Organ Pipe National Monument

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Caroline Wise and John Wise at Organ Pipe National Monument in Ajo, Arizona

A quick day trip to the Mexico border in Southern Arizona to visit the Organ Pipe National Monument.

Organ Pipe National Monument in Ajo, Arizona

Just some simple sightseeing, checking out what we might see, such as this Organ Pipe cactus.

Organ Pipe National Monument in Ajo, Arizona

Being careful not to get to friendly with the thorns and paying attention that we don’t step on a rattlesnake.

Organ Pipe National Monument in Ajo, Arizona

This must be some kind of mutation. I wonder if an acanthochronologist might be of help here beyond telling us the age of the cactus.

Organ Pipe National Monument in Ajo, Arizona

Taking in the desert, looking for flowers, and admiring the many forms of hostility this type of landscape can offer.

Road side old gas station, restaurant, and motel somewhere in southern Arizona

Stopping in small towns and trying to stumble upon something of interest. A nice drive instead of sitting around at home.

Grand Canyon – Day 2

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Sunrise at the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona

It’s barely light out here on the edge of the Grand Canyon National Park. We stayed the night at El Tovar, ensuring we’d be close to the rim in the morning.

Jutta Engelhardt, Caroline Wise, and John Wise at Sunrise at the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona

It’s a bit cold out here, even in May, though not so cold as on previous visits when we had to bundle up in blankets from our room to stay a little warm.

Sunrise at the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona

We’ve all seen these images before, maybe 100s of times, but when you are standing here in person, they take on an entirely new meaning. So, while my photos are not award-winning masterpieces of dramatic art, they serve us perfectly as reminders of the moments we were here to witness yet another sunrise over the Grand Canyon for ourselves.

Sunrise at the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona

The Canyon fills with light rapidly once the sun is fully over the horizon though pockets of dark linger deep within.

Navajo Arts & Craft stand near the Little Colorado River Canyon in Arizona

The dream catcher at the very center of this photo is destined for Jutta’s friend Linda back in Germany.

Walnut Canyon National Monument in Arizona

Having accomplished what we set out to do at the Canyon we visited Walnut Canyon National Monument near Flagstaff to bring Jutta to yet one more place of Native American history.

Within a couple of days, Jutta was on her way back to Frankfurt, Germany, and once again, I am simultaneously happy to have my time and privacy back and sad that someone who enjoys the United States as much as my mother-in-law can’t just hang out with us and see even more of the magnificence that defines the natural beauty of our country.

Casa Grande, Arizona

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Casa Grande National Monument in Coolidge, Arizona

After a few days off to recuperate, Jutta and I took a day trip down south to visit Casa Grande Ruins National Monument in Coolidge.

Mission San Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona

Followed by a stop at Mission San Xavier del Bac in Tucson further south.

Jutta Engelhardt and John Wise at Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley, Arizona

And then, finally we stopped in at the Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley. I think my mother-in-law wears the hard hat better than I do; she looks like a serious engineer in that thing.

Across the Southern U.S. – Day 10

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

This is not getting any easier. The deal is that for the past couple of days, these blog entries are not coming from notes such as the extensive highly detailed notes that accompanied the first week of our road trip. Instead, I’m trying to pull details from a journey we made 15 years ago. At times Caroline lends a hand as her superior memory, while not infallible, is often carrying details I had long forgotten. What I can tell you about this photo is that the horse and pasture yummies are all from Tennessee, and the reason I know that is from the time stamp on the photos and that the next photo shows us crossing into another state.

Welcome to Mississippi, where we are just dipping our toe into the state to gain bragging rights to having visited the north and south of the state. Our visit was pretty brief because we had to head back up to Tennessee and into Memphis specifically.

Not knowing if we’d ever visit Memphis again, we had to take this opportunity to visit Graceland, home of Elvis Presley and his final resting place.

For my mother-in-law, this isn’t exactly her idea of a great place to visit as she never developed a fondness for kitsch, nor was she a big fan of Elvis. As for me, this is an interesting look into a kind of prison that had likely become a madhouse. While others will feel a kind of closeness to the King by being among his possessions, all I can see is a place designed with the hope of being able to escape fame. During better times, this may have been a partying refuge where Elvis could entertain and share with friends and family, but then there’s the madness, isolation, and depression that came with his drug abuse and not being able to lead a normal life due to his bizarre fame.

I’d like to imagine that Sister Rosetta Tharpe once dined here with Elvis as he said thank you for teaching him what rock ‘n’ roll was going to be. While Elvis won accolades, fame, and fortune, she will live on in rock history as the pioneer who defined the sound of the electric guitar as an essential part of a music genre that has endured for the better part of 50 years.

Funny that I’ve enjoyed walking in the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, along with my share of castles, palaces, historic homes, and not-so-famous dwellings, but the feeling here is of a kind of anguish I felt at Dachau concentration camp in Germany. I don’t mean to imply that some kind of atrocities occurred here or that Graceland and Dachau should necessarily be compared; it’s just the sense of foreboding heaviness that has me ill at ease walking through this man’s home. Was it ever his intention to allow his refuge to be a museum where even his privacy is sold to those who want just a little more of him?

Once I took the thread of finding despair here at Graceland, the self-guided tour became too oppressive. This wasn’t helped by the fact that everyone was moving around in silence as visitors were given headsets to listen to a narrative about Elvis’s life here. The feeling of isolation was probably appropriate, considering that the majority of Elvis’s time here would have to have been alone. Taking off the headset, I was still feeling awkward, except now creepiness walked with me as the zombies in the house shuffled silently about, robbing the place of chatter and laughter.

The King’s wealth let him buy a lot of things, including a kind of immortality, as he entered the history books, but he couldn’t buy happiness. I was 14 when he died a hero to many who had worshipped a man they had had fond recollections of from the late ’50s to the mid-’60s. To me, he was cool in a “black and white era” kind of way but was a tired, bloated buffoon as I was busy worshipping the throne of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. All these years later, I can’t help but feel sorry for Elvis and the majority of others who have found fame in America, the double-edged sword where money carves away privacy, leading to megalomania or deep depression.

Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas is our next stop. Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to bath in. While Bathhouse Row is historically awesome and architecturally beautiful, the baths are long closed as the age of therapeutic mineral baths gave way to shock therapy. Just kidding about one replacing the other, but the fact remains that public baths have fallen out of favor, so we won’t be doing any restorative swimming this fine day.

It’s pretty here in Arkansas. I don’t know what I expected, but this is beating those expectations. Okay, I know what was on my mind, more of Deliverance and squealing pigs. It’s sad this impression of the Southern United States as being one of backward, intellectually handicapped people that have been stereotyped ad infinitum during my lifetime. The idea that a bunch of “Gomer’s” lives down here is not my creation or sole interpretation; it is an image played across America millions of times a year. Why is this? Because the majority is hostile to anything less than total conformity, and those who control cultural hegemony are quick to label those that they find to be different. To be different is to be hated, and that’s just the way it is.

Good thing trees are harmonious and carefree without time to hate on others or choose to avoid certain neighborhoods due to prejudice. Instead, they grace our landscape, shade us, help produce oxygen, house us, warm us, and only on rare occasions try to kill us. For the most part, they offer us a beautiful backdrop and a place to carve our names to demonstrate that we will forever love someone.

Flowers, on the other hand, offer no permanence to carve a message upon, though they, too, indulge us by provoking our thoughts of love and romance.

A garden gnome riding a snail? Whoa, this is the most perfect thing we will EVER buy in Arkansas and it is coming home with us. I know what you are probably thinking, “Hey, is that symbolic of you riding the snail, John?” I’ll just offer you a sly grin for my answer.

Horses in lush pastures are nothing but love and are effectively the sunset and bookend for this day in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas (pronounced Arkansaw).

Across the Southern U.S. – Day 9

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Maybe there should have been a sense of disappointment that we woke to overcast skies, but here in the land of hollows (pronounced holler in the local Appalachian dialect), it feels fitting that a kind of foggy mystery is hugging Earth.

We needed to stop at the Looking Glass Falls on Route 276 on our way to the Blue Ridge Parkway. The upcoming road is one of America’s most iconic thoroughfares. After having driven the Natchez Trace Parkway a few years ago, it was our dream to visit this other major historic road that glides through the countryside, offering visitors a view of this small part of the United States untouched by man and machine or parking lots and commerce. We’ll only see a tiny section of the 469-mile parkway that travels from near the middle of Virginia almost to South Carolina, but even a brief firsthand glimpse of the incredible beauty is better than nothing at all.

The road ahead cannot be known as it is shrouded in fog and beyond the horizon; if there is one, it remains unknown and incomprehensible. Maybe this sounds ham-handed and as if I’m using heavy poetic license to make something more of what should be obvious, but this is my adventure, and without embellishment, romantic notions might be lost on cold logic. Who needs objective truths when we are talking about flights of fancy, where the imagination is filling the void that lies around the corner?

Dewdrops on flowers, now here’s a great setting to help fill in the gaps. Ornamental decorations can add color to the tales being woven out of what some may call ordinary travels, though there is nothing ordinary about stepping into our world. The television, on the other hand, is a poor surrogate for having “taken” someone to an exotic location, as the viewer cannot know the hushed tones and delicate soundtrack of a forest with a stream in the distance or the stillness of a viola just before a drop of water falls from its petal.

In the mid-1980’s while also in the middle of my existential angst period, I was busy consuming every word of Friedrich Nietzsche, and on the cover of the Penguin edition of Ecce Homo (Behold The Man), I saw the scene above. Now here it is 17 years later, and existential crisis is a distant problem that gave way to an anti-foundationalist Romanticism (idealism for those who’d appreciate not having to look that up), and I’d rather just soak up the beauty than consider the hopeless masses of humanity who will never be able to appreciate these moments where aesthetics, scientific phenomenon, history, nature, and poetry meet at the mountain top of our intellects to produce emotional sacrifices on the altar of life. The photo was taken at the Wolf Mountain Overlook.

Caspar David Friedrich

This scene titled Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich from about 1818 was the cover that graced Ecce Homo. Courtesy Wikipedia.

The arteries of life crisscross this landscape and all I can see are trees and streams. My eyes are blind to the microbial world, and even with what I can see, such as the mosses and leaves, I cannot identify precisely what they are. Why is this information about our natural world seemingly so unimportant to us humans? It’s not enough that the scene is beautiful; we owe it to our short lives to understand and know the earth we live upon and within.

Being this close to another National Park, there was no way Caroline and I wouldn’t take the time to peek in.

I suppose that trying to brag that we’ve been on the Appalachian Trail would be nothing less than disingenuous, even though we are standing on that very famous trail. The fact of the matter is that we are right next to a parking lot where the A.T. crosses the road, and so we’ve “hiked” about 100 feet of the 2,180 miles of the trail. For the math nerds out there, we’ve covered about 0.000008% of the A.T. and only have 99.999992% more of the trail to hike.

Uncertainty is never fun, and so while I think these are maitake or hen-of-the-woods mushrooms I wouldn’t bet money on it or cook some up and gobble them down to find out.

Ah, yes, that is blue sky beyond the trees.

Wow, a hornet up close and personal. I’ve been told that these flying demons are aggressive beasts, but being only inches away from it, I’ll bet I was more nervous than it was. While it may pack a wallop of a sting, it also packs a wallop of evolutionary efficiency in its design as it looks to be a perfect form considering its life among the rest of us living things.

While the hornet is free from rent, obligation to pay taxes, or barter its time for food, we humans, on the other hand, are often bound to conformity. This march to social conditioning often starts here in the church, and while some may argue that it is a foundation of our ethics, I believe we are naturally moral beings and that the church does much harm to propagate complacency in ignorance by reinforcing our laziness to challenge authority. Someday, I believe all churches will be relics of another age, just as caves and pyramids are reflections of an earlier primitive self.

Philosophy, art, ethics, nature, history, conflict, and harmony do, in fact, travel with me on vacation as I’m not able to escape myself. The composite of who I am is what helps form how I see the landscape and subsequently try to capture these images that will hopefully bring me back to a moment of inspiration. From this scene, I want to imagine being an observer here about 600 years ago, before the Native American population first encountered Europeans. What was it like to walk free, find, capture, or harvest food, explore without permission the surroundings, or layabout in the valley and watch skies above travel overhead to places unknown?

It’s beautiful here in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but like so many other first-time encounters with our national parks, this one was too brief.

Seeing the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant on our way eastward was a conflicting sight as I’m at once fascinated by the technology and convenience while simultaneously uncertain about the waste issue. Of course, coal is not a viable answer either, nor the dam that has backed up these waters to destroy a healthy river system. Seems to me that only leaves, wind, and solar, which come to think about it, are two of the elements that, in their natural state, contribute to these trips being extraordinary.

The trees are on their way to full summer bloom here in mid-spring. I’d like to return in two months to see the trees with their leaves filled out and the little house and yard covered in shade. It’s pretty out here in Tennessee where nature doesn’t portray a poor education or hostility towards others, just an indifference to being here regardless if I am or not.

Seems that even many locals disdain boiled peanuts but Caroline and I sure enjoy them. They taste a bit like lentils. Being on vacation, we weren’t in much need of anything being notarized, so we weren’t able to take advantage of that while picking up another road snack. By the way, you won’t find boiled peanuts west of the Mississippi or much further north than Virginia.

Like boiled peanuts, this isn’t something we see every day: gourds. While popular as containers, musical instruments, birdhouses, and other crafty things, I can’t imagine why anybody driving by would be inclined to impulse buy gourds. Maybe this is the regional distribution point of dried gourds, and my ignorance of the area doesn’t let me know the important role they play in Tennessee culture.

Why a pig? Because this company called Piggly Wiggly changed the world of grocery shopping back in 1916. Prior to this chain of stores that got its start in Memphis, Tennessee, people would give a clerk a list of what they wanted and that person would fill their order. What changed was that Piggly Wiggly’s founder gave customers open shelves and a cart to collect their groceries themselves, and with that, the modern grocery store was born. You can learn a lot about America just by driving across its breadth.

Across the Southern U.S. – Day 5

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

The day starts with a visit to the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. We are near the borders of the Everglades National Park and the Big Cypress National Preserve. Our tour through Fakahatchee follows a 2000-foot-long boardwalk that starts among the mosquitoes. As luck would have it, the pesky bloodsuckers don’t follow us in. Making our way into the preserve exposes a rich depth of life and an intriguing entanglement of plants and animal inhabitants. Birds sing from above and scurry below. Flowers burst forward in strange shapes and delightful hues.

Trees wrap around each other in a symbiotic relationship of dependence as one holds up the other. Spiders dangle. Palm fronds, ferns, and the canopy shade us while we do our best to walk in silence to hear all and see all. Towards the end of the boardwalk is a lagoon harboring our first alligator. The gator floats silently while a large school of fish swims nervously, trapped between a heron and the gator. The fish don’t seem to have much to worry about as both the gator and the heron are lazily lingering; maybe they have already taken their fill. Then we realize that this lagoon may be a landlocked pond due to the low water level in the preserve; if this is the case, these fish have much to worry about.

Silence in these natural settings, aside from the chattering of indigenous species, is always at a premium. It’s not long before a small army of boisterous tourists is making their way up the boardwalk. For us, it is the signal to go, and for them, unfortunately, the heron and the gator responded to the commotion by leaving, too. Along with the preservation of the great wildlands of America, my other wish would be for the tourists to these places of natural beauty to respect the solitude and tranquility so many of us travelers are trying to find at our shared destinations.

We’re on the approach to the entrance of the Everglades National Park after just three and a half days and 2,355 miles from home. I’m reminded of how my mother-in-law’s excitement gives her the energy for the endurance she needs on such a grueling road trip. Jutta has made three other trips to the United States, and each time, we ask a lot from her because our excitement has us forgetting that we are traveling with a retired lady who might not have the get-up and go that we have. Jutta has accompanied us on hikes in Zion National Park to the Emerald Pools and down into the Grand Canyon, where she was able to witness two Bighorn Sheep butt heads a mere 20 feet in front of her. We have taken her to walk among the giant sequoias near Yosemite, and we’ve walked the trails around geysers and bison in Yellowstone. From inside the caves at Kartchner Caverns to a trip floating down the Colorado River, Jutta has always kept pace with us.

We have strolled amongst the ruins of Chaco Culture National Historical Park and found rest on the grounds of a California Mission. She’s stayed in the Luxor Pyramid in Las Vegas and slept in a cliff dwelling called Kokopelli’s Cave in New Mexico. Watched a grizzly bear feeding with her cub and has been face to face with elephant seals on the Pacific coast. After trying new foods and talking to strangers with strange accents, her back straightens with determined pride. I have come to appreciate my mother-in-law all the more on these road trips because, besides her occasional desire for a quick cat nap, this grand old lady has a spirit and most delightful gratitude that is both honest and from the heart. When, after a trip to America, we hear back from her in Germany about how she recently saw on TV a place she had visited, we hear the excitement all over again as she is full of appreciation regarding the extraordinary journeys she has had the chance to make. If only others had her zest for life and the wherewithal to rise to these challenges.

Another challenge greets my mother-in-law: we are asking her to step onto one of the loudest watercraft she may ever take, a fan boat, also known as an airboat. We are in Everglades City with reservations to have Speedy Johnson’s take us out into a private area of the Everglades outside the National Park. We have chosen Speedy, as their tours are limited to 6 passengers.

Gently, we push along out of the dock, and then our pilot hits the gas with a thunderous roar of the unmuffled V-8 engine that screams white noise as we glide over the water. Just as quickly as he gunned the engine, the pilot kills it, letting us float up to our first view of mangroves. Approaching the entangled roots a pelican lands on the edge of our boat just a foot away from where I sit, looking at me like I’m going to pull a fish out of my pocket and throw him a treat.

From the open water, our boatman fires up the engine, and we speed directly into the low ceiling of the mangrove forest, with its shallow black waters providing just enough depth to allow our passage. We narrowly missed getting whacked by the mangrove branches as we buzzed by.

Turns out this little guy is a friend of the boatman who has been enticed by treats. I’m guessing that the adage about feeding the wildlife doesn’t mean a lot when a vendor needs to deliver an experience that satisfies everyone on board.

The mangroves are sporadically growing in bunches here and there, or so it looks to me. Between the forests are grasslands.

In a larger clearing, we again stop the engine and start to float, we have an approaching guest. This is no ordinary alligator; he has acquired a taste for a meal that doesn’t come from the Everglade he lives and hunts in; he’s coming right at us. He’s coming for marshmallows. My first thought was, “How does he get the marshmallow cleaned out of those huge dagger-like teeth?”

The fan boat heads for another larger open body of water, and the pilot tells us to look at the approaching ripples in the water to our right. It’s not another killer gator; it’s a dolphin who has taken up residence in the Everglades. This is not normal behavior for dolphins; they are social creatures. Our pilot tells us they think that maybe he was separated from his pod or that he’s an outcast and that he took a liking to the warm waters and is now a local. This was an unexpected site; to be sure with all three of us getting down to pet the friendly visitor, we were having a sagenhaft moment.

Our one-hour tour is already over, which is okay as our hearing is nearly ruined. We opted to go without the headphones to feel and hear the full experience of the airboat. We cannot get over the delight of how cool this introduction to the Everglades was. Trying to leave Speedy’s, we get turned around again and again until, finally, we are on our way east on Route 41.

Historic and tiny is the Ochopee Post Office; if one were astute, they might remember that Caroline and I were here back in 1999. This is America’s smallest post office measuring but 7-foot-by-8-foot and has been the stand-in since the other post office burned down in 1953. We are stopping to drop off postcards and to pick up a few new ones from the post office itself to send to friends and family in Germany.

Driving into the Everglades National Park, the road is lined with wildlife from herons to gators, even a couple of vultures. The rest of our day will be spent here in the park. Strikingly flat is the first impression, with a sea of grass in nearly all directions. I expected jungle-like conditions, kind of like the photo above, but with even denser trees and mosses hiding gators and old, toothless men. The trees that are here rise in patches as islands amongst the brown and green grasses.

Even with large National Parks like the Grand Canyon, you have an idea of the task ahead, as you can scan the horizon and from above recognize in the expanse what kind of effort may be necessary to see even a tiny slice of the park. Here in the Everglades, you see the vastness only on your map as the park spreads out across the bottom tip of Florida. On the ground, though with flatness stretching out as far as the eye can see, I feel lost on where to begin. Under these circumstances, it would seem best that we speak with a ranger and find some orientation and a recommendation.

It turns out that this won’t be as intimidating as I first thought. We are in a car and are not prepared to see the park by canoe so our choice is simple: drive the road ahead of us. We’ll be taking the 38-mile long drive from the Ernest F Coe Visitor Center to the Flamingo Visitor Center and hold on to the dream that maybe someday we will make the canoe voyage. There was no way to do a canoe trip through the Wilderness Waterway this year due to the route running 99 miles and requiring seven days to maneuver.

Pa-hay-okee Overlook is our first stop to look out over the river of grass. Matter of fact, Pa-hay-okee is from the Seminole Indian language meaning “grassy waters.” On to the Mahogany Hammock where a trail leads us to a boardwalk over the wetlands and into the tree island, officially known in the glade as a hammock.

Fresh chutes of green emerge from the dark waters while the detritus of winter still sits on the ground, waiting to be consumed by the land. Inside the hammock, the light is filtered through a dense canopy of treetops and palm fronds, casting pale shade until near the ground, only shadows exist. Birds are heard but rarely seen while silent snails can be found glued into position on the trees we are passing. Earth and plants that can attract even a minimum amount of sunlight are able to thrive. We stop to take a closer look at a tree limb with layers of plants, mosses, grass, and weeds that have taken up residence, similar to what we saw nearly six months ago in the rainforest of Olympic National Park in Washington.

Leaving the hammock, we spot a couple of mangrove trees taking hold in the waters in front of us, and I wonder, if we come back in 15 years, will this be a mangrove forest similar to the one we were touring on the airboat earlier in the day?

West Lake is our destination, but on the side of the road, I spot a sunning gator. Being an intrepid photographer or a fool, I leap out of the car for a better photo. I had been of the opinion that if the gator so much as wiggled a toe, I would be jumping back in the car, but instead, he made a beeline into the water. Fearlessly, I followed him to the water’s edge, half expecting him to be long gone. Instead, I found this large alligator looking over his shoulder just offshore, letting me snap a couple of close-ups.

The greenish-yellow waters of West Lake are murky and lonely at first glance. As I scan the horizon, I only find a calm lake lined by a mangrove forest, but upon closer inspection, alligators can be seen in the distance poking their eyes above the water’s surface. From the tree line, a bird takes flight, followed by another and yet another. The birds dart from the safety of the canopy only to quickly dash right back in. Fish splash the surface while gliding alligators dip back out of sight. Mangrove trees push right up against the boardwalk trail, making for an intimate walk back and forth to the lake, giving us a great opportunity to peer into these entangled and otherwise impenetrable forests.

Low dark clouds have been creeping up over the southern tip of the glades, images of powerful storms playback in my memory, and I hope this will be but a passing hint of the potential for bad weather. Flamingo Visitor Center is as far south as the road permits, and we are near that end. Eco Pond, just before Flamingo, bends around a hammock on the other side of our boardwalk with an overlook affording us an elevated look into the pond and birds that are living undisturbed by us tourists. My Arizona sense of approaching rain suggests we head back to the car before the downpour starts. This sense is finely tuned for desert dwellers who must develop better-calibrated rain antennae for the little amount of precipitation that graces our arid lives.

With the rain coming down and our shopping excursion into the visitor center finished it’s time to follow the road back up the way we came. Maybe we’ll escape the rain with the trek north, where it doesn’t look so foreboding. After only a few more miles, we start glimpsing sunlight behind the clouds as the rain quickly fades off. At the Royal Palm Visitor Center near the entrance of the Everglades is the Anhinga and Gumbo Limbo Trail that we passed by earlier in the day. The sun will set soon, and this dictates we take the shorter of the trails; our final walk in the Everglades today will be on the Anhinga Trail.

This trail was well worth saving till the end of the day. The southern part of the national park is a series of hammocks, grasslands, and waterways, while this trail area is better described as a wetland. Herons, green herons, egrets, hissing alligators, and various other creatures scurry under the brush, in the water, and among the trees.

This has been our most intimate encounter with the fauna of the Everglades. Late dusk, and the waters are relatively still, mirroring the grey sky and trees. Our nearby star makes a final peek through a sliver of sky between the horizon and hanging clouds and begins its rest for the day.

But the egret knows that there is still time for a couple more bites.