Tread lightly

A wild tangle (Williams family photo). ROGER WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

In any wild tangle of Florida swamp or marsh you can see the once upon a time, a confit landscape slow-cooked in its own fat juices over a century, a millennium, an era or an epoch of geologic time.

Or you can see a way to survive and profit.

Maybe both.

On the Orange River in east Lee County, once called 12-Mile Creek because it winds roughly that far out of what used to be the big wet of the western Everglades, the citrus growers of a century ago floated their harvested fruit to a packing house at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River. The oranges bobbed downstream beneath the webs of spiders so thickly woven from one forested bank to the other that the space between the trees could sometimes seem impenetrable, the old timers said.

The Caloosahatchee itself, westward bound from near Lake Okeechobee, gathered numerous other tributaries to her as she traveled to the great Gulf of Mexico.

Before the growers or the cattlemen, the Orange had drifted through the Florida landscape for something on the order of 5,000 years, roughly the lifespan of the Everglades where tens of millions of wading birds and others once adorned the world in a feathered glory.

And before that, the river or something like it traversed drier landscapes, places where camels and mammoths, saber toothed tigers, giant sloths and even horses carried on across the continent as if they had all the time in the world.

Horses, for example, popularly known as a gift to the Americas from the Spanish some 500 years ago, inhabited the continent for almost 55 million years, the fossil record reveals.

But about 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age when the Gulf Coast lay as much as 300 miles west of its current location, all of them disappeared.

Paleontologists say they became extinct, which isn’t entirely true.

That fact is obscure to newcomers here, slogging their ways through the hot wet mosquito tortured mess (as it may seem at first) of a cypress slough or swamp — of the pine flatwoods or scrub palmetto uplands — intent on raising cows or citrus for food. Or, more recently, raising a sprawling development for selling to floods of newcomers.

You have to be taught to see it. To recognize incongruously that we live not just on top of the past, but with it. In effect, we inhabit a lively cemetery, one we would do better not to desiccate or destroy.

I met a swamp lover who knew all that almost 25 years ago. She offered me a job I didn’t take, so instead she showed me the truth of this.

First she slapped me out in the swamp, as I then thought of it, and not with a lot of affection. I’d waded through swamps before, sometimes carrying significant weight, and they weren’t my favorite places. I probably figured at the time that if somebody could put a tidy little suburban housing development there, with neat little sprinkler fed, herbicide-soaked lawns and a couple of palm trees in the front yard, maybe a solar panel or two, more power to them. More money, too.

A lot of people have thought that and some still do.

In this case, the swamp where she led me was smack in the middle of the Orange River. We didn’t walk along it. We didn’t stand together and gaze fondly at the slow-flow tannic water sliding silently past us as it had for 5,000 or 10,000 years.

Instead, we climbed in and joined it — joined all those patient millennia as we sloshed upstream or down, sticking close to the banks exposed by the dry season.

Exposed to reveal, what, though: Sharks’ teeth? Is that possible in fresh water far from the upstream line of brackish?

The very different teeth of horses or camels?

A roughly cubed tooth nearly the size of a cantaloupe, resembling a torte in darker and lighter chocolate-colored layers?

No way.

Yes, way.

That tooth was the thing that taught me to see — to see not just a wild tangle of wet woods, a scrawl of sorts that meant only a hard slog, but the beautifully written calligraphy of a nature at once delicate and impermanent but enduring. If we let it be.

I married that swamp lover 24 years ago this month, a time too short to register even a flicker in the history of the Orange River. For a wedding present, though, she gave me a mammoth’s tooth she’d found in the Orange, a paradox of a gift I still treasure.

We were there last week with another swamper, our youngest son, staring into a wild wet tangle of woods, when I asked her what she saw in there where she longed to wade.

“I see dense sabal (cabbage) palms whose boot jacks, those broken-off fronds, shelter hummingbirds and snakes, and whose tender inner buds nourished hungry bears and enterprising Crackers,” she said.

“I see maples and pop ash, and beyond the palms I see cypress up to their knees in the slow, swampy headwaters of the Orange.

“I see the life we’ve shared wading there: stingrays and blue crabs, gambusia (mosquito fish) and little bass and bluegills. And I see the creatures who existed long before: the mammoths and camels whose teeth we find in the bed and banks.”

Then we came home to the wedding gift, that mammoth tooth.

It suggests at once both permanence and impermanence.

It also suggests we live on sacred ground, a burial site on a majestic planet where we would now do well to tread lightly. ¦

The post Tread lightly first appeared on Charlotte County Florida Weekly .