10 Best Mosquito Netting For Patio

Best Mosquito Netting For Patio in 2023

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Vacations in Georgia and Florida: Wilderness Camping in the Okefenokee Swamp National Wildlife Refuge

To enter the heart of the swamp you need a canoe and wilderness gear: drinking water, mosquito netting, stove and fuel, sleeping bag, tent.

The swamp is much studded with lakes, prairies, and grasslands; with islands and hammocks; with stands of cypress. The swamp is also home to countless species of bird and fish: mosquito fish, scalyhead darter, pirate perch, the endangered gopher tortoise and red-cockaded woodpecker. It is also home to tens of thousands of alligators. Its waters leach though beds of peat moss; the moss supports the enormous stands of cypress. Stop in at a restaurant near the swamp and you'll find entrees that reflect the swamp's reptilian mix, southerness, and ocean terminus: turtle, alligator, frog, crawfish; shrimp etoufee' and au gratin; crabmeat casserole; and finally that most southern of dishes, country-fried steak. One can't live near the swamp without throwing something of it into a dish The swamp's waterlogged earth trembles, hence Okefenokee's literal translation: Land of Trembling Earth.

To enter the heart of the swamp you need a canoe and wilderness gear: drinking water, mosquito netting, stove and fuel, sleeping bag, tent. You sleep out on tent platforms on stilts, to keep you out of range of alligators; crossing the swamp via canoe is a five or six day trip.

It is here, on a five-day canoe trip, that I came face-to-face with an alligator big enough to chew up a sports car. It lay there in a drainage slue silent as the weight of the tens of thousands of years that have passed here.

The encounter began simply enough. I am prone to leg cramps on long canoe trips ---- those hours of sitting on the buttress, my legs folded beneath that most uncomfortable of chairs, my rear --- and because I knew on this trip I would be in the canoe or on a tent platform for half-days plus at a time, I took a walk along the swamp's southern perimeter.

The swamp is mostly landlocked here, solid underfoot, its floor sand and slash pine forest; were it not for the eerie, heavy silence of the early hour, the landscape's remarkable flatness, the hanging Spanish mosses, the pall of the small, smoldering fires that the rangers had set with drip torches and the wide, waterfilled canals on either side of the road, I could have been anywhere flat and dark. A New Jersey coastal pine barren. The pine-needle paths of the Blue Hills. The Savannas of Ocala National Forest --- any number of flat and silent, heavily wooded areas.

The alligator lay half-submerged in a deep section of a miles-long culvert which bordered the swamp like the frame of a picture. Seeing an alligator for the first time, one cannot but assume the creature is dead. You will never see such implacable motionlessness in a living creature unless it is a spider; in mid-April, when I was visiting, this motionlessness appears even stiller, as the alligator in Georgia is just then emerging from its torpor of semi-hibernation.

First there was the snout: two round holes at the end of a log, it appeared, as protuberant and bulbous, and simple, as the original Mickey Mouse's original ears. Then that low head, the closed eyes with their distinctive duct. Yes, alligators smile: the corner of its mouth, near the hinge, curled upward into an impish grin. A foot curled in, the joint as big as an andiron. Finally the belly, round and spread-out and firm, and the long back's box-of-chocolates.

I looked for signs of breath: a huffle in the belly, a hiss, a cat's paw in the water just ahead of the snout. The sun was up, revealing the alligator's brownish tinge and the of the tannin of the water it lay in. It was a twelve-footer. It was the biggest living thing I had seen supine in the wilderness.
When we hike, wander or camp, there are many places where we can encounter the ancient and the threatening. The alligator, primordial as a cockroach or a horseshoe crab, is as a reptile an invertebrate which predates even the notches and landforms of the White Mountains or the sandplains of Georgia. I measured its length by heel-toeing past it along the road and counting how many times I heel-toed my feet.

Then there was that impulse, the reflex of the boy who sees the odd creature road-side: the urge to throw something at it. I went to the wood beside the road, picked up the largest pine cone I could find. I threw the cone and waited.

The results were pretty much exactly what you would expect.

To plan your overnight wilderness camping trip in the Okefenokee swamp, visit that National Fish and Wildlife Service's web page devoted to the area. Currently, as of late 2020, maximum trip lengths through the interior have been reduced to two nights, due to recent wildfires.

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For more outdoors content on fishing and small-boat adventures, see my content-rich blogs North American Kayak Fishing and Sea Kayaking Dot Net.