Another American Adventure: Grassy Waters

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Grassy Waters

Grassy Waters is one of my favorite places around here. Quiet, with lots of boardwalk to enter into this strange and wildly beautiful land. The Everglades, but only a couple of miles away and free.

Sweet little baby alligator there to greet us ...

(I think I must have a smudge on my lens ...)

Airboat ...

Same little baby alligator ...

If you look at the edge of the step ...

another alligator poking up his head ...

This is the new boardwalk section that wasn't finished the last time we were there ...

Saw some Everglades Snail Kites out there ...

Little bits of color growing on the trees.

Alligator venturing up the steps ...

2 comments:

BarbaraApril 7, 2012 at 2:23 PM
What a beutiful habitat! I guess you can't take Jubilee along. Don't the alligators bug you a little?
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beth cioffolettiApril 7, 2012 at 4:05 PM
The alligators are like lizards, just larger. BUt they do give me pause, especially the large ones. The years that we've been in Florida we've known some very tragic incidents, so we do pay proper respect. If Jubilee were there she would definitely have gone for a swim and could very well have become an alligator lunch.

The Everglades (and this is just the northernmost part of them) are a very wild land, most of it quite inhospitable to humans (and dogs). Heat, bugs, swamp, "grass" that is sharp as a saw. But a rare beauty nonetheless. I wouldn't want to be caught out there alone at night.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.