The Miami Herald, Sunday Travel Section, March 27, 1988  

ANDREW CASSEL
Knight-Ridder News Service

ON ROUTE 9336, THE EVERGLADES, Fla. — Nike-Nike, Nike-Nike, Nike-Nike, Nike-Nike.

I was traveling in a two-dimensional universe. Around me and my bicycle was the vast flatness of the Everglades, 100 miles of elbow room, but my exhausted brain had shrunk the world as we pedaled into the wind. For me it had come down to this: a narrow strip of pavement, tired shoulders and the Nike trademarks on the heels of the sneakers of the cyclist in front of me, rising in a panting, right-left rhythm that I matched with lockjawed determination.

We had joked about the wind before leaving Miami: how it somehow blew into your face whether you were going or coming on this 40-mile road through Everglades National Park; how it left even champion Yankee cyclists, trained on the hills of Vermont, with their heads and their quadriceps shaking. Our trip leaders, Judge Arthur and General Jack, had even dubbed this ride the Heineken Mirage Run, based on the visions allegedly visited on wind-battered cyclists somewhere around Mile 35.

But I was still surprised when, heading down among the black mangroves that define the swamp’s brackish zone, the perfectly flat road began to feel like at least a 30-degree hill. A hill with no top to it and therefore no downside reward. 

Even on a bicycle, the ‘Glades has a way of teaching you respect.

The big swamp had fascinated me almost from the day I moved to Miami. In a place where most of everything, from palm trees to people, has been imported, the Everglades is the genuine article. It is not merely a feature of the region, like the Seaquarium or Little Havana; it literally is South Florida.

“There are no other Everglades in the world,” historian- naturalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote in her definitive book River of Grass. Spilling out of big Lake Okeechobee to the north, the Everglades — actually a river 50 miles wide and less than a foot deep — flows over the pitted limestone that underlies the peninsula’s soggy bottom.

‘THREAD OF RIM’

Douglas likened it to a full spoon sitting in a glass of salt water: “The rock holds the fresh water and the grass and all those other shapes and forms of air-loving life only a little way out of the salt water, as a full spoon lowered into a full cup holds two liquids separate, within that thread of rim.”

Several million people have settled on that thread of rim in the last 70 years, and their demands for land, food and water have damaged the life within the ‘Glades. The great swamp’s natural water flows have been channeled, millions of acres have been drained for development, and its wildlife population has been decimated by hunting, pesticides and flood control.

Despite all of that, the Everglades remains a special place, most of its vast wet spaces uninhabited and unreachable by urban man. It is a great, looming presence, a darkness at the edge of town that still, every summer, sends up massive thunderclouds to drench Miami and all its glitter with a daily reminder of just who’s in charge here.

In the cooler months moreover, when the skies calm down and the mosquito population subsides, the area is a tranquil, fascinating place to visit, a vast, flat world of sky and water where wading birds, lazy alligators and short, quick deer find a home. To the visitor willing to slow down — to at least bicycle pace — there is enough there even today to put the Seaquariums and Disney Worlds to shame.

Our group’s trip had begun bleakly, under a spitting February sky that forced us to put on sweats and raingear. Winter days often start out chilly here, but by the time we had gotten past Homestead and Florida City it was already warming up. The toughest among us had cycled all the way from Miami, tacking an extra 25 miles on to the journey. That group included General Jack, who compounded his effort by stashing two six- packs of Heineken in his rear pannier.

The rest of us — a loose affiliation of weekend cyclists with a fondness for bragging and large breakfasts — traveled with only small overnight bags strapped to our racks. We had reserved rooms at the one motel in Flamingo, a tiny village that sits on a dry outcrop at the edge of Florida Bay. We had gathered at the main entrance to Everglades National Park, The park, about the size of Delaware, has only two points of entry for those on rubber tires. One is a 15-mile paved loop road called Shark Valley on the northern edge, left by an abandoned oil-exploration project from the ’30s. It makes a perfect short afternoon spin and is often loaded with wildlife, particularly in the winter dry season when birds and reptiles concentrate around the leftover pools to feed.

But we were going for the weekend, not an afternoon, and so we rolled south, beyond the last of the subdivisions and tomato farms that buffer urbanized Miami.

We began on the park’s high ground, all of seven feet above sea level, pedaling through stands of tall southern pine surrounded by low scrub palmetto.

SEA OF REEDS

A few miles farther along, the imperceptible changes in elevation brought us into the sawgrass region. Take an airboat, or, better, a canoe, and you discover what the Everglades is all about; a huge marsh that clings precariously in a few inches of muck to that crust of primeval limestone. Where the muck has been piled slightly thicker, say by a female alligator burying her eggs, small trees can take root. Eventually these patches grow into hammocks, islands in the sea of reeds that support deer, reptiles and occasionally people.

At the small mound overlook at Pah-hay-Okee (Seminole for “grassy water”), I unpacked my binoculars and scanned the horizon. You really have to stop moving entirely to appreciate the bright, silent beauty of the ‘Glades on a sunny day. A red-shouldered hawk sat on a mahogany branch. Overhead white ibis, their slender beaks curved down, flew in formation. Birds like that used to fly here in much larger numbers. But the population of ibis — as well as that of wood storks, roseate spoonbills and Everglades kites — has been decimated over the decades.

But at watering holes such as Royal Palm Hammock or Shark Valley, dozens of species still gather. Blue herons step gracefully through the tea-colored marsh water, grabbing at small fish with their sharp beaks. Long-necked anhingas dive for their dinner in deeper spots.

The anhingas are among the most dramatic of the ‘Glades birds, since the lack of oils in their feathers forces them to literally hang themselves out to dry. After a dive they sit calmly and regally spread-eagled in the trees, watching the alligators.

Gators have survived better than almost any other species in the Everglades. Though poachers threatened them some years back, the enforcement of laws and the decline of the alligator-skin market has brought them back in large numbers. There is even a small legal trade in gator-tail meat at some of the barbecue shacks outside the park.

NEVER A THREAT

Alligators are unquestionably the popularity kings of the ‘Glades. Tourists nervously pass on gator lore, such as what to do when being chased by one (run, broken-field style) and about how many small pets and children have disappeared abruptly over the years.

In reality, the reptiles are almost never a threat. I once came across one on the bicycle path at Shark Valley, a placid- looking 12-footer with his hind end still in the marsh. He rose abruptly as I approached, but while I slammed on my brakes, he merely reversed position, eloquently expressing his attitude toward tourists.

After breaks for bananas and beer, we cycled on toward Flamingo, passing elegant strands of bald cypress as the road curved south. Within the hour, the first mangrove trees began to appear amid the sawgrass, signs we were nearing the brackish zone closer to the bay.

Eventually, even the sawgrass disappears, replaced by thick forests of mangrove trees. These pungent plants thrive in brackish water, putting down a thick mat of tangled, crisscrossed roots. You don’t want to be caught here in the wet season without mosquito repellent. But we were lucky. We didn’t have mosquitos; we had the wind.

It had come up around the place where the mangroves reached 15 feet high, forming an alley around the road. A few gusts at first, then a steady, insistent blow, causing us to shift our 10-speeds down to hill-climbing gear. By the time we neared the coast, we were strung out along two or three miles, each of us pumping at his own rhythm.

I rounded a curve and came to the Buttonwood Canal, which runs from Flamingo into the interior. From the top of the small humped bridge, the motel and fishing dock stood out against the soft blue of the bay beyond. A squad of brown pelicans passed low overhead, in flight the most streamlined and graceful of all South Florida’s birds. Above, the first streaks of pink had just started to appear.

I stood there, exhausted. General Jack breezed up, grinning, and offered me a beer.

It was the Heineken Mirage at last.

Copyright 1988 The Miami Herald