote. The sounds swirl together in one's head, and one orchestrates them unconsciously until they make a kind of coherent music with its own distinctive character, maybe peaceful, maybe ominous and foreboding.