That same day I saw my first bald eagle, perched many tens of feet above the forest at the top of a very tall dead tree. We stopped, drifted, looked. Eventually we shook ourselves out of our reverie, started the motor and continued on our journey into the Heart of Darkness (apologies to Joseph Conrad).

I hope I am conveying the awe and wonder that my two years in the Everglades held for this mostly city kid. Not everything in my life has worked, gone well, succeeded or has been as expected. But I have had those two years to relive in my mind and heart anytime I wanted to this day. Do I sound sappy, soppy or sentimental? I am just trying to share the smile it pasted on my face that is still there to this day.

The actual construction of Shark River Camp was an entirely different experience! Work! Hard work under near impossible primitive conditions with the most primitive tools in a carpenter’s work belt. A hammer and a saw. That was it. Power tools? You’re kidding, right? Miles upriver into the “swamp”? Muscles. Under any kind of condition: raging storm, blazing sun, blood sucking parasites. But we did it.

Shark River Camp consisted of a flat expanse of 1” thick plywood. 8 pieces. 16 feet by 16 feet. No roof. No sides. No screening. NOTHING like the picture of the Cottonmouth Camp Cabin you have seen. 2×4’s, 4×4’s, plywood. All carried upriver in the little motorboat pictured. We sat on the supplies as we ferried it. Load by load. Day by Day. Week by week.

So how did we do it? Start with the 4×4’s. Run the boat up onto the soft, peaty, muddy bank of the river channel. Then hold one upright, stand on the edge of the boat, and push it into the peat as far as your combined weights would take it. Then reach way over your head with a sledgehammer to pound it down ’til the top was flush with the water’s surface. One steadying it. One pounding it. Switching positions often because of the exhaustion. Repeat with another at the corner of where all those pieces of plywood were going.  

And what do you do with the first ones on the riverbank, 4 feet apart? They are under water, and thus so are you! Phil (low man) got to put on a mask and snorkel, and over the side he went. The 4×4’s needed to be braced and steadied with a 2×4 on a diagonal from the top of one to the bottom of the next. But it is a river with a current. So picture this: your left arm is wrapped around the upright to keep you from being washed done the river. That same hand holds the 20-penny nail in place to be hammered through the 2×4. Underwater. Have you ever swung a hammer, or anything, under water?

The nail was sunk in ¼” by ¼”, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Hell, even with the snorkel you had to come up for air! And I look back on those days as some of the best times of my life (Don’t suggest it…long since have had psychotherapy!). But look where we were: in some of the last completely unspoiled wilderness on Earth. Alone. Separated from the masses of humanity. Silence. And the Rookeries.

It was called Rookery Branch for a reason. Wish me luck in painting a word picture to try to share this unbelievable sight. The rookeries have long since disappeared. I am one of the last persons on Earth to have seen them. The starving of the Everglades for water, so sugar cane could grow and the cities on the Southeastern coast of Florida would not have their drinking wells poisoned by salt-water intrusion, led to the creation of the task force to try to restore the River of Grass in 1996, 30 years later.

I have the good fortune of a memory that can take me back to a time, and in my mind I am there. I can see it in motion in full color. It is dusk. From the miles of the surrounding ‘Glades water birds began to gather. Each species, Herons, Wood Storks, Ibises, Spoonbills, Egrets, had their own grouping of trees which made up their rookery. And they were all right next to each other. When a bird arrived it started flying in a perfect circle in the air above the rookery. And each arrival would take its place in the circle at the bottom. When enough had arrived the early birds had to fly higher and higher to make room. Above the rookery. In a perfect circle. Just the width of their stand of trees. Forming a perfectly concentric column of birds reaching a hundred feet and more into the air. And the colors of the columns: white, pink, orange, blue.

And then. And then. In an instant. The columns collapsed. Straight down. Into their stand of trees. ALL the species in each rookery at the exact same time. I didn’t hear a whistle blow or some signal to tell them it was time! How? Not an orderly descent! A gravitationally assisted freaking collapse! Try to believe me. That nesting ballet went the way of the water supply to the ‘Glades. All that is left is the joy and wonder I still have at having been there. Worth the work!