It’s a mystery to me that I could have lived in the southeastern US for more than thirty years, twenty-two in my youth and now another fourteen, and never been to the Okefenokee Swamp, officially the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. It’s a fabled place, the setting for Walt Kelly’s famous cartoon strip “Pogo” among other distinctions.
Dick Ambrose, from my gay men’s outdoors group, began visiting the Okefenokee with his Boy Scout troop about the time God spat out the first cypress seedling there, and has been leading WNG trips every year for some years. For the last two or three years, there have been no trips. The wildlife refuge has been closed to visitors because of the drought here in the Southeast. Last year, there were serious fires in the swamp. Dick scheduled three trips this year. The first two had to be canceled because of high periods of thunderstorm activity. I was lucky enough to be on the third trip, which we were able to complete.
We put in on Friday morning, Memorial Day Weekend. We loaded our four canoes with everything we’d need for three days and two nights in the swamp--tents, bedding, food, water. There’s very little “land” in the swamp, a fact that didn’t sink in completely for me until I began to think, “What if we did capsize a canoe? Where would we swim to?” As one fisherman said as we were leaving the outfitter’s “Don’t worry. You won’t drown. The gators’ll get you before that happens.” That was reassuring. We camped on platforms in the swamp, the first night, out in a prairie section of swamp on a platform named “round-top.” Our trip information included that this platform was high enough that the alligators wouldn’t be a bother. Well, maybe they weren’t coming up on the platform, but we did witness a bit of a fight as one bull gator chased another out of the territory. The second night, we stayed on “Canal #1” on a rare piece of land in the swamp. Here, the gators could clamber up onto the shore, and the literature describing Canal #1 simply said, “The activity [of campers] is usually enough to keep the alligators away.” Nice. My sister Christy, who had done an Okefenokee tour with her family several years ago, pointed out that no one has ever died in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. OK, then.
Over three days, we paddled almost 30 miles. Yes, there were lots of alligators … and frogs, and birds, and other wildlife. On the way back to the outfitters on Sunday, I was in the one-person canoe and considerably ahead of my fellow campers/paddlers. When I came on a tour boat headed up the canal, I knew I was getting close, and when the tour-boat guide said “Welcome home,” I felt as if I had just scaled Killimangaro or hiked across Siberia. What a great thing for us, to take ourselves out of our comfort zones from time to time.
For a photo album of the trip, click
here.
