The Flight of the Iguana

by David Quammen

  “Do we want them up?”

  The first of the rains began, which seemed inconvenient only until we stopped trying to stay dry and surrendered ourselves to the cooling effect. A drenching in rainwater seemed preferable to a drenching in sweat, after all, and the temperature had plummeted right into the eighties. Then the sun returned, bringing with it the deerflies. Slim chartreuse vines groped outward like green snakes from the overhanging brush, slender stalks reaching for light, for support, for the brush on the opposite side of the channel, for a passing canoeist, striving to get hold and tighten down, to knit closed on daylight and motion. The vines were called smilax, Crawfish said. It was his swamp and he knew the names of everything. He said the buds and the terminal leaves of the vines were sweet and tasty.

  “You can eat them.”

  “You can eat them,” said the Red Ace.

  My hands had started to swell from the deerfly bites. A curious new experience for me, who could not even spell anaphylactic shock. I remembered the tale Crawfish told about a city dude he was once required to evacuate out of the Okefenokee by moonlight. This fellow had coated his whole body with layer upon layer of the fiercest insect repellent; then, when the afternoon heat got serious, started dunking his terry-cloth hat and letting the cool runnels trickle down his face. Soon he had one eye full of N-diethyl-meta-toluamide, but the doctors just managed to save it. A little parable, Crawfish seemed to imply, about where insect repellent would get you.

  We made camp an hour before dark at Maul Hammock Lake, a modest patch of open water clotted over only partly by water lilies and another big-leafed floating plant that Crawfish called spatterdock. Our appointed campsite was the Maul Hammock platform, a bare structure of planks and pilings just big enough for three tents and an Optimus stove and a billion mosquitoes. It looked like a little lakeside dock, the kind you would scamper down to from the summer cabin and use as a diving board if you were a kid—except here in the Okefenokee there was no real lake to dive into (unless you craved to pack your nostrils and ears full of peat), nor adjacent dry land on any side. The platform, at day’s end, was it. Step off it, try to stride out into that tangle of floating shrubbery that passed for the landward side, and you would sink to your waist. Lie down in your sleeping bag on some comfortable patch of sphagnum moss, and you were liable to wake up drowned.

  “Who would like wine?” said Crawfish.

  “Yes, yes, yes!”

  It was a pert but amusing Chablis in a large plastic jug bearing a label that read ANTIVENIN.

  That night I thought and dreamed intermittently about missing digits. Thanks to the mysterious toxic deerflies of the Okefenokee, my hand had continued swelling and I had waited too long to transfer my wedding ring; now the ring was bound on at the base of a finger that looked bloated and pale as a boiled bratwurst. I did not want to see this particular ring, which means a lot to me, taken off with a Swiss Army hacksaw. But I had also begun wondering, more than idly, which would give first—the gold band or the blood flow to that finger. It put me in mind of a story Crawfish had told about the time he was snakebit and decided against seeing a doctor.

  Crawfish, you must first understand, is one of those singular folk born with an incurable affinity toward reptiles. He is a self-taught herpetologist of professional rigor and a passionate admirer of the animals he knows. Every lizard, to him, is a creature of arresting beauty. Every alligator is like an old friend. Every snake is a poem. The particular poem in question here was a small copperhead.

  He found it one day on the long woodland drive that led to his house. Captured it easily and, holding the snake in his left hand, resumed driving with his right. He had handled thousands of poisonous snakes over the years, including a pygmy rattler that lived in his bedroom when he was a kid. But this time, according to Crawfish, he got careless. Climbing out of the vehicle, he relaxed his grip slightly and the snake jerked back, nailing one fang into Crawfish’s middle finger. “It was like a hot poker jammed in there,” he told me. “Worst pain I’ve ever felt.”

  He turned down the horse-serum antivenin because a human body sometimes reacts drastically to that stuff; a friend of his once in the same situation had nearly died from it. He didn’t even phone a doctor. “I like to let my body try and heal itself,” Crawfish told me in the most unassuming and matter-of-fact manner; he would have dismissed the whole subject if I hadn’t prodded him for details. “Heal itself if possible,” he added. “Within reason.” On this occasion his arm swelled hugely, all the way up to the shoulder, and stayed swelled for three weeks. Evidently he judged that to be within reason. His finger puffed out bigger than he had imagined a finger could puff. Then it turned black. “I thought it would probably just fall off.” But it didn’t. After three months the finger was back to normal, except for the lingering numbness near the tip.

  “What happened to the snake?” I asked.

  “You mean did he get sick?”

  “I mean what did you do to the sucker?”

  “Oh, we kept him around as a pet,” said Crawfish. “Just awhile. Then let him go.”

  So this was not a man you would wake from sound sleep with squeaky talk of evacuating your fat little finger. By midafternoon the next day, my ring could be quietly moved.

  • • •

  We paddled for several hours through an open area called Sapling Prairie, near the northern edge of the swamp. With clear lines of sight for miles across the horizon, and little chance that a predator can come up by surprise, Sapling Prairie is one of the favorite habitats of the swamp’s biggest birds: three species of heron, several kinds of egret, several ibises, and a good population of sandhill cranes, whose loud ratchety calls sounded at three hundred yards like the complaint of a rusty barn hinge broadcast by loudspeaker.

  When they say “prairie” in the Okefenokee what they mean is a large shallow marshy pond, a zone bare of trees and bushes but covered almost entirely by grasses and other small foliage such as spatterdock, floating hearts, a couple of species of orchid, the carnivorous sundews and bladderworts. In the prairies, water stands two or three feet deep over a substrate of peat, the current is nearly imperceptible, and the only pathways are those kept open by canoeists and alligators.

  Large rafts of peat occasionally rise up from the prairie bottom, lifted by the buoyant force of methane gas, a by-product of anaerobic bacteria at work on the decomposition of the submerged plant muck. Sundews especially seem to favor these risen rafts, colonizing them early and supplementing the marginal diet of available nutrients with insects caught in their own sticky, fistlike leaves. After the sundews, other small plants and even pine saplings get aboard, stitching out a network of roots, until the raft may become a soft, anchored island.

  In the distance across Sapling Prairie, giving a skyline to the flats, are another sort of island-like feature called cypress domes. Cypress is a water-loving hardwood with seeds that require long submersion (as well as a dry interval) before they will germinate, so the clusters of cypress originate without benefit of a raft, sometimes growing right up out of the peat through a layer of standing water. One tree takes hold, dropping seeds, offering some stability of conditions for other recruits, and a colony of cypress expands outward over the marsh, dome-shaped against the sky because the oldest and therefore largest trees are at the center. Eventually, such a stand will become carpeted at the base with a tussocky layer of mosses and peat and brush—almost but not quite like solid ground. The cypress may be joined by black gum trees and maple and several species of bay. Local slang refers to these patches of soggy forest as “houses,” possibly because they provide habitat for a big share of the swamp’s mammalian wildlife. But the Okefenokee, with its meager supply of real solid ground, is not nearly so hospitable to mammals as it is to birds and reptiles and amphibians. Most of the mammalian species are small: cotton mouse, gray squirrel, marsh rabbit, raccoon. Flying squirrel. Evening bat. Big-eared bat. Seminole bat. Animals that don’t need much solid ground.
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br />   Swimming and flying are the optimal modes of travel here. Climbing is also an option. Walking is problematic. It’s hard to imagine how even a small deer could support its seventy pounds over those tiny hoofs on a platform of floating peat. When a creature as large as a human strides through this terrain, the ground bounces and the tall trees shudder. The name Okefenokee itself comes from old Indian words—ecunnau finocau—that meant “the trembling earth.”

  * * *

  “Watch out for cottonmouths above in the bushes,” said Crawfish.

  “You got it, buddy,” said the Red Ace.

  “And be careful when you step over fallen logs.”

  We were bushwhacking through the understory of a cypress dome, sunk to our knees in a lush patch of yellow-green sphagnum, clutching at saplings with each step to avoid sinking farther. In the softest places we had to knee-walk, using our shins like snowshoes. The water was warm, the sensation was surprisingly pleasant. Hiking this way, we could cover a mile in about two days. Crawfish was barefoot.

  Lichens in four colors were wrapped like gaudy decals on the trunks of loblolly bay trees. There were some amazing shades and configurations of shelf fungi. In the center of the thicket we paused to admire one especially majestic cypress. It was a hundred feet tall, naked and straight along the trunk, its canopy hung with long beards of Spanish moss—very possibly it had been the patriarch of this whole dome. Then we slogged on in a wide loop back toward the boats. Suddenly Crawfish reversed course, backing hastily out from under the limb of a bush.

  He was clutching the side of his face and wheezing in pain. By the time I got near him, though, he already seemed calm again. His left eye was beginning to swell shut.

  “It’s okay. Only a wasp. Yow. Stings pretty good, but what a relief,” he said. “I thought I’d been tagged by a snake.”

  “What’s the first aid when a cottonmouth bites into your eyeball?”

  “I can’t imagine.” He looked at me cheerfully with one good eye and one gone slimy and red. “Just don’t put a tourniquet on my neck.”

  His body would heal itself. Once after a trip in the Ogeechee River drainage, Crawfish had told me, he pulled fifty-two ticks off his body, every one of which had already gotten itself plugged in. Around that time, he suspected, he must certainly have had a case of tick fever. All the symptoms were there. But his body had healed itself.

  • • •

  No more rain, no more deerflies, no more oppressive heat and humidity—just mild sunshine and the gradual awareness that this swamp journey of ours was somehow being smiled upon.

  The scenery had gotten even more exotically gorgeous after Sapling Prairie, when we turned south toward the very heart of the Okefenokee on a channel that led in and out among cypress domes. The cypress themselves seemed to thrive in this area; they were lofty and stark, exaggeratedly fat where they came out of the black water but tapering quickly down into long roof-beam trunks, Spanish moss dangling all over the high branches. The smilax vines continued to reach out at us along narrow runs, but now Red and I were reaching back, letting navigational chores lapse while we snapped off those sweet little tips, popping them down like huckleberries. There was a noticeable current again, upon which we moved easily. The surroundings were halcyon, but best of all, for me, was having the Red Ace there in the front of the canoe, intermittently rummaging down into his bucket of cameras and zoom lenses and fancy filters, coming back up with some combination of that hardware in front of his face while he tracked the latest alligator on a leisurely swim along the channel before us, the latest heron on a laborious takeoff and then a slow graceful walk across the sky. I was glad to have Red here in the swamp because it had been too little and too long. I had barely seen him since 1972.

  Certain people can make the most pleasant enterprise seem doleful; others can turn any grim misadventure into at least pretty good slapstick. The Red Ace is of the latter group. I had laughed through some of my life’s dreariest moments in his company. I could describe the time he split my scalp open with one crack of an exploding all-day lollipop, an event that occurred onstage during a high-school-production melodrama in 1965. I bled on my Buster Brown suit while we went ahead and sang “Never Hit Your Grandma with a Shovel.” I could tell you about the West Side of Chicago in 1968 and a neighborhood gang that was intent on frightening off a commune of do-gooder white boys. I could recount the one about The Man in the Towel, late at night in the labyrinthine corridors of the Penn Station YMCA, 1969, with the Red Ace and me literally barricaded up in a five-dollar room. And there were the few weeks he slept on the floor of my garret in England, during the winter of 1971, while he tried to decide whether to fly home and propose marriage to a certain lady and I groped for a plausible excuse to drop out of graduate school. But never mind all that. Just take my word. Space doesn’t allow doing justice here to those episodes, and anyway this is a story about—at least mainly about—the Okefenokee Swamp.

  During the past dozen years we had seen little of each other, Red and I. It was a matter of history and geography. Time and change. The movement of waters along an imperceptible gradient, dividing to follow different routes to different seas. Then again, though, it wasn’t really so gentle as that implies. Something ended abruptly in 1972.

  What was it that ended? Not the friendship. Not just our youth or his bachelorhood. Not just my romance with academia. It was the sixties themselves, according to my theory, that ended in 1972.

  Now I know some pundits argue that the sixties ended at Altamont, in December of 1969, when a Mick Jagger song finally resulted in murder and the band played on. Others would claim that the true end came in April of 1975, at the moment the last U.S. helicopter lifted off the roof of a building that had been the American Embassy in a place now named Ho Chi Minh City. I assert otherwise. For me the definite and unmistakable end of the sixties—for whatever they had been worth, and God only knows—came on that evening in November of 1972 when the network computers announced, just minutes after the polls had closed, that Richard Nixon had squashed an earnest, unfortunate man named George McGovern, on whose behalf I had gone AWOL from all aspects of my own life. And of course I was just one of many.

  Me, I slept that night on a pile of leaflets in the back room of a McGovern storefront in suburban Chicago. I used my seersucker politico jacket for a pillow, next morning dropping that into a trash barrel. My reaction within ten days was to depart the civilized U.S., heading back to England and then to Africa and then eventually, still farther, to Montana.

  Yes I was young, and yes my political metabolism was hysterical. I was angry and worried and saddened—everything but surprised. But I also count myself as having been lucky: The abrupt end of the sixties may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me, because Montana certainly was.

  Neither Red nor I got back to southern Ohio for that fifth or tenth or (if there are such things) fifteenth high school reunion. I heard he was married and then later not and teaching tennis and then not. He was back East in a town that he himself had always celebrated for its grim ugliness. He was steady, but there were no giveaways of good fortune. He endured solitarily through a run of bad weather, of the personal variety, that went on just too damn long. It seemed to me like unfairness. I invited him, in a tone that verged on browbeating, to come out and fill his lungs with Montana air. But that never managed to happen. I suggested he move out permanently (although adding to the number of Montana residents, even by one, is a responsibility I don’t take lightly). Moving wasn’t on. Still he needed—and deserved, it seemed to me—to fill his lungs with a new sort of air. Any sort. Shuffle the deck, give a crank to the kaleidoscope, get some fresh alignments and juxtapositions. This was all unsolicited diagnosis by me, the Dutch uncle. A new sort of air.

  Finally I said: Meet me in south Georgia two months from today, and we’ll go out and get lost in the Okefenokee Swamp.

  The Red Ace said: How could I possibly refuse?

  • • • />
  Which brings me to another story that Crawfish told in the privacy of the swamp. He didn’t push these stories forward, understand, as though he enjoyed talking about himself. On the contrary. No, it was simply a matter of memory doors opening and anecdotes emerging as a certain swamp-bound but genuine rapport grew up among the three of us. And Crawfish, I learned, was a man of multiple doors, with a luminous little memory behind each.

  This one was about being electrocuted. It happened when he was fourteen. (A hard year for him, the same year he shot an arrow through his own wrist with a device called a Hawaiian sling. But that’s a different story, and not one that illustrates the human body’s capacity for self-healing.) The doctors in this case of electrocution honestly thought he had killed himself, at least temporarily. They suspected that his heart was not beating during the time he sailed through the air.

  He was in the upper branches of a tree, doing merely the sort of foolhardy and routinely life-threatening things that fourteen-year-old boys used to do in trees. Leaning too far, he reached back for support and grabbed hold of a wire. The wire was carrying ten thousand volts. The tree was wet. Zap: legally dead, through that long dreamy moment while his body fell forty-five feet to the ground. “I had the sensation of floating,” said Crawfish. “I saw myself floating there, my body in the air. Dead.”

  But he was a lucky young Crawfish, missing the picket fence by a full three feet and hitting the ground hard. That impact on landing—so the doctors hypothesized—must have started his heart beating again.

  The moral, I suppose, is that if the tree had been smaller his death might have been more permanent. The moral is that you never know what it might be, causing your lungs to fill with new air. It might be Richard Nixon. It might be the Okefenokee Swamp.

  • • •

  As late afternoon was turning to early evening, we came into an area called Big Water, which is a lake by the Okefenokee system of figuring, though in some ways seems more like a river, yet, in real justice, should not and cannot be reduced to either of those categories. Big Water is a thing of the swamp world, and you would find its equivalent nowhere else. It was the loveliest spot Red and I had seen or would see in the Okefenokee, and in its own style probably one of the most magical wild places on the continent. It was also high on Crawfish’s private list of Okefenokee secrets, and though he presented it to us with quiet pride, noncommittally, later we knew that he had been gratified by our appreciation. Here in Big Water was where the alligators came out to greet us.