There are two official names for this hammock (defined here as a tangle of hardwood trees, ferns, vines, crawly things, heat and humidity, surrounded by swamp) in Everglades National Park.
One is Royal Palm hammock, for the nearby visitor center.
The other is Paradise.
This is the place where Harold Hubert Slater has his life’s work. Harry Slater also has a bachelor’s degree in botany from the University of Iowa (1981), a master’s in plant physiology from the University of Minnesota (1984), two ex-wives and a mortgage on a house in Key Largo he bought with wife No. 2, who would like to get her money out of it but can’t.
That house was to be our lodging as well.
“I never lock my door,” said Harry. “I don’t even know where my key is. And I’ve never had anything stolen.” There’s not much in there worth stealing. It’s tough to fence ecology journals, even in South Florida.
About to turn 41, Harry’s pursuit of a doctorate in plant ecology has been ongoing but, well, leisurely. At present, with no salary and an expired research grant, he lives primarily on unemployment insurance, rent from a year-round boarder and remnants of resources supplied by people like us.
It is easy to underestimate Harry Slater. It is easy to underestimate the Everglades. Either, we would learn, would be a mistake.
Earthwatch, a non-profit organization that matches the socially and/or environmentally conscious with suitable projects, matched the four of us with Harry Slater and his Everglades Ecology project, one of 131 options in the Earthwatch catalog.
The four: Lois Shadewald, 30s, of Minneapolis; Christina Hobbs, 70, of Natick, Mass.; Judy Thorne, 51, of Reston, Va., and me, almost 51, of Lincoln Park. We were drawn by a common altruism-and by a shared desire to escape the January cold. Our land cost: $1,195 per person, in the form of a tax-deductible contribution that covered our lodging, meals and most equipment for two weeks and helped pay for such invaluable research odds-and-ends as aluminum nails.
It was on our first day in the hammock, 40 minutes by van from Key Largo, that it became clear the Everglades Ecology project had two purposes:
1) To support Harry Slater’s continued research into how natural disturbances-especially hurricanes and fire-impact on and interrelate within the Everglades’ pinelands and hardwood hammocks, primarily so that ongoing restoration and reclamation projects can accurately reproduce these elements and so that managed burning can be done in synch with natural patterns; and
2) To help Harry Slater finally get his Ph.D.
Day 1
The Everglades have been around for centuries, of course, but these fragile wetlands have been protected as a national park for only 50 years-an oversight corrected in large measure through the efforts of conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
“They have been called ‘the mysterious Everglades’ so long that the phrase is a meaningless platitude,” she wrote in the watershed (so to speak) year of 1947. “They are mysterious still to everyone by whom their fundamental nature is not understood.”
In the beginning, none of the four of us understood.
Our first working day was in the hammock where Harry Slater has been identifying and monitoring the birth, growth and death of trees since 1993, the year after Hurricane Andrew spun viciously through the national park. We followed merrily as he took us on a pleasant stroll along Paradise’s paved Gumbo Limbo Trail, installed so tourists in sneakers could get a sense of the habitat’s unique vegetation.
Then he took a right turn off the pavement and led us into a wall of green that begged for machetes.
“This,” he said triumphantly, charging ahead and pushing vines contemptuously out of the way, “matches the classic definition of a jungle.” For what seemed like hours but was probably about 20 minutes, the four of us climbed over rotting logs, limboed beneath leaning trunks and ducked recoiling branches as we followed an expert who had names for most everything.
“This is the West Indian cherry,” Harry said. A few more steps. “The satin leaf.” A few more. “Our friend, the gumbo limbo.” A few more. “This is called the paradise tree. I don’t know why.”
Ever seen snakes in here? I asked, between steps.
“Oh yeah,” said Harry. “Eastern diamondbacks.”
“Thank you,” Chris said ungratefully, “for bringing that up.”
More steps, those from us a little more careful.
“The only thing worse than this trail,” said Harry, “is what was here before we put the trail in here.”
Harry, this was no trail.
More steps. More vines. More scratches on arms. Then we went to work. Our job, as explained, basically was to listen as Harry found a tree, identified its species, measured its diameter, described its general condition and made sure it had a numbered aluminum tag nailed into its bark. The plan: Two of the group, Chris and Judy, were to share the duty of recording the data. Lois, using a compass, was to assist Harry in determining the tree’s precise location.
Lois had a question: “Is now a good time to tell you I don’t know how to read a compass?”
My job was to give the others an occasional break and, self-assigned, to watch out for snakes.
“In the summer,” said Harry, “these are the most notorious habitats in the park to work in. They have the highest mosquito populations, the stillest air, the highest humidity. Claustrophobic. It takes getting used to. That’s why we stop in April.”
All those things exist in January as well but not as miserably. The work, on the other hand, was numbing.
“It’s a gumbo limbo.” Write it down. “Diameter, 6.1 centimeters.” Write it down. “Height, 3.” Write it down. The enthusiasm belonged only to Harry, but there was nothing false in that enthusiasm, and he made no attempt to force it on us.
“A lot of what we do is not rocket-scientist stuff,” he said. “I mean, I’ve got 25,000 trees, and I’ve got to go up every couple of years and stick a tape-measure around a tree and go, ‘It’s this big, and last time it was that big, so it must’ve grown that much.’ “
What does it all mean? It’s data. Lots of numbers signifying nothing except that Harry Slater stuck a tape-measure around 25,000 trees in 1993, 25,000 trees in 1995 and maybe another 25,000 trees in 1997 and people like us wrote it all down.
“I don’t know where it’ll end up, but to me it’s a project worthy of a career,” said Harry. “And it’s fascinating.”
A pause.
“I don’t know what else I would do.”
Around noon, we broke out sandwiches we had made for ourselves that morning. The discussion topic became “paradise” and whether the hammock qualified.
“I think in a way it is, because it’s so lush and everything,” said Lois Shadewald. “Like with the Garden of Eden, I think of something like this.”
“I don’t think so,” said Judy Thorne, “although any kind of jungley place is paradise in a sense.”
“I would rather be here than on Paradise Island in the Bahamas,” said Chris Hobbs.
By 4 that afternoon, we were out of the hammock and back among the tourists at the Royal Palm Visitor Center. The Gumbo Limbo Trail through the hammock is one of two trails that begin at Royal Palm. The other is the Anhinga Trail. Its boardwalk takes visitors into (over, actually) the grassy wetlands that, to most people, are The Mysterious Everglades.
Anhingas-also called “snake birds”-all but pose at the trail’s beginning. Across what works as a moat, alligators lie on the mud and grass, sometimes in groups, utterly motionless. Egrets and herons and ibises stand along the banks that line the trail, oblivious to the cameras and the curious. More alligators. More birds.
At one end of the trail, natural islands provide more bedding for the sleeping gators. A wood stork, its numbers recovering but the species still threatened, pokes at the water but mostly stands around disinterested.
Open, marshy grassland fills the distance, interrupted here and there by a hammock or a small colony of willows as the grass searches for the horizon, but the placid birds and inanimate alligators and the people and the boardwalk itself combine to give the place the feel of a zoo, or, worse, of a museum diorama. There is no sense of wilderness, of sharing a natural state. It feels staged, stuffed.
I’m not sure right now if this was a good decision.
Paradise is not paradise, and neither is this.
Day 2
Sarah Riley works in the Everglades. In the glades. She hates the hammocks.
“It’s a jungle,” she said. “That’s not paradise.
“On a beautiful, 70-degree, breezy day out here, this is paradise. There’s something about flat open spaces that’s neat.”
Today, I’m on loan to Sarah. She is 24, fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania, taking some time to work in the Everglades before grad school. Her project, sponsored by Louisiana State University, involves defining grasslands that, by May, will be mostly under water as the wet season takes hold.
The morning is sunny, in the 70s and breezy, and we’re surrounded by miles and miles of golden grass. Awful nice-but paradise?
“I didn’t think so when I first got here two years ago (as an AmeriCorps volunteer),” she said, leading me through the waist-high grass, the two of us sharing a load of plastic tubing and thin steel rods. “The beauty is subtle. Most people who love this place know that.”
As we walked, I again asked about snakes. Yep, said Sarah, they’re here. She specifically mentioned eastern diamondbacks.
“What would probably happen,” she said, “is it would warn me, and then bite you.”
We kept walking. Soon we were there. Together, we assembled a 1.5-meter (that’s about a 4.7-foot) square plastic frame, set it into the grass, then created a grid of rods over the frame, each square measuring 10 by 10 centimeters-about 4 inches.
I sat in the grass. Sarah stooped over the plastic frame, moved her hands into one of the squares and began calling out species. My job was to write down the name of the species and record the frequency with which the species were found.
“Cladium jamaicense,” she called. Cladium, I wrote. “Muhlenbergh filipes,” she called. Muhley, I wrote. In one square the size of a hand, Sarah Riley found 10 distinct species of grass or sedge. Within the whole 1.5-meter frame, she would identify dozens more.
“Oh,” she said, “this is an ugly one.”
I said I thought that, to a botanist, there were no ugly ones.
“I’m an ecologist,” she said.
As funds enable the national park to reclaim agricultural land, it hopes to re-establish native habitat. Problem is, researchers are just now determining what native habitat is at the park’s various elevations, where a few centimeters can change all the rules. Sarah Riley’s data-recorded, for one day, by me-will feed into that process.
In the distance, behind a hammock and etched against a very blue sky, great white clouds rose, and from them might come nourishing rain and, maybe, lightning, whose fire would bring renewal to a patch of Everglades. It was starting to make sense.
“It’s a challenge,” Sarah said, “to find the beauty sometimes.”
She had found the beauty. I was beginning to understand.
Day 3
Once again, I would not be in the hammock. Today, Judy and I would be working with Jed Redwine, a recent LSU graduate continuing his seedling research in the pinelands at Everglades National Park.
This was Judy’s sixth Earthwatch project. An archivist for the National Archives in Washington, she had helped protect sea-turtle hatcheries on St. Croix, coral on Fiji, ruins in France. This time, her husband, also an archivist, stayed home.
“I think he felt that when he was on vacation, he didn’t want to work,” she said.
Florida slash pines grow in a slightly elevated habitat that’s benevolent from a distance but treacherous up close. The ground is mostly pinnacle rock whose crags and shards tear up boots and knees and hands. Palmettos just get in the way.
When Sarah had given me a quick tour of a pineland near her work area the previous afternoon, she’d said what workers feared most here is breaking a leg. The terrain is that awful.
A moment after having said that, she spotted an orchid. Delicate. Sweet.
Jed led Judy and me a half-mile into the stand. Naturally, I asked Jed about snakes. “I almost stepped on a snake in the plot right over there,” he said, nodding to his right while virtually bounding over impossible rocks and debris. “Eastern diamondback.”
We had reached the work area. Jed’s project involved monitoring the effect of fire on the pinelands. This pineland area would be burned eventually, inevitably. Our job was to find, measure and record seedings before the fire happened; after the fire, another survey of the area would ascertain the fire’s impact.
This time, Judy would take notes while Jed and I did identical work: finding the seedlings and establishing their location, height and the thickness of their stems. The search required me to poke around piles of live and dead vegetation and probe beneath decaying logs not far from where Jed had almost stepped on that rattlesnake, with bare hands.
It was not relaxed work.
I was working earnestly when Jed called out to me.
“Has anyone explained to you about metopium?” he asked.
Sounded familiar. Common name?
“Poisonwood.”
Is it around here?
“It’s all around where you are right now, and it’s pretty nasty,” said Jed. “It’s the oil. I know a girl who got it on her forehead and it stayed for a year.”
I was almost looking forward to meeting an eastern diamondback. There’s no romance in being attacked by metopium toxiferum. From that point on, my work in the pinelands suffered-but my respect for the territory and for the people who worked within it skyrocketed.
I remembered what Sarah had said about her own introduction to Everglades National Park.
“I figured it was a big wetlands, full of grasses and water and alligators, but it’s not at all what I’d pictured,” she had said. “The hammocks are so different from the glades are so different from the pinelands are so different from the mangroves are so different from the slough are so different from the bay . . ..”
So different.
The Last Day
Back in the hammock, this time with Chris and Harry.
Fifty years ago, just months before this park was established, Chris had graduated from Vassar with a degree in psychology. She has devoted much of her working life to the Garden Club of America, of which she was a director and remains an adviser; and to the New England Wildflower Society. This was her first experience with Earthwatch. Clearly, she was enjoying it.
“I’ve always liked being where people are doing things,” she said. “Really doing things.”
The first day, in the hammock, we had all been tentative, even Harry, who was caught between trying to get his work done and trying to teach us the difference between a mahogany tree and a simarouba glauca-the paradise tree. Now as Harry Slater rattled off species and figures, there was no confusion. Chris recorded the data, and I maintained a checklist. We had become a team, which made it tougher for me to leave. My teammates, unencumbered by magazine deadlines, would stay on for another week.
What, I asked Harry, should we bring away from this place, from this experience?
“From your point of view, you should realize how the Everglades works, get a fuller appreciation,” he said. “And you’re participating in a process. You’re participating in research in a national park. Ultimately it will translate into management, and we can’t do it alone.”
I had actually come to like the hammock, its greenness and fragrance and its shade. I had come to like Harry, who clearly was more stimulated by the work and in its potential usefulness than in its private reward. He was doing what he wanted to do, where he wanted to do it.
Perhaps more than the rest of us, he knew where he was.
It was after 5, later than usual, when we emerged from the hammock this final time. Harry’s plan was to have us linger for a while in the park, maybe until dark. There were still tourists on the boardwalk called the Anhinga Trail that extended into the wetlands, but the sun already was sinking, and the dads with baby strollers and the amateurs lugging cameras with monster lenses had given up and were straggling toward the parking lot.
Soon it was just a few of us and this strange light-and the Everglades.
Sarah had left something out: Sometimes the glades are different from the glades.
In the dusk, the alligators were alive and moving. One by one they slid on their bellies into the water from the banks, and their tails propelled them through the blackness like solitary submarines, silent except for an occasional flurry of excitement incited by a territorial rival.
Near the islands that earlier had seemed like a still life, a submerged alligator watched as a wood stork-the threatened species-purposefully poked the water for food near the great reptile’s snout. I watched this, fascinated, hoping the gator would pounce and feeling guilty about hoping that, watching until I no longer could.
Behind this drama, trees that had been empty had filled with anhingas and with animated flocks of white birds, and from time to time the air would screech with the sound of a bird fighting to preserve its place.
Beyond the islands and the trees covered with birds, billows of smoke from a fire glowed an eerie pink, illuminated by flames I couldn’t see. Behind me, the setting sun had streaked the sky with orange and red and purple.
This was primeval. This was really something.
I knew what this was.
