SW FL, The 'glades | Andokides' Porch

March 16-20, 2014
SW Florida & The Everglades

I was asked, this year, to be the external reviewer for the seven-year program review for the Communication Program at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Meyers. Florida Gulf Coast University didn’t even exist when I was an undergraduate in Florida; it’s only in its 17th year. The Fort Meyers area really needed a state school.

Normally, Florida Gulf Coast doesn’t provide for site visits as part of the external review process--many schools do--but I saw an opportunity here to visit family and do some reconnaissance for an Everglades trip that I’m helping to plan for my gay men’s outdoors group for March, 2015. I contacted my cousin Karen to see if she and her family would be willing to put me up, made a deal with FGCU that, for the price of a round-trip ticket, I would not only gather data and do some interviews to help enrich the data for the review, but would also give a couple of guest lectures in classes, and we were on.

Karen and her family were the most gracious of hosts. My cousin Sheila came through on her way home to Sarasota from Miami. Karen’s parents, my Uncle Leonard and Aunt Judy, came over, and Don delivered up a most excellent (and beautiful) low-country boil.

I spent two full days on campus at FGCU, a remarkable and beautiful campus. Imagine walking to class everyday along a boardwalk through sections of cypress swamp, maybe finding an alligator camped out in front of the bookstore. The folks at FGCU worked me hard and kept me out late both nights.

On day three, I got up early, had breakfast, said good-bye to my cousin, and headed south for the Everglades National Park. In all my years living in Florida, I had driven through part of the Everglades along “Alligator Alley,” but had never been in the park. It was a longer drive than I was expecting, longer than anyone led me to expect, though my cousin
Sheila explained later that this was probably because no one understood that I was going all the way down to the main park entrance and visitor center in Homestead, Florida.

I stopped for lunch at a restaurant run by the Miccosukee Indians; the service was painfully slow. I had a plate piled with greasy fried alligator, so much of it (and so greasy), I couldn’t finish.

By the time I arrived at the park, it was around 3 in the afternoon. I stopped at the visitor’s center and quizzed some very friendly and helpful park rangers, then anticipating I’d also have a short day before having to return to Fort Meyers on the following day, I drove the 38 miles of the Main Park Road to the end at Flamingo Bay. After surveying the camp facilities there, I made my way, somewhat leisurely back out to the entrance, stopping for a 40-minute hike at Mahogany Hammock and another hike, at sunset, at one of the most famous and popular trails in the park, the Anhinga Trail.

The 38 miles of the Main Park Road covers an amazing range of eco-systems, from scrub forest near the entrance, to grass and cypress swamp, to coastal. There’s very little that looks like any popular conception of “swamp.” Much of it looks like African veldt; you half expect to see giraffes and elephants. The atmosphere in the park is decidedly primeval. It’s not just all the reptiles with their obvious connection to dinosaurs; even the plant life--ferns, air plants--seems prehistoric. And the strangler fig tree, a tree that begins as a seedling in the trunk of a host tree, then proceeds to envelope its host and, eventually, to take over its airspace, killing the host, serves to testify that, in such an environment, the predatory “law of the jungle” is not restricted to the animal kingdom.

In maybe an hour on the Anhinga trail, I saw a number of fish species, turtles, alligators, egrets, nesting anhinga, and an owl at close range.

I had a good supper in Homestead, southern country cooking--(Those who say Florida isn’t really the South have never been anywhere outside of Miami and Ft Lauderdale.)--the sort of find that modern digital technologies and apps such as Yelp! make possible.

I had a perfectly fine modest motel room for the night. The next morning, I skipped the free motel breakfast and went to a recommended breakfast place down the road (Yelp! again), then back to the park where I surveyed the other campground, the one closest to the entrance, and Pine Key. I did a bit more poking around before it was time to head back to Ft Meyers to catch my evening flight back to Atlanta.

Click here for more photos of my time in the Everglades National Park. To view as a slideshow, double click the first photo, then use the navigation arrows at the top of the page to scroll through.