Shannon Costello

By the numbers: 2 nights camping, 2 nights in hotels, 60+ confirmed mosquito bites on my legs (oops on forgetting the repellent on Sunday’s hike)

Best moments:  long hours outside, watching all those brilliant stars Friday night, hiking in the rain, tree & bird identification, piles of alligators basking in the sunshine, dolphins in a feeding frenzy, vultures pecking out the eyes of dead fish, spotting multi-colored snails, early mornings with the mist rising and the sky flushed pastel…

Silliest moment:  after a totally inedible cooking disaster, CJ spreads out a bandanna, pours out the wheat thins, and calmly suggests we thank God for the food…

Best meal:  dolphin stuffed with crab meat and topped with a cream sauce and mango salsa, vegetables and tropical rice pilaf on the side…mango cheesecake for desert

Most disorienting:  waking in the middle of the night in a tent, feeling warm, and checking one’s watch to see that it is January…

I like getting to know a place, including its trees and birds.  In this one country we have such a variety.  A mangrove forest is supposed to be one of the hardest to get through.  They grow in water.  Even from great heights they send down shoots that will anchor in the ground below the surface of the water.  A fairly thin root (an couple of inches) feels solid when you push on it.  When the trees are thick you can’t proceed by boat or by wading because there isn’t room.  There is no dry ground and it is difficult to move from root to root because the roots are curved, of different heights and thicknesses, and the branches are so low that even if you find a spot to stand up in, you couldn’t take a step.  The strangler fig is also a pretty cool tree.  It starts out as an small plant on the host tree and sends down powerful roots that eventually choke the host to death, leaving the strangler fig with a clear view of the sun.  Contrast trees like that with a grove of sequoias or redwoods…

I hadn’t realized how important touch is to me when I’m getting to know a tree.  I had to hold back because I wasn’t good at identifying the poisonwood tree.

The coolest bird is the anhinga, or snake-neck bird.  It has webbed feet, yet can grip branches well enough so that it is comfortable perching in trees, where it sits with wings outspread to dry.  It slips into the water and swims, completely submerged.  When it comes up for air it pops up its head and part of its neck while still swimming- a very odd look.  It skewers fish with its bill, which it then attempts to swallow whole.  I watched one throw a fish in the air and then catch it in an attempt to position the fish to that it will go down properly.  We saw lots of other cool birds- multiple types of herons, egrets, ibises…but the anhinga’s feet…!

Once we walked down a pretty path that allowed us stolen glimpses of a mangrove-lined canal.  Who knew what we heard screeching back there.  I suspect that the Everglades are hard to appreciate fully by land.  Unfortunately, we don’t have enough kayaking experience to try a multi-day trek through the water trails.

We only spent about 24 hours in the keys.  (Incidentally, I had no idea that was where key-lime pie got its name- sad, huh?)  It is kind of cool to drive down a road with blue-green water on either side, pelicans sitting on the bridges, and cormorants on the power lines.  And forget sparrows- ibises beg for food at the picnic tables.  We did a little kayaking in Coral Reef State Park.  I can steer much better in a single (even though my first move upon being pushed off from shore was to ram ingloriously into the mangrove roots on the opposite shore).

The keys have a resort-y, vacation-y kind of feel.  Lots of bright colors, restaurants and hotels and laundromats with words like “flamingo” in the name.  Lots of advertisements for swimming with dolphins or para-sailing or bi-plane rides.  There’s a price for all of that, of course.  The buildings are built with rising seas in mind.  I could picture the land in a hurricane, water swirling ominously around the pillars of a building, lawn chairs floating in the surf, and royal palm trees bent over by ferocious winds.  I can do without the resort feel and the hurricane threat.  A great place to visit, but nice to be back again…