| Ahead,
I spotted swiftly flowing water between two mangrove islands: West Pass
Channel. Bill, my paddling partner, entered the channel first, and I
followed. The push of the incoming tide immediately slowed us down.
Moments later, we emerged into the Gulf of Mexico. The sun shone in
a freshly washed cobalt-blue sky over two-foot waves that stretched
westward as far as the eye could see. To our right, a pair of dolphins jumped out of the water in unison. |
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Earlier in the day, a powerful thunderstorm had rumbled through just as we had arrived at the Gulf Coast Ranger Station, near Everglades City. The storm had delayed our departure by two hours and forced us to paddle rapidly to make it to our destination by nightfall. Three hours into the paddle, as we skirted the shallow northern shoreline of Tiger Key, we raised the rudders on the sea kayaks to prevent scraping the sandy bottom. One last turn around a narrow peninsula led onto Tiger Key beach.  Sea grape trees, lit red by the dying sun, hunched over the upper end of the sloped beach. These generally low-slung coastal trees have large, round, shiny leaves that are leathery, to tolerate the strong sun. They produce a grape-like fruit in the fall, which settlers of a century ago gathered and made into jelly. I sat for a few moments in my kayak, relaxing my arms, and enjoying the cessation of repetitive motion. Moments later, the sun dropped below the horizon. We'd completed the seven-mile West Pass Route before dark. I was on the tail end of a scouting expedition for a paddling guidebook I was writing. I had already spent most of the winter paddling the Everglades, and had been adventuring down here for a decade. My friend and fellow Tennessean, Bill "Worldwide" Armstrong, had flown down from our hometown of Knoxville to join me for the trip. *The beach of Tiger Key is one of 52 designated backcountry campsites within the confines of Everglades National Park. It lies at the extreme northern end of the preserve, where the fresh water of the mainland flows through sawgrass into innumerable channels, which in turn gather in rich estuaries to form rivers leading to the Gulf and thousands of outer islands. Most of the outer islands are very small, yet hundreds are five acres or more, like Tiger Key. |
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