Mari Ness - March 12th, 2008

Teller speaks.

Thanks to technoshaman for the link.

The past weekend was the first weekend cool enough for a real walk in the Everglades – we've certainly had cooler and downright cold days, but they happened to fall on weekdays where I needed to be at work. And alas, the Everglades, even with its myriad gorgeous birds, is not the most pleasant place to walk in any kind of heat, largely because it's not exactly big on shade. Sure, stands of trees dot the landscape, or cover it in some places, but in most cases, these are either not overly shady trees (slash pine and dwarf cypress) or they are standing in three to four feet of water, making long walks a bit uncomfortable.

So I've been waiting for the temperatures to drop down below 70 midday, and Sunday, they finally did, so out I headed to the Florida Trail. The full trail allows people with less sanity than I to walk all the way from I-75 to the Tamiami Trail through wetlands, scrub lands, and a few dark gloomy places lined with waiting alligators. I was not inclined to walk the entire twenty miles (especially since I'd have to walk even further once I reached the Tamiami Trail to find water and food and stuff.) But I did start walking south. Thanks to last week's rains, the trail was considerably muddier than I prefer it, and involved some interesting jumping around at some points, and by the time I'd walked for probably four miles or so it had flooded out completely, so I headed back.

This is not precisely one of the world's most awesome sightseeing trails, I'll admit, and given its remoteness and generally unmarked quality (you have to drive out on I-75/Alligator Alley and park in a spot misleadingly labeled as "Access to Big Cypress Reserve" instead of "Florida Trail," and negotiate through a series of doubled and slightly rusted gates (this is meant to keep deer and panthers off I-75, in the case of the deer to protect cars, and in the case of the panthers to attempt to protect the panthers. GPS studies suggest that the gates aren't doing much to keep the panthers off the highway but it's a nice thought. I don't think anyone's tagged deer, so I don't know how well that's working – in general, we don't have a lot of deer in Big Cypress anyway) , and then hop over some mud) this is not precisely one of the more usual ways to explore the Everglades. And although the trail has some trees, it's not entirely shaded, either. But it's also one of the very very few long walking trails (more than five miles) south of Lake Okeechobee, and one of the equally few places where you can walk away from the constant sound of cars. (Not, alas planes.)

Birds don't precisely congregate here the way they do around the fish laden Shark Valley and Anhinga Trails, and I ran into too many snakes. ("Too many snakes = 1 non poisonous snake with a serious attitude problem.") But I ran into a great white heron staring at me on the trail, saw several deer bounding away and splashing through the water, and saw three great alligators slipping into the dark waters beneath the tangled trees to my left, and a couple of very young alligators testing out the trail, and my favorite dancing dwarf cypress trees, that rather resemble guilty fairies caught in mud. (In certain lights, a field of dwarf cypress trees almost looks as if the trees are about to spring up and start dancing, or if they're merely fairies disguising themselves for a bit as you pass by.)

The end result of all of this magic and me almost but not quite seeing an otter (I think it was an otter, but I'm not sure about that) was that I vastly overwalked on Sunday, with the further result that I got incredibly lazy last night and Monday, and once again broke my self-promise to exercise every night as long as I stay in this office job (my previous slipups came when I was sick, or when I just had a need for chocolate instead). I feel sure that a moral lesson or life observation in there somewhere, but it would take too much exercise to dig it out, especially since I need to exercise tonight.

And a cartoonist is about to tell us what really happens when terrorists call the White House at that hour.

Clearly created by someone who, like me, has spent time on hold with Comcast.net recently. On a related note, can someone please tell Comcast that if I am calling them to tell them that my cable modem is out, I can't bloody well get on the Internet and head to their website to complain about this?. Thanks!

(To give Comcast marginal credit, they did fix the cable, which is a bit more than I can say for their rivals in customer service agony, the new Bellsouth/AT&T, which is frighteningly worse than the old Bellsouth/AT&T.)