In a Florida swamp, the whole of nature beckons

The alligator was sleeping. Or hiding. Or maybe it was just bored.

In any event, all I could see of the reptile was its bottom half because it had crawled part way underneath the wooden walkway on which I was standing.

I might never even have seen it expect for one of the other visitors to the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. He had been walking several feet in front of me, my wife (Mary Pat Treuthart) and our friends, and it was he who pointed down and silently mouthed what I could see was the word “gator!” (the exclamation point is mine but is based on how wide his eyes were).

But let me back up a bit. The sanctuary we were trekking through is situated in Florida, a little more than 47 miles southwest of the Gulf Coast city of Fort Myers. We had come here, having made a flight connection in Atlanta, to visit friends of Mary Pat’s from high school.

Yeah, high school grads from 1970, not that anyone’s counting what that amounts to in relative ages.

I had been to Florida a couple of time before. The first time we’d visited in-laws who live just outside Miami. We took that opportunity to drive down to Key West where, one evening, we enjoyed drinks with a hundred or so strangers as we all toasted one of the most glorious sunsets I’ve ever seen.

Another time my brother-in-law and I attended the Doral Open, the annual PGA golf tournament. We followed Phil Mickelson for a few holes before, having grown tired of the Florida heat, retiring to the refreshment tent.

Our previous time in Fort Myers, when we’d visited another one of Mary Pat’s classmates, had been less adventurous – though we did drive south to the city of Naples and walked out on the Naples Pier. Afterward, we spent the night on Marco Island, which was particularly nice since it was the winter holiday season and the main streets were brightly lit up with Christmas colors.

This time, however, we stayed with the friends who had rented a condo in Estero, Florida, for a month. It sits right on a man-made estuary, and the condo’s lanai offers a view of one of the community golf course’s par 3 holes.

This time of year (I’m writing this the day before the Ides of March) the weather in this part of Florida is temperate: sunny and breezy with the highs in the upper ’70s. And our one golf outing so far was enjoyable, far better than the 40-plus temperatures that Inland Northwest golfers are no doubt enduring.

But one cannot (or maybe should not) play golf every day. At least not when places such as the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary are available to experience. So the four of us piled into our rental car to see it for ourselves.

According to the sanctuary’s literature, the swamp was little known to anyone who lived outside of south Florida. Things changed, though, when the wearing of bird plumes became fashionable (ladies’ hats, maybe?). This applied particularly to egret and heron plumes, both species that were plentiful in the swamp – and both that were, as a result, avidly hunted.

“Plume hunters could make a fortune in a well-timed weekend hunt and were quickly devastating rookeries throughout Florida and in the southeastern United States,” the sanctuary guidebook explains.

Then the National Audubon Society got involved. The organization hired one former plume hunter, a man named Guy Bradley, to be a warden to the area. Bradley, though, wasn’t popular among those who continued to hunt, and kill, the area’s birds, not just the egrets and herons but also Roseate Spoonbills, Wood Storks and others.

In 1905, Bradley was shot and killed while on the job. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.

But the society persevered. And even in the face of the local logging industry, which wanted at various time to level the area, the society managed to purchase some 5,680 acres of land that, in 1954, became the start of the sanctuary itself. This followed the Audubon Society’s efforts of the year before urging then-Gov. Dan McCarty to deem the area important for its “scientific and aesthetic value.”

The first iteration of the boardwalk, which these days winds 2.25 miles through a number of different habitats, was constructed in 1955. In size, because of more land acquisition, the sanctuary today comprises more than 13,000 acres. As the guide says, the “boardwalk meanders through pine flatwood, wet prairie, around a marsh, and finally into the largest old-growth bald cypress forest in North America.”

On our walk, which took a little less than two hours, we stopped at several of the dozens of stations, each of which tells us about the trees and wildlife. We saw herons and racoons, and heard the cries of birds I couldn’t begin to identify.

We even saw an owl sitting silently on a tree branch, apparently either sleeping or intent on keeping still so that it could pounce on whatever would become its next meal.

And, of course, we saw half of an alligator. A shy alligator, maybe. Camera shy, for sure. See ya later, I couldn’t help but whisper as I passed by.

If the gator could talk, he might have echosed my friend Jim who occasionally says, “Sometimes he thinks he’s funny.”