1999
Swamp Bandits (Okefenokee Swamp)
by S.L.Reinke
Swamps suffer from a lack of talent in the Public Relations Department. They are usually portrayed as dim, fetid miasmas crawling with creepy insects, slithering with venomous snakes, and infested with all manner of blood-sucking and flesh-rending beasts. They are reputed to be the haunts of bandits, demented sociopaths, and quite possibly the restless spirits of the dearly departed themselves. Like operatic baritones, they are typecast as villains. Of course, all those hyped, Hollywood, swamp stereotypes are either wholly incorrect or at least grossly overstated - all except the bit about the bandits.
Now, the Okefenokee Swamp is the specific place that has shaped my dissenting opinion of swamps in general. It's in Georgia, about as far south as you can go without crossing the line into Florida. It had loomed large in my imagination for more years than I'd like to confess to before I finally got a chance to visit it in person. And it still managed to live up to expectations.
We bucked Conventional Wisdom by visiting Okefenokee in December rather than March so we missed the riot of spring wildflowers and the vernal cacophony of reptilian and amphibian mating songs. But visiting at a time of lower popular demand allowed us to obtain a camping permit without Divine Intervention and to camp in the swamp for more than two nights, the prime-time, springtime limit. I've done some serious driving in my time to reach a put in. But a 6000-mile round trip drive for a 2-3 day paddle was too high a price for even me.
So the last day of November found us getting ready to push off from Kingfisher Landing for a five-day loop through The Swamp. And the swamp seemed a friendly enough place at the outset. It was serenely peaceful on this damp, grey morning after a tumultuous night of rain and storm. The bit of swamp we could see from the landing even seemed homelike. The dark, placid water between sand banks and tall pines could easily have been a piece of northern Minnesota, only warmer. It hardly felt like we were paddling into a den of thieves.
It was extremely quiet as we paddled off down the Red Canoe Trail toward Maul Hammock. Water dripping from the paddles seemed a loud noise. But it wasn't the brooding silence of some slasher movie, soon to be broken by ominous music welling up from the sound track. It was simply the calm quiet of a solemn and secret place slowly settling itself in for the winter. Autumn was fading here. Only a few, rusty, cypress needles remained on the trees. But vines and shrubs were weighted down with berries. Coppery seed plumes and sere, brown grasses over-arched the water. Lily pads were turning red, though a few, white blossoms remained. Clumps of yellow flowers brightened the dark waterscape here and there. Many branches were bare; many others still held a mix of green and scarlet leaves. The swamp seemed to be reluctant to let go of the growing season and clung to summer leaf by leaf.
Paddling was deceptively easy the first mile or so out from Kingfisher. The channel was wide and deep, following an old peat-mining canal. We dawdled, allowing the swamp to delight us with its exotic still-lifes. We couldn't even put names to most of the plants we saw along the route. Clumps of pitcher plants, some mottled green and red, some now withered and brown, reared out of the water everywhere like gossiping groups of hooded cobras. Water droplets still clung to spider webs and floating leaves like strung pearls. And everything was mirrored so perfectly in the still, black waters that the image in the water seemed as real, as tangible as the genuine article. Staring into the water could be momentarily disorienting. (And some of my photographs may still be upside down!)
After the Red Canoe Trail had parted company from the Green, the channel narrowed and we began to appreciate the diversity of the swampscape. Far from being a monotonous expanse of muck, the swamp offers the traveller some remarkably varied scenery. Over the next few days we would paddle through ponds and lakes of open water, dense water lily fields, grassy prairies, and some claustrophobic passages through dense, jungly vegetation kept brushed out only by the constant vigilance of the Refuge staff. We would skirt thickets of pine trees and pass down long corridors of cypress veiled with grey, Spanish moss swaying eerily in the breeze. We would even find a bit of dry land at Floyd's Island. For today, however, our route led mostly through a chain of small ponds and lakes, comfortingly marked by a series of white-tipped posts between the red canoe blazoned mileage markers.
All that first day there was nothing in the manner of dry land in sight. At lunchtime, we spread out our floating deli on the packs amidship and were careful not to rock the boat lest the peanut butter and apples go rolling off into the swamp. It was quite a test of balance to pass things fore and aft without losing anything over the side.
Wildlife sightings while paddling this first day were few. We saw some ducks and egrets and lots of black vultures. And on our way across Ohio Lake, we encountered our first alligator. A burly fellow about as long as our boat, he saw us as soon as we saw him and slipped silently into the water without raising a ripple. There is something a little unnerving about alligators. They always seem to be smiling at some private joke they are not going to share. And there is something about the thought of an alligator swimming near (or under!) one's boat that makes one involuntarily choke up a bit on the paddle shaft, even if it is winter and the alligators have allegedly stopped feeding until spring!
As the afternoon wore away, we realized that those nice, red, mileage markers were not showing up nearly as often as we thought they ought to, so we picked up the pace and stopped dawdling. After two or three miles of paddling through dense, jungly vegetation, we finally came back out into the open to feel the breeze on our faces as we finished our twelve-mile paddle to Maul Hammock Lake. With the afternoon sun in our eyes, we also finally appreciated why all parties are required to launch before 10 AM. I would hate to get caught peering through the dark for those white-tipped posts to guide me "home".
Home for this night was the Maul Hammock shelter. Overnight shelters in Okefenokee all follow the same, general pattern; a wooden platform, roughly 20x30 feet, raised above the swamp on pilings, with a dock out front, a standing seam metal roof over one end, and an outhouse perched at the other, front corner. This particular example had a rather saggy and forsaken look about it. It had a rather strong odor of creosote and privy. And it had all too obviously been visited by a great number of birds in the recent past. But it was dry, it was home for the night, and it commanded a lovely view out over Maul Hammock Lake. We took a few moments to luxuriate in stretching our legs, then moved in for the night.
We dutifully signed in on the shelter log. The good folks at the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge want to know where you are - or where to start looking for you if you turn up missing - and require all swamp visitors to sign in and out at every access or overnight stop. The logs let you know who was there before you, how many were in the party, and the date and time they arrived and left. They also have a "comments" column. That was how we were forewarned we were about to be besieged by bandits.
"Raccoon Hilton" someone had rechristened the shelter. Another wrote simply "raccoon hell". Another spelled out a tale of woe as the masked bandits opened their cooler and then pushed it off the platform, scattering (and presumably making off with) the contents. Yet another let us know that "raccoons can untie square knots but not bowlines". Well! We took no chances. Every scrap of food and garbage, every item in the cook kit, was repacked after dinner and the packs strapped to the roof posts. We hoped that those dexterous, raccoon paws would not be clever enough to undo a buckle. We then retired to the tent to await the expected attack.
Right on cue, the first assault broke onto the platform just as dusk was fading to dark. Raccoons swarmed up over the little, corner shelf that served as a kitchen counter. (Actually, it may have been only one raccoon. But even one raccoon is capable of swarming when free food might be involved.) These were obviously accomplished and experienced crooks, making straight for the unguarded till, so to speak; returning to the scene of previous crimes only to be disappointed at finding no swag for the taking this time. We proved very unaccommodating hosts. And, like bowlines, the simple, rusty buckle was too complicated a safe for these yeggs to crack. They were persistent, though. All night long we'd hear the patter of little paws coming across the decking in a brief foray to see if anyone had come out for a midnight snack and maybe dropped something. And at breakfast next morning we were visited by one of our midnight marauders. Unsuccessful at thievery the previous night, it tried its hand at begging in the morning, splashing through the shallows behind the shelter, doing its best to look mournful and starving. It was a convincing act. But we left it with only heartfelt best wishes for good crawdad hunting.
This morning was as sparklingly clear as the previous morning had been dully grey. The early sunlight spot-lit two egrets, startlingly white, at roost on the west shore of Maul Hammock Lake. It also dried the wings of the two dozen or so black vultures which had spent the night roosting in rustling camaraderie in the trees behind the shelter. One by one they lifted off to fly westward to join in the tight spiral where we had first seen them the previous afternoon. We saw a number of birds as we paddled through the rich, morning light among the golden, grassy expanses of Sapling Prairie. Several flocks of sandhill cranes lifted and wheeled away at our approach, calling to one another in startled, primordial tones. (I am quite sure sandhill cranes do the voice-overs for pterodactyls in the movies.)
A stiff, westerly breeze ruffled the water, profoundly blue with mirrored sky today. At first, this head wind made the paddling, already slowed by the shallow sheet of water, rather ponderous. But when the canoe trail turned south, we found ourselves not only sheltered from the wind by tall prairie grasses, but also being impelled forward by a downstream current. Barely perceptible at first, it was a minor force to be reckoned with by midday. We found we could paddle lazily and still make our destination in good time. The discovery of current in the swamp should not have been such a startling revelation to me since I knew the Suwannee River flows through the northwest quadrant of the swamp and the St. Mary's River drains to the southeast. Nevertheless, it came as a pleasant surprise to find myself floating blithely downstream where I expected to be poling feverishly through muck.
Another pleasant surprise was the discovery of a day use shelter at Dinner Pond. It was a mouldering, old hulk of a shelter. Its dock was a-tilt and missing a few decking boards to rot. But we gingerly hoisted out our food pack and were only too happy to stretch our legs and make use of the table to spread out lunch. It was a rare luxury.
We saw a number of alligators during our day's paddle - little guys about 6-7 feet long. They were all basking contentedly on the trampled, mud flats we had come to recognize as 'gator sun decks. They watched in stony silence as we passed, unwilling to compromise their comfort with a dip in the cool water. We also saw a couple of otters cavorting along our route. Apparently, winter is a prime time to spot otters: they come out to play when the alligators are not active during the cooler months. Indeed, we saw one otter brazenly splashing and snorting through the swamp right behind a sunning 'gator as if thumbing its whiskered nose and saying, "Nyah, nyah, nyah, you're not hungry!"
The terrain traversed today varied pleasantly. From Sapling Prairie's long views over waving grasses we passed into the twisting confines of tangled branches and back into the open length of lily-choked Dinner Pond. Thereafter came more twisting cypress alleys where downed trees and cypress knees made for a few navigational checks. Here we were thankful it had rained torrents the day before we had arrived: at low water levels this stretch would be a chore to paddle. In fact, a previous attempt to visit the swamp had been thwarted by a dry spell which rendered this section of the route impassible.
Eventually we wound our way out onto the grand length of Big Water. Aptly named, Big Water is an extensive stretch of deep, open water, more like a wide, slow-moving river than a lake. Its quiet stateliness lends it the feel of a medieval hall or cathedral with tall cypress trees standing in for gothic arches and Spanish moss for draped tapestries, the cloudless sky for a vaulted ceiling.
Despite the fact that we had passed out of the paddle-only sector of the swamp, it was still very quiet. There were no day users about. We had seen no one else since leaving Kingfisher and would see no one until the fourth day when we would pass a party of four canoeists trading places with us between Bluff Lake and Floyd's Island. The only other people we would see the entire trip were one park ranger in a motorboat and one large group of day tripping canoeists passed on the way back to the landing. It was a very peaceful journey.
The Big Water overnight shelter was actually a little way off of Big Water itself, on a side channel that cuts through Floyd's Prairie. Though lacking a view up Big Water, it made amends by providing four-star accommodations. The platform looked brand new, straight, solid, clean. We also had a respite from bandits here. Either the shelter was too new for the local banditos to have gotten wind if it yet or the surrounding water was too deep to make it worth their while to swim out to it. Either way, we had a peaceful evening of sitting on the platform's front step, watching the stars come out both in the cloudless, moonless sky and in the cloudless, moonless water. And we wondered vainly if the full moon on these waters would look as magical as one of the log entries suggested it would be.
Our cloudless night was quiet and cool . . . and damp. All night long we listened to the incessant, irregular drip of water from the shelter roof onto tent nylon, canoe fiberglass, and swamp water; a syncopated percussion. I had no idea dew could drop so loudly.
We awoke to a beautiful, color-drenched, late-autumn morning. It was even cool enough to need a jacket. The onset of winter in southern Georgia is a good deal more temperate than in southern Minnesota!
By the time we loaded up the boat for our day's paddle, we were back down to (short) shirtsleeves. As we crossed Floyd's Prairie, it even felt hot and stuffy down in the narrow, winding passage between thick walls of prairie grasses and late-season wildflowers. This was a good place for birds. Over-wintering robins scolded us. Sandhill cranes called mournfully in the distance. We saw kingfishers and herons, wood ducks and buzzards, and one barred owl which flew across our path and perched in a low tree, blinking sleepily in the sunshine.
As we turned east toward Floyd's Island and rejoined the Green Canoe Trail, we found that the current, which had been such a joy yesterday, was now against us. The grasses gradually gave way to shrubs and trees; cypress, magnolias, and evergreen oaks. Their tangled branches eventually overarched the waterway to form a dense tunnel. We could hear activity all around us - wood ducks flushing to our left, sandhill cranes rising to our right with a rush of powerful wings and a confusion of primeval cries -but we could see nothing beyond the curtain of gnarled branches and evergreen leaves.
This tunnel was pleasantly scented with the wild tang of some aromatic shrub. Here was another pleasant surprise. I had expected the swamp to stink; putrid, sulfurous, rotten. Instead, the worst smells came from the shelter latrines. The natural smells the swamp offered up were well worth sniffing; the hay-like scent of dry grass, sun-warmed pine and cypress needles, sweet bay. Nice.
Sweet smelling or not, this tunnel seemed to go on forever (though in reality, we paddled less than six miles and arrived at the island before noon!). The up-current paddling went slowly and there were no notable landmarks. The only perceptible changes were the water changing color from black to red, the trees growing progressively denser and the shade growing deeper. It came as a sudden relief when the canoe trail ended abruptly at a sandy portage landing and we stepped ashore onto a different universe on Floyd's Island.
Floyd's Island has long been a world unto itself. A rare expanse of solid ground among the watery wilds, it was once maintained as a private game park for the Hebard family, local lumber barons. Their shingle-sided hunting lodge still stands along the portage trail. It is charmingly situated in an open grove of slash pine and magnolias. Two ancient live oaks, draped with Spanish moss, stand sentry at either end of the porch. We briefly toured the cabin. A small, central room with a stone fireplace was flanked on either side by bedrooms, a kitchen and storeroom extending off behind it. Now this was to be our private domain, if only for one night. We could have simply unrolled our sleeping bags on the floor and moved in. But, despite its high ceilings and many windows, the cabin felt dark and cold and it smelled strongly of too many smoky fires stoked with wet wood. So we pitched our tent under the magnolia canopy instead. Later that night, as the light from our fire glittered off the blank and expressionless windows of the abandoned building, I was to have second thoughts about that decision: this would be a great place to sit up all night and scare yourself silly with ghost stories.
After languidly setting up camp, we decided to remind our legs what they were there for (aside from kneeling in canoes) and hiked one or two of the island's trails. We had no real destination. We were just exploring our temporary realm. It was pleasant to walk in the dappled shade of open woodland through the scrub palmetto understory. We encountered three, yearling deer during our perambulations. They stared at us guilelessly and without any evident concern - quite a tame lot. The wild island wildlife didn't emerge until the cover of twilight.
Turned out this deceptively peaceful Eden had a dark secret. Here, near the heart of the swamp, lay the base of operations for the boldest band of furry desperadoes imaginable. No furtive, midnight sneak thievery for these fellows. Before the sunset light had faded, they came swaggering into camp to boldly harry their new marks and brazenly raid any unguarded morsel. There were only two of them - One-eyed Jack, who limped and seemed to be blind in one eye, and his Big Buddy - but they were obviously hardened criminals who had long been working in cunning concert, like an elite commando team. They started with a bold, frontal attack, swarming ever higher up the camp table in successive waves. (Two raccoons can swarm much more effectively than one.) We repulsed assault after assault and finished dinner with all possible speed. In the trenches, one obviously doesn't linger over tea. We hurriedly repacked food, garbage, and cook kit, but not before Jack made off under the cabin with a bag of matches. We later retrieved them, after he decided they weren't too tasty.
With our packs lashed to the porch posts and pot bags hanging from a canoe thwart, (the canoe being inverted over the tall, paddle rack much as on a Northwoods portage pose) we hopefully imagined that the resident banditos would wander off to look for easier booty. But no, they continued to patrol the perimeter of the camp with a no-quarter-asked-or-given glint in their eyes, pawing and sniffing all the packs and searching diligently for any dropped or neglected bounty. (We had briefly considered caching the packs inside the cabin for the night. But one look at the bottom edge of the screen door suggested that raccoons were equally at home on the inside, unless the door was latched from within.)
Then Bud got wind of the pot bags, dangling deliciously in mid air, and made off to attempt to scale Mt. Explorer. At first he made good progress, getting a tenacious toehold all along the edges of the boat's skid plate. Then, there he clung, stymied over the next move. Eventually, with a great scratching of 'coon claws over fiberglass, he slid off onto the needle duff in a great, inglorious heap of fur. Casting a hasty glance aside to see if anyone had been watching, he managed to gather up his dignity with feline audacity and saunter off into the cover of the trees with the air that he had been planning that pratfall for weeks. Old Jack didn't manage to retreat so gracefully from his attempt. He, too, clung tenaciously, if tenuously, to the skid plate, teetering on the brink of success. Or so he thought. But his summit attempt also failed as he rolled off the canoe bottom and across the sandy clearing in a tremendous, tumbling, back somersault. He slunk off into the woods with no effort at saving face.
The silent, skulking patrol of the camp continued. If a local constable had been within hailing distance, we could have had the lot of them jailed for stalking. They even came right into the fire pit as we sat, tending the fire, as if they owned salvage rights to any half-burned marshmallows found there. All night long we could hear them prowling about the cabin clearing. And in the cool grey before the dawn, old Jack sidled right up to the tent and pressed his nose against the door screen, as if asking when breakfast would be served.
We were relieved to find the masked marauders nowhere in sight when we finally did crawl out of the tent. Nonetheless, I kept a wary lookout while fixing breakfast, not wanting any furry, cat burglar to come crawling up my leg to see what was cooking. The weathered cabin in its sun-dappled clearing again looked welcoming and benign, at least until the next unsuspecting visitors came to call.
Finishing the short portage across Floyd's Island was soon accomplished. Like an unbroken reflection in still swamp water, we found the east approach to the island to be a mirror image of the west. Here the leafy, scented, evergreen tunnel gradually gave way to a tall, cypress alley which in turn yielded to open prairie. Same ruddy water fading slowly to black. Same unseen wings rustling behind the veil of vegetation.
However pleasant it had been to briefly tread terra firma at Floyd's Island, it was nice to come back out into the open today. And Chase Prairie was quite open. It offered long views in all directions out over its vast expanse of water dotted with hundreds of floating, peat islands. It was quite a unique landscape.
Approaching the first of these floating islands, we were greeted by a guttural, rumbling growl. As we passed one island, the growling there would stop, only to be taken up by the resident of the next island. The scenario played itself out repeatedly all the way across the prairie. At times, we heard as many as three growlers at once. Operating opposite from a frog chorus, which ceases whenever anyone draws too near, the growling only began when we drew near enough for the resident master of some peat blow-up to feel his personal space was being invaded and subsided as soon as we had retreated to a respectful distance. Now, I'm not fluent in alligator, but I suspect these were all 'gators saying something on the order of "Go away, this is mine!" Very effective. We heard at least fifteen alligators during our traverse and saw five more. Funny how the alligators we saw sliding stealthily under the boat were a lot less unnerving than the invisible ones we could only hear.
Birds didn't seem to care a bit how many alligators there were, growling or otherwise. They were out in rich profusion - egrets, green herons, great blue herons, sandhill cranes, and white ibises. But it wasn't until the next day that we bagged our birdwatcher's prize of the trip when we spotted an anhinga, flying drunkenly off toward the horizon.
Leaving Chase Prairie behind us, the remainder of our day's route lay through the swampiest bit of swamp we'd paddled. The passages from Chase to Territory Prairie and from Territory to Durden were narrow, twisting tunnels through dense underbrush that closed together just over our heads and grabbed at our paddles between strokes. We frequently found ourselves at a dead stop, trying to maneuver the boat up current around the tight, blind bends. Our paddles frequently struck into soft peat or against hard cypress knees. The trail was strung with spider silks and many a newly displaced spider came tumbling into the boat as we passed. Progress was slow. And though it may have been the third day of December, it was almost too warm for a shirt!
It was a blessed relief to come back out into the open and feel moving air again. Even then, our progress was slow. In this classically swampy stretch, we found ourselves essentially poling our way through the peat bottoms for another mile before we reached water deep enough to sink a paddle in without touching bottom.
Another half mile or so of easy paddling brought us to our home for the night. The Bluff Lake shelter was an aging platform built on an even more ancient platform which was quietly pursuing its more elemental nature down at water level. Like an old bed in a cheap motel, it made everything roll to the center. But it was dry, collapse did not seem imminent, and it offered sweeping views out over the swamp, despite not being situated on Bluff Lake itself. It would have been a marvelous venue for star gazing, had the weather not turned to clouds with a threat of rain.
Instead of watching the heavens, we amused ourselves by reading the shelter log. Here we found the terse, yet riveting tale of one Ms. D___, travelling solo by canoe from Kingfisher to Bluff Lake in early November. Failing to reach the shelter before dark, she had spent a long night in her boat on Bluff Lake proper. This was quite a rational, if uncomfortable, choice and far preferable to blundering around and getting lost in the dark. (Indeed, this was, perforce, the camping method of choice for early swamp travellers before the platforms were built.) But how must her good humor, already sorely tried by whining squadrons of mosquitoes over night, been strained when the growing light of day revealed the roof of the shelter only a stone's throw beyond the lake!
Our own fortunes were far better. We were not besieged by bandits this last night in the swamp. The resident raccoon here minded his own business and stayed demurely out of trouble. Maybe he was on parole. In any case, though he wandered up under the shelter roof to wait out a passing rain shower in the night, he showed not the slightest interest in us or our belongings.
So without any further piracies, we paddled peaceably back to Kingfisher Landing, following (with the occasional help of a compass) those old, peat-cutting canals for the last three miles. After all our claustrophobic clawing through the underbrush the previous day, those canals looked as wide as a freeway. And the deep, clear water made travelling seem nearly highway speed!
Safely back at Kingfisher Landing after cutting our five-day swath through the swamp, we tallied up two otters, three deer, and countless birds and exotic plants but zero creepy insects, zero venomous snakes (or any other kind, for that matter) zero sociopaths, and zero restless spirits, discounting our own. There had been a few mosquitoes putting in a half-hearted, lackluster appearance at twilight as blood-sucking beasts. And all beasts with flesh-rending capacity displayed the most decorous bearing and retiring manner imaginable. Quite a mild-mannered place, actually. And as for the bandits - well, despite their best efforts, we suffered no losses. They all went home empty-pawed from their cover-of-darkness raids. But they all looked so mournful and contrite the following morning, I could almost feel sorry for them. Almost. They were no doubt shamming for the judge in hopes of a lenient sentence or time off for good behavior. I can still see old One-eyed Jack, wandering soulfully down to the Floyd's Island portage landing the morning we left, listlessly working the crowd in hopes of cadging a handout if he couldn't pick a pocket. I'm not sure, but I think he wiped away a tear and waved good-by as we departed. He's probably still there, waiting for the next rubes to come paddling naively into town. Give him my best regards, if you visit. But don't forget to guard your flank.
For more information on Okefenokee, contact Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Route 2, Box 3330, Folkston GA 31537 (phone: 912-496-3331).
