Breaking the Pandemic Wall

Getting away from people has become a way of life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some in South Florida flock to a neighborhood park or take a solitary walk along the seashore. But others choose to blaze their own trail in the one, true wilderness close by: the Everglades.

And what better time to break the pandemic wall, when it’s still the “before time” of fewer mosquitoes, cooler breezes and fields of wildflowers under the pines. It’s also the dry season, when wading birds can most vividly be seen, seemingly walking on water in the sawgrass prairie.

For the uninitiated to this spectacular national park, there are two approaches to the Everglades from Miami – south or west. One chilly, sunny Sunday, I chose west on Tamiami Trail (SW 8th Street), which starts on Brickell Avenue and stretches far into a landscape of endless sky.

No book or brochure or news article can tell the story of South Florida better than Tamiami Trail, I think. Each mile is a cautionary tale of how Florida’s 20th-century desire to conquer nature has given way to the 21st-century realization that our survival lays best in surrendering.

Tamiami Trail is the road carved out of muck and coral rock that began in 1916, with workers battling mosquitoes and rattlesnakes, enduring excoriating heat. It is an engineering marvel that brought both coasts together while ripping the Everglades apart. With the road came a levee that dammed (and also damned) the “River of Grass,” blocking the life-giving water from flowing south – convenient for agriculture and development, but devastating to the ecosystem. In the last decade, that dam has been broken with the building of several miles of “bridges,” an Everglades skyway of sorts that has freed the deeper waters of sloughs to flow sweetly toward Florida Bay.

It is a road that lets you time travel through Miami’s history, beginning with the environs of the Tequestas and then homesteaders William and Mary Brickell on Biscayne Bay to the suburban developments of the 1950s, where Tamiami Trail widens for commerce and housing, lined by old motor court motels and modest strip mall shopping centers.

It is a road that keeps widening with each new generation of development, reaching six lanes in one direction alone near Florida International University. After that, the last-chance grocery stores and gas stations of the outer residential areas get replaced by fields of exotic Melaleuca trees and Australian pines.

At Krome (188th Avenue), the road narrows to the two lanes that carry you through to the Everglades, Big Cypress National Preserve and onto the Ten Thousand Islands of the Gulf of Mexico, as it reaches the west coast of Florida. Finally, this is the wilderness I have come for.

The airboat ride signs start about then. “Everglades Safari” “Alligator!” “Explore Your Nature,” they tell us. But I ride on.

At mile 40, I officially enter Big Cypress National Preserve, where the sawgrass prairie yields to a whispery forest. The 729,000-acre preserve, established in 1974, is a freshwater swamp ecosystem, both tropical and temperate, that is home to the endangered Florida panther.

On this particular day, the air is crisp and cool. The cypress trees are dry, dotted by epiphytes, draped in Spanish moss. Among their bare branches, white egrets perch, brilliant and bright against a light-blue cloudless sky.

As the trees close in from both sides, a more intimate relationship to the land and water begins. A wider, wilder world immediately envelops you. It’s hard to believe it could have all been destroyed decades ago.

Right about here, in the 1960s, a development of hotels, malls and suburbs was envisioned. Behind the tree line, down a nondescript road, is the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport – a remnant of what could have been the world’s largest “jetport,” to be surrounded in time by a new center city that would inevitably branch out to either coast. The tarmac is still there, a haunting reminder of how close we all came to losing the exquisite and delicate beauty of this preserve, and a warning of how it could happen again.

And then, as I absent-mindedly looked up into the sky – I see a flock of roseate spoonbills. It would be the most glorious sight I’d see all day. Even though somewhere down the road I know there’s the hulking statue of a Skunk ape at the museum, the promise of a ghost orchid at the Fakahatchee Strand, the delight of a stone crab lunch in Everglades City, nothing will compare to the sight of those graceful birds. While rare to see wading, they are more fabulous to find in flight in their cotton candy-pink glory.

Blaze your own trail on the Tamiami: Visitor centers, trails, bike paths and tram rides, Miccosukee cultural sites, Skunkape Headquarters museum and, of course, airboat rides, make for a great day of adventure and respite.

Learn more about the Everglades and Big Cypress National Preserve at nps.gov/ever and nps.gov/bicy.