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| Apalachicola National Forest |
In
Apalachicola National Forest in the Florida panhandle, there is a place where
the Florida Scenic Trail, the Sopchoppy River, and a bridge all meet. We camped
out there, drifted off with an assist from a sixer of Jai Alai and a vespers of
Carolina Wrens and Northern Cardinals. One of the rules of the road is that, if
you’ve been off it awhile, it takes a day or two to reabsorb its rhythms.
Bodies and mindsets stiffened by convention (that is, the constructs abided by
when occupying a space with a fridge, shower, and toilet) become supple again.
When we’ve both forgotten what day it is, Tripp and I take it as a sure sign we’ve
acclimated. Usually, this does not take long. Here on the banks of the
Sopchoppy, I decided we were truly on the road again—not just camped on it. The
windows were down, but even if they’d been up, we still would have heard the
peepers; they were that loud.
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| Putative Put-in on the Sopchoppy |
Dawn came,
gray and moody. Our plan had been to paddle the Sopchoppy—a slender blackwater
river trimmed with limestone bluffs and live oaks. But the river was low, and
within the very small span we could see from the bridge, there was a dubious
downed log. Extrapolated to the 14-mile float, this amounted to many dubious
downed logs. We imagined, aloud, portages riddled with snakes, fire ants, and
spiny plants. We remembered, aloud, a canoe epic from the previous fall. It
took place in the Upper Peninsula and encompassed dozens of downed logs, a
capsizing, and several wolf spider hitchhikers. In fact, when I spilled into the
river, an initial thought was “well, at least the spiders in my boat will be
gone now.” And wolf spiders seem more innocuous than Florida spiders.
After
spending most of the last four days in the car, the idea of being outside it
had serious appeal. The previous afternoon, we’d scouted Sopchoppy access, and
driven the route I’d run to retrieve the 4runner after takeout. Bagging it all
was a big letdown. We mourned our loss by, fittingly, making a pot of coffee in
a cemetery, then continued down quiet forest roads brewing alternate plans. Apalachicola
Forest is mostly a tree farm—but a very attractive one, heavy on open pineland,
where some trees are decorated with white rings at the base and Red-cockaded
Woodpeckers up top. In early morning, these great woodlots are wrapped in fog;
the charred trunks shoot up past verdant palmetto. Blue-gray Gnatcatchers
wheeze everywhere and Busch Lite, Bud Lite, and Natty Lite cans are ubiquitous roadside
residents.
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| Red-cockaded Woodpecker |
The
alternate plan evolved: we were at the southern edge of Bradwell Bay
Wilderness. Tripp would leave me on the side of the road, I would run to the
northern edge of Bradwell Bay Wilderness, and he would drive its periphery. The
Florida Scenic Trail transects this parcel and the stretch is described,
inspiringly, as several miles of trackless swamp. Wading in water where you can’t
see your feet is just something that comes with the territory. That sounded a
little more adventurous than I felt, so I set out in the opposite direction of
the swamp and hoped for the best. Girded with an I.D., a wad of toilet paper,
and my phone, I felt prepared for anything.
It was six miles to the next road
crossing; to keep pace, I cycled through all the different scenarios that could
kill me. This is an important step in acclimatizing the Michigan brain to
Florida’s charming landscape. I could step on a snake (I saw one; we were afraid
of and zero threat to each other.) I could die of heat exhaustion. (It was
sunny, which Michigan had not been for at least a month.) I could be hit by
lightning. (Disconcertingly early in the endeavor, rumbles began advancing from
the west.)
I did not
die, and was relieved to emerge from Bradwell Bay Wilderness just as Tripp, with
typical flawless timing, pulled up at the road crossing. He apprised the
situation—an abundance of sweat, a scarcity of showers. Diplomatically, he
suggested we find a spring and take a rinse. There are a lot of springs in this
part of Florida. Most of them had faults, like trespass-only access or tourist
invasions. We settled on one that was near the headwaters of a river, ran our
plan by a couple locals. The takeaway was that the spring was pretty, but also
the destination for problem gators from the nearby state park. Undeterred, we
put the canoes in, paddled downstream for about a mile, turned up a tributary,
and, arriving at the spring, hauled ourselves and our boats up onto a little
dive platform. Then, we saw a gator, and momentarily lost courage. The physical
need to be clean was not much less than the physical need to not be eaten by a
gator, so we jumped in anyway. It felt so wrong to leap into the water towards
the gator—but it felt so right to be clean.
The spring
was perfect. Beautiful, too—the water was blue-green, cool and incredibly
inviting; stately cypress and amorous Red-shouldered Hawks were everywhere, and
the only other human visitors were a couple boaters who came, saw, and went as
most sightseers do. Back at the put-in, we mixed up a batch of black beans,
rotel, and parmesan cheese and ate it on a dock. Our drippings made a nice
addition to the splattering of heron shit.
Tripp found
us a campsite—maybe the best campsite, ever—that he declared to be a remnant of
Bartram’s Florida. It truly was a portal
into a past Florida, a forgotten river landing framed in cypress dripping
Spanish moss. There, it was primeval: otters cavorted, moorhens cried from
vegetation mats and Barred Owls caterwauled up and down the floodplain; mullets
splashed into the night, like self-propelled skipping stones. Like the good
things in life, the site was free—and, like the good things in life, it was
perhaps not entirely legal. But we fell asleep to dirtbag dreams that, maybe,
were just an extension of the dirtbag dream we’d lived all day.
