A Golden Guide to Everglades National Park!

Our book today is a little gem: the “Golden Regional Guide” A Guide to Everglades National Park and the Nearby Florida Keys (this one is the third printing, from 1962, when Warren Hamilton was the Superintendent of Everglades National Park), written by Herbert Zim and wonderfully illustrated throughout, not only with crisp (albeit tiny) photographs but also with dozens of color drawings by Russ Smiley.

Like all the Golden Guides, this one was very much intended to be tucked into a pocket and brought along outside – in this case, out into the flat vastness of the Everglades. In fact, the last time I was there, one of my travel-companions was carrying a shiny (then) new edition of this very book, and there were times when I could have sworn he was paying more attention to it than to the wilderness all around him.

Fortunately, my other traveling companion on that particular outing (which lasted only two days) was an old, old friend of mine, somebody with whom I’d explored the Everglades and the Florida Keys at much greater length long before that guide-consulting companion had been born (and since he’s now retired and living on bottled air in Phoenix, the rest of you can just assume that all of this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far away). She and I consulted no guidebooks, although she was a good deal more comfortable in her surroundings than I was. Southern Florida in summer is a pestilential hell-hole of heat, humidity, and bugs, a hammock-and-sawgrass nightmare of steam and muck and monsters that were already old when the dinosaurs walked the Earth. I have paddled by canoe all through the waterways of the place, camping inland on the rare humps of dry land and camping on beaches on the Gulf side, and over time and over repeated visits, I reached a grudging but sincere appreciation for the otherworldly beauty of the place.

This Golden Guide takes a typically no-nonsense approach to that otherworldly beauty. It opens with a brief panoramic history of Southern Florida and the Everglades – Lake Okeechobee, the Anhinga Trail, the enormous variety of wildlife, and the outer reaches of the ecosphere, the 200-mile arc of the Florida Keys, stretching from Miami to the Dry Tortugas (I’ve sailed over every inch of those Keys, but I did most of that sailing in the sole company of a brace of beagles – not an experience I’d recommend to the faint of heart). The Guide rightly declares that the 300 species of birds here are the Everglades’ true glory, but even so, it hardly has any choice but to spend a page on the malevolent stars of the wetlands, the American alligator and the American crocodile:

Crocodiles are much rarer than alligators in this region. They live in the salt marshes and mangroves of the Park and Keys, sometimes going out into Florida Bay. They are thinner, with a narrower, pointed snout. Some teeth are exposed when their mouth is closed. Crocodiles are more dangerous than alligators, but are too rare in this country to be the problem they are in Asia and Africa.

My travel companions and I saw a few alligators during our two-day jaunt, and my old friend and I saw many, many more during our various much longer trips – eight-footers, ten-footers, and in one rather harrowing encounter, a monstrous creature much longer than our canoe, a thing probably sixty years old. That brief, glancing mention that crocodiles are more dangerous than alligators is this Golden Guide’s only semi-concession that alligators themselves are dangerous, but you only have to be around them for five seconds to feel five millennia of human civilization just slide away.

Actually, the whole place feels that way. I know of hardly any experiences on Earth more inherently despairful than watching the sun set from a tent deep inside Big Cypress Swamp and feeling the most oppressive darkness in the world closing in, teeming with vigilant aliens.

Foremost among those aliens are the alligators, but right behind them would be the innumerable snakes that infest the area. My old friend insisted during every visit that these creatures were actually beautiful, but she wasn’t bitten by as many of them as I was. The Guide is typically sanguine about that possibility:

Snake bite is more easily prevented than treated. Wear heavy shoes and use care when walking. All snakes bite. The bite of non-poisonous species may show a U-shaped pattern of tooth marks. Treat with an antiseptic. Bites of poisonous snakes often show two large fang punctures and perhaps other teeth marks as well. Learn first aid before you go. Keep the patient quiet; apply a tourniquet; cut and suck the wound. Notify a park ranger or get the victim to a doctor immediately.

There’s actually a somewhat stern tone running through a good part of this Guide – a tell-tale giveaway that despite its rosy, tourist-friendly ultimate purpose it knows perfectly well it’s describing a hellscape that wants nothing more than to consume all these clueless pink-skins tromping around with their cameras hanging around their necks:

There is little danger in the park except for that which people create themselves. Stay on trails and roads. Dress appropriately. Be prepared for mosquitoes in summer. Check charts before boating and fishing. Much of the park is wild country. Do not underestimate it.

I very much doubt I’ll ever be back to the Everglades or the Keys, so it was extra-nice to find this Golden Guide at the Brattle Bookshop the other day. The Brattle’s ecosystem doesn’t bother me at all – I suspect I’ll be back to it, no guidebook needed.