Ten Thousand Islands

A still-water mirror en route to Lulu Key.  

At sunset, a sky pregnant with showers.

A nearly full moon made for a very low tide at dawn, and a chance to glimpse the temporarily-exposed domain of echinoderms and gastropods.

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I had the rare opportunity to ring in the New Year on a 3-day kayak camping trip through the Ten Thousand Islands -- a portion of which lies inside Everglades National Park.  Such an adventure requires acceptance, and tolerance, of biting insects, sticky air, the drone of passing boats, and the visual monotony of the countless mangrove islands.  But the rewards are many: the sound of forced exhales as sea turtles and otters surface, the escalating chatter of osprey overhead, the serenity of easy passage on a strong flood tide, a sky full of color at dawn and dusk, and the camaraderie of fellow paddlers.  

Over the next few decades, the sea will rise steadily. This, like Arctic sea ice, is an imperiled landscape.  To take it all in now -- at a quiet, leisurely pace -- was a privilege.  

Kissimmee Prairie

Koa is only a "bird dog" in the sense that she's very patient while we're birding.

Sunset with a strand of palms in the distance.

Sunrise and warm color on the Florida prairie.  

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Kissimmee Prairie.  Pronounced "ki-SIH-me".  As close to a wide-open, western landscape as you can find in Florida.  A former Air Force property, given over to equestrians, the odd hiker and the preservation of endangered grasshopper sparrows.  I had been feeling claustrophobic, hemmed in by commercial development, and lacking a sense of scale.  No vistas, no mountains in the distance to lift one's spirits.  So, the Florida prairie was a revelation.  To look out over miles and miles of untrammeled nature, to look up at a night sky ripe with stars, was like rising for a deep breath after a long underwater swim.  

Novelist and essayist Wallace Stegner wrote it is "not an unusual life-curve for Westerners -- to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment".  

Stegner lived for a time in Iowa and New England to mature his writing, but he soon turned homeward to a region defined by aridity, expansiveness, and boundless (if sometimes short-sighted and ill conceived) dreams.  I am also a Westerner.  I'll never shake that enchantment.  A purpose and a calling brought me East, but I know it is not forever.  For now, I'm relieved to have found this prairie, and the feel of home.