The (Re)Creation Story

Idyllic chickee sunset on the Hell's Bay Canoe Trail. Everglades National Park. 

In the beginning (of spring), winter lingered on in Chicago. April was drawing near, but still, frozen dog shit adorned the sidewalks, the train wafted aromas that, under the best of circumstances, could be likened to moldy socks, and a bitter wind waited around every corner in ambush. The decline of, well, everything since the Fall of Man was undeniable--blatant, even. I enjoy the city, but I am not of the city. No one would ever accuse me of being a martyr, either, so I did the logical thing to do under such unpleasant circumstances--I left. Florida sounded nice, a place where I wouldn’t have to incarcerate my thighs with pants or my feet with shoes.

To shorten a long story, I cocktailed St. Patrick’s Day, returned home and threw away my shoes, which were coated in some horrible seafoam green substance contrived from the union of Irish car bombs and green beer. The next morning, I decided to quit and shortly thereafter, we skipped town. It was a prime time to leave.

My companion was Tripp, my mate, my lover, my partner in crime. Tripp was formed not from the dust of the ground, but on the sand of some Florida beach. That’s close enough. He had to wait a little longer than Adam, though, for his mate to come into existence--16 years, in fact. But I like to think the wait was worth it--save our differences when selecting gas station junk food binges (in its own right, a significant test of any relationship), a more compatible duo there never was.

We loaded his temperamental Delica with camping gear and began a return to our Eden--which, ironically, was named Hell’s Bay. There, we would paddle the chickee trails that wind through the mangrove flats and brackish bays of extreme south Florida.

Sign at Hell's Bay put-in 

Our journey began by going north before heading south, so we could procure from my childhood stomping grounds boats, cuddles from our dog-child Wally, and some decadent cheesecake from my sister, Bob. We bade Wally a morose farewell and powered through our food coma until just north of Indianapolis, where we passed the night on the dark side of a Walmart parking lot--a requisite part of any annals of dirtbaggery.

We continued south the next morning. Adam may have been tasked with assigning names to the animals, but we took it on ourselves to christen RVs instead. This was not difficult, for RVs already have names emblazoned down their sides. We just took the liberty to attach the word “anal” to whatever that word was. Our favorite christenings involved the words “conquest”, “sandstorm”, and “fun finder.”

Chattanooga was where we spent our second night, sleeping in the van, parked in the driveway of Tripp’s supervisor. It would be in poor taste to consider our actions that night (nearly all of which were also in poor taste) appropriate for consumption by the general public, so I will refrain from recounting them here.

The next morning was Easter, April Fool’s. Our hangovers were no joke. At one point, I was standing barefoot in a rest area parking lot double-fisting fried egg sandwiches Tripp was cooking on the camp stove there--the best of times. The drive south through Georgia and Florida was fairly uneventful, just hundreds of miles through a dominant scenery of billboards catering to old people. “Eye floater removal!” “Exit now for RV supercenter!” “Heartbeats can be detected at 18 days!”

We stopped at a Publix for provisions. Classically, we forgot most items on the list and bought a host of things that hadn’t ever been there, all the while ogling the gallery of bad botox and shopping cart chaos. (turns out the average Florida retirement community resident drives a cart about as well as they drive a car.) Our most ludicrous purchase was a bottle of grapefruit juice, justified on the grounds that Tripp needed a pee bottle. It was 2 for $7, so, naturally, we walked out of the Publix with two bottles of grapefruit juice.

Ibis and egrets along the drive to Flamingo. 

The drive into Everglades National Park towards Flamingo was hot, quiet, put on pause when we pulled over to appreciate a host of egrets, herons, spoonbills, and storks unleashing a blitzkrieg on a drying pool. When we rolled into Flamingo Campground, the palms were silhouetted against the tail end of a sweet sunset. Soon, Orion was up overhead; the forlorn cry of a Black-bellied Plover pierced the heavy air. We went to sleep quickly; slept through till sunrise.

Later that morning, I excused myself from vanwife duties to go for a run, which conveniently transferred said duties to Tripp. An Eden story is incomplete without a serpent, and this account does not disappoint. I was on the return leg of an out-and-back, when I almost planted my foot on a fat, grouchy Eastern Diamondback. It hissed; I squealed. All in all, I can’t say this snake was much of a temptation.

We squared our wilderness permits away at the park office--free, because it was low season. We then went down to the marina to look at crocodiles and manatees, which we found quickly. In the heat of the day, we lounged for a bit in the van; Tripp borrowed my binoculars to enhance his viewing opportunity of some underdressed female walking across the parking lot on her hands. Florida wildlife…

Mangroves and brackish water at the put-in.  

The next day, we actually set out towards attaining our Adam and Eve chickee experience. The water at the launch was slightly salty. So were we. Through a sequence of terse interactions, we readied ourselves and our gear for launch. A journey doesn’t really begin until you remember the first thing that you forgot. In this case, it was the headlamp. This was compounded by the fact that we had already paddled several bends into the mangroves, and also by the part where I forgot to buy a headamp while we were still in civilization. I was in my canoe, Tripp in his kayak--we’ve both been with our fair share of people and come to the conclusion that it’s best to paddle your own boat.

Tripp and I making our way through the mangrove channels

It was hot and sunny and the water was brown, mangroves scrubby. I hadn’t anticipated how featureless it would be, the sort of place where it’s easier to get lost than attempt to figure out where you are. To my unconditioned eyes, there was an utter lack of reference points. We paddled eight miles through narrow channels and choppy bays. When we reached our chickee, we hauled our boats up on the warm floor and promptly took off our clothes--all of them. It would be more than 24 hours before we put them back on.

I’m not exactly certain what actually unfolded that afternoon, a sure sign of it being a good one. It was hot. We were naked. Tripp talked about swimming, then abandoned the plan when, after dumping some sardine oil through the cracks of the chickee floor, a shark swam in that would be inaccurate to describe as “small.”  We weren’t really hungry--whatever it was we ate was almost definitely not more elaborate than refried beans straight out of the can, which might as well be the tree of life for a dirtbag Adam and Eve.

Sunset from the chickee our first night out.

When evening came, we realized that though in the creation story, the sun rules the day and the moon the night, at Hell’s Bay, mosquitoes rule the night. As the sun began to dip below the mangrove tops, this horrendous drone began to emanate from their depths, swelling into some underworld chorus as the demons of Hell’s Bay asserted their dominion. Fortunately, we were prepared. Tripp rolled into his tent and I tied the last knot in my mosquito net. Laying there separated from the whining of at least several hundred mosquitoes clustered on the net was surreal. I trusted they would not find a way to me, and most of them did not.

Morning came, the mosquitoes went--the changing of the guard. Tripp and I began our Everglades morning routine, which was somewhat modified from our typical of boozy coffee, waking up in each other’s arms, and a heart-attack inducing breakfast. It was too hot to sleep together, too hot to be hungry, and too hot for it to be wise to bring booze into the bush. Still, the morning was splendid. We did not wear clothes. We ate refried beans out of a can. The mosquitoes did not bite. Tripp fished, wearing sunglasses, a straw hat, and nothing else. Save a sunburn on his ass, he caught nothing.  

Too soon, leaving for the next chickee could not be pushed any longer. When we did, delightful, menacing thunderheads pushed towards us on a stiff wind. Rather than muscle across the roiling bay, we opted for the back route through narrow mangrove channels. Overhead, two Swallow-tailed Kites rose against the front line; one dove, once, for Tripp’s jig as he cast, swooping back up into a soar before it could come close. The afternoon felt like how one in south Florida should.

We edged into a nook in the mangroves to wait out the first wave of rain, then continued to the chickee. As we rounded the corner, it was undeniable that we were no longer in the Garden of Eden. We had neighbors; no longer were we the only people in our world. This placed our naked times on hiatus.

Our chickee-mates, however, were the best sort of neighbors (well, Tripp was hoping for girls in bikinis, but…) They were Andrew, a well-spoken professor type and his two younger sons Lars and Nikola. They were staying out just one night, and likeable folks. We ate (refried beans from a can), we conversed across the boardwalk that separated the two chickee platforms, we appreciated the eerily still evening, choosing to ignore the advancing front line that was immense and white.

The literal calm before the Great Flood. 

A rainbow arced off to the north. In the Bible, after the Great Flood, which comes shortly after creation, God sends a rainbow as some sign of reconciliation. This night though, the rainbow came before the flood. There had been a decision made before the flood, too--a decision to not bring the rain fly at all. This decision had inspired Andrew and co. to leave theirs off as well. The front line blasted towards us; Andrew and co. retrieved and enlisted the fly. If ours had not been somewhere in the Midwest, we would have done the same.

The storm hit, an enduring deluge. The chickee shook under the wind; Tripp announced that it was raining inside his tent. He spent the next hour bailing it out. If we’d been better prepared the storm would have been one worthy of appreciation. However, we were better equipped for getting hypothermia than we were for staying dry, so we didn’t exactly expend any energy on digging its beauty. I spent most of the night waking, trying to turn the dark sky into predawn, waiting for the sun to rule the day and warm the earth--yearning for this, actually. My clothes and hammock remained wet until the sky began to lighten.

We were not heartbroken when Andrew & Co. left the next morning, rejoicing in our return to Eden with the discarding of our clothes. A dolphin swam around the chickee, breaking the immediate silence with its breaths. It gave us quite a show--rolling, splashing, cruising for a good spell. The sky was big, tropical, dotted with a montage of fluffy clouds reflected in the brown, flat water.

We took a brief departure from refried beans with these splendid sandwiches constructed of desiccated Ezekiel Bread, sardines and curry, and coconut peanut butter. Despite the skeptical looks we receive when we relate this to front-country friends, they were amazing. That night, we had no neighbors--another night waiting out the mosquitoes; another blessed daybreak that drove them back into the mangroves.

Tripp and I were discussing staple backcountry topics like our urine color over a can of beans the next morning when I heard an approaching motor. Before I had a chance to cover myself, the powerboat had cut around the buoy at the mouth of our bay. It rushed towards our chickee. I was woefully unprepared for such an encounter and, like Eve after the fall, was suddenly very conscious of my nakedness. It is only appropriate that our visitors were those carrying the responsibility of judging the righteous and the wicked out in the glades--the parkies. Their names were, I shit you not, Officer Money and Officer Mullet. Tripp and I were, for once, doing nothing wrong and soon Officers M&M went on their way.

Soon, we too had to be on our way. On the way out, we passed two parties of two each--they all were red, sweating, unprepared, unhappy. We were glad we would not be chickee neighbors with any of them. They were what I call destination people, obsessed over reaching some endpoint that, ultimately, exists because they created it. They then worship its achieving.That’s not my Eden. I’ve been trying to become less of a destination person lately, acknowledging the joy in relaxing in a hammock during the heat of the day, or of savoring coffee and a good book, or the walking barefoot down a sandy trail into the morning mist--or sitting naked in a chickee with my lover eating cold refried beans out of a can. That’s my Eden.

When we returned to Chicago, though May was now drawing near, it was still cold; the train was still a vessel of questionable smells. And yet, though my address was the same as before I'd left, I was in a better place.