A Wilderness Waterway to Reading

After recommending to you nine ways to get more books into your life in the coming year, yours truly is off to a poor start. In the first week of our new year I read not a paragraph with my eyes or my ears (six audiobooks are languishing on my iPod). Instead, from January 1st through 7th, I paddled the 100-mile Wilderness Waterway through Florida’s Everglades National Park, together with my 21-year-old son, Cal, my brother-in-law Bryan Granger, and my adventurer friend Robert Kennedy.

When does a well-read life call for fewer books but more action?

For a dozen years my buddy Rob and I had talked about paddling this waterway, which is renowned among paddle aficionados but unknown by almost everyone else, even by people living within 100 miles of it in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. It’s almost funny trying to explain this to area people.

“The Wilderness Waterway?” they ask.

“Well, it starts in Flamingo…” Blank look.

“Flamingo is the southernmost town in Florida if you don’t count the Keys.”

“Oh…” followed by another blank look.

“Then you paddle northwest through this wilderness area, a National Park actually, also called the Ten Thousand Islands, until you get to Everglades City….”

Blank look.

“Everglades City is the southernmost town on the west coast of Florida—south of Naples and Marco Island.”

“Mmm…”

That the Ten Thousand Islands and Wilderness Waterway are terra incognito is perhaps one reason they're preserved. There may have been more visitors a hundred years ago. That’s when hunters shot unknown thousands of Everglades birds for their exotic feathers, destined to adorn the hats of fashionable ladies. (Chevelier Bay is named after one such hunter.)

While the desolate bays and rivers are quite close to millions of people, they are hard to get to. A few hours in a high-speed boat can get you there, as long as it’s the right kind of boat—like a 17-foot skiff with a special jack plate mount for the outboard that allows the prop to just brush the water, whose depth is often measured in inches.

Once there, you pretty much have to stay in the boat. Those thousands of islands are impenetrable mangroves. It would take you several minutes just to crawl onto the net of roots that serve as shoreline. I don’t know how you’d stand without risking a sprained ankle, or worse.

Anyhow, don’t feel left out if you’ve never heard of it. Few people other than avid paddlers and fishermen have. Plus a growing number of people in government who are being informed by a litany of environmental groups trying to repair its ecology. 

I blame books for getting me into this mess…and my buddies

Like other strange areas of the world, the Ten Thousand Islands serve as the setting for some fine literature. Randy Wayne White’s enormously enjoyable novels in the Doc Ford series, such as Mangrove Coast and Shark River, exhibit a detail of the area earned the hard way from White’s early career as a fishing guide. And Peter Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy was set in these murky waters. His penultimate Shadow Country won the 2008 National Book Award. 
Matthiessen’s Killing Mr. Watson was one of the tipping points that made me want to paddle this area. There’s even the Watson’s Place campsite where you can spend the night, if you don’t mind sleeping on a muddy beach once owned by a murderer.

What transformed a mere desire to paddle this area into the actual deed were my three partners. Cal, after six months of Mandarin immersion in Beijing, wanted the opposite of big-city pollution and people, and reminded me of the idea that had long been on my bucket list. Then there was my brother-in-law, Bryan, who is a genius at preparing for, and thriving in, the outdoors.

Finally, Rob Kennedy, mountain climber, triathlete and extreme sports enthusiast. Normally when Rob tells me his plans and asks me to go along I say, “That’s okay, you go ahead and I’ll stay here to dial 911.” On the trip, the four of us agreed we were the only four people we knew who would actually do this trip and—for the most part—enjoy it.

 

I also went to the Wilderness Waterway for the reason Thoreau went to the woods—to see what it had to teach. What did I learn?

I sure did learn to appreciate hot showers, and the comfortable mattress I sleep on (after six nights on a 1/2 –inch foam mat over wooden planks). I have a new appreciation just for being outside at nighttime without a constellation of mosquitoes orbiting my head and gators 18 inches below my feet.

And on the positive side, I also have memories of the three of us paddlers, tired and sore, facing yet another headwind and deciding to just power our way across Broad River Bay’s choppy waters with chants and whoops and hollering like crazed men. (Cal and I looked at each other through the spray, saying with our eyes: Remember this.)

Thoreau’s tonic of wilderness had some time to work on me: hour after hour of only the sound of water and wind and of mangroves, mangroves and more mangroves. I began to wonder whether wilderness, by definition, must be monotonous. Must you have mile after mile of something, like glaciers or desert or forest or mangroves, in order to qualify as wilderness?

I have this warm feeling that lingers now of just knowing this place exists. This place of distant green shores, of wide open water and unmolested sky—this place where you can go all day without seeing another human outside your party and not even a sign of humanity, save what you yourself brought. Could I be missing the place already?

I just downloaded Randy Wayne White’s Ten Thousand Islands onto my iPod. Now I can go back there at the hands of a master storyteller.

Sometimes we read, sometimes we do. Let me know what you think, dear reader, about your own reading and doing, and reading some more. I want to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Comments

[Ada (Mom/Grandmom)]

I am righteously impressed by my adventuresome son and grandson!

[Bob Wientzen]

Great to read about ...but not sure I want to do it!

[Claire]

While not completely cut off from humanity, I get the same wilderness feeling when traveling in the western states. This was brought home to me when I returned to the desert southwest after a 7 year absence. As we drove the interstate, and I absorbed the mountain ranges and vast empty plains, I felt I had come home.

While I can live anywhere, there are some places that feed my soul just by existing. My husband and I love to go fishing in such areas. Again, while we are never far from civilization in the areas we frequent, there are moments when the illusion of aloneness, and the grandeur of nature, help me remember my place in the universe and in God's plan.

We cannot always live in our moutaintop moments but we do need them to put life in perspective and to refresh and renew.

[Don]

A friend, who is disabled as a diabetic, sent me a link to your blog. He is an avid reader, but his disability keeps him from being a doer.
I may be nearly at a cusp of the reading and doing conundrum. I have had to slow down for a time to heal from skin cancer and the effects of sciatica and tennis elbow. Though I have always been an avid reader, my time to read is usually shortened by my work as a guide. Since I am away from home on trips to wild areas, when I get back home there are always a multitude of chores and other family obligations that keep me from reading, though I usually have a number of books sitting around to peruse during bedtime and odd moments. Maybe "talking books" would optimize my reading. The confines of age will eventually necessitate a return to my childhood years, when I put in large portions of time reading, unencumbered with obligations. But for now, though I may have to slow down from time to time, I will revel in the doing; sedentary activities will have to take second place.

[mym]

Before I was diagnosed, in 1990, with fibromyalgia, I was an active kayaker, runner, backwoods camper. Then I became too ill to walk around the block. Cut to 10 years after diagnosis. I became aware of therapeutic horseback riding. If my two legs couldn't take me to places where cars can't get to, maybe four legs could. Well, I found my sport and my passion. Since then I've taken two wilderness horseback trips in the Colorado Rockies and ridden the back country everywhere I travel. Wanting to be the best rider possible, I quite literally read every book about horseback riding in our very good library. And bought some more books. And subscribe to a dozen horse e-newsletters. I even write two monthly columns for an e-magazine about horses.
Then there's that other delicious bit of reading and doing. When I travel, I always arrange a ride and I read as much as I can about where I'll be riding, the history, the environment and, best, novels set in the area.
This, for me, is the synergy between doing and reading.

[Sallie]

My cycles of reading and doing typically center around home. I find a book with wonderful ideas for design, decoration, or storage and then I try out a few of them at home. There's definitely a pattern of feeling the urge to read (absorb) and the urge to purge (act on new knowledge). Sort of like breathing, I guess--in and out.

[Jeaneene]

After living in southern Louisiana for 4 years, I became, let's say frustrated by the apathy of the locals regarding saving the coastline, or what is left of it.
I'm still puzzling over why they are so unconcerned. It seems the conservationist viewpoint books are all written by non-natives. I've come to believe that exploitation by the rich has been the norm for so long there, that they aren't aware that there's any other way. In some cases, if we don't get out there and experience these fast-fading places, we'll only be able to read about them. Books are wonderful, but they are a luxury of time. When we have it, they nourish us, but when we don't, we shouldn't replace doing with reading. You went to experience life. Now you can write about it, so others can read about it. I enjoyed your piece.

[Sueannyoung]

Delightful blog! I believe that reading and doing must go hand in hand so we can dream and experience all of life....like peanut butter and jelly, salt and pepper, dawn and dusk, running and walking, pondering and being mindless...and as I have shared with my eight children, life is a combination of nouns and verbs! Don't just be either, be both!!! So, for my husband and I life alone is an adventure but sometimes it is kayaking at Sanibel Island and sometimes it is perusing a bookstore!

As a matter of fact, even though we live in Dublin, Oh, my husband's office is downtown Chicago so one of our favorite pastimes in the Windy City is to go to Starbucks, wander down to Levenger to find a great "find" and cross over to Borders to sit and enjoy a book!

Recently, when we decided to "do" instead of just "read" we ended up in Miami for a long weekend! Sweet time in Coral Gables...found the Starbucks, then the Barnes and Noble...but something was missing! As we enjoyed dinner, I said the only thing that was missing was a Levenger! :) My husband assured me there were only three stores, so he thought, in the United States and teased me to find the closest and he would take me! (Yes, after 25 years there is still love in the air!) And ta dah! I teasingly whipped out my trusty phone, looked up Levenger and found one an hour north of Miami at Boca Raton! :) So off we went on our adventure of Florida, in rental car instead of kayak, to find a Levenger!!! Thank you for providing a means of adding a little "delight" into the lives of those of us that love both books and paper! So far, the younger children are only allowed to "dream" by way of your catalogue but we are doing our best to woo them into being Levenger followers some day! :) Looks like our next adventure, though, will include a kid or two! May you continue to embrace and cherish both experiences of life...especially with your family! You will never reget it!