Wild(ish) America

I've just returned from a nice paid vacation in Florida for a week. What's the secret to being paid to go eat seafood on the Gulf Coast? Apparently you just have to be willing to get dirty.

A friend of mine from college is now an engineer with a firm in California. Every once in a while he gives me a call to do some sub-contracting on their projects. It's mostly just his goodwill towards others, and that I think he's trying to recruit me for his company. The recruiting is not unwelcome, but let's face it, CA is a pretty big demerit on their score card. Anyway, this time my friend JS was going to be on my side of the continent for a job and could use a little help with a field study, so I hopped onboard if for no other reason than to pay for my wife's imminent "work" trip to London to present a paper at a conference.

The work was pretty easy. JS mostly had to download data from two instruments at 7 sites or so along a river in the panhandle of FL. There were also two new sites that he had to install instruments. The latter were the jobs that he needed help with since it included carrying a stack of 10 foot sections of 2" pvc pipe and a few steel T-posts (think barbed-wire fence posts) along with drill, saw, computer, hose-clamps, crimps, a variety of other odds and ends, and of course duct tape.

The sites were on a stretch of unregulated river in FL with a wide, undeveloped floodplain. Honestly, it reminded me a lot of the Delta National Forest in MS. The floodplain roughly 8 miles wide and was forested predominantly with tupelo, cypress, swamp oak, and ironwood.
The understory was pretty open (i.e., you could walk it easily without needing, say, a machete), with lots of vines, poison ivy, and ground palm. Oh, and don't forget the spiders! They were awesome. I haven't seen spiders like that since Brazil. They built orb-like webs that would span 6 or 8 ft between trees, and the spiders themselves had bodies that were about 2-3 in long (at least one sex did... I'm not sure if this larger version (the others were only about an inch long) is the male or female. I'm guessing female.). Legs and all you're looking at something that has a footprint about the size of a man's palm or slightly larger. And the woods were littered with these guys! To move through the forest we generally did a sort of maze-like negotiation of dozens of giant spider webs between trees.

I know what you're thinking: Florida in late July around a bunch of sloughs in a river, must be really hot and humid. Humid, yes; hot, not really. The temperature was only in the low 90's or high 80's the whole time we were there, probably because there were thunderstorms pretty much the whole trip. A typical day consisted of a hot morning that would cool off when a breezy scattered thunderstorm came through and drenched us. The shower would be followed by stiflingly still air and direct sun that heated everything back up to a steam bath. This would happen two, three, or four times an afternoon. I have to say, it's tricky operating a laptop (for downloading the data) in a thunderstorm. Meanwhile, Bob-the-boat-driver regaled us with stories of fishing boats being hit by lightning.

Most of the study sites were between a quarter of a mile and a mile off the main river back along sloughs. The idea is to determine the river stage at which these sloughs become hydraulically connected. Thus, a typical stop on the river consisted of a hike across the floodplain or along the channel of the slough (depending on how much water was in the slough) to the field site to download the data. And of course, Florida is reptile country. Strangely, we didn't see that many reptiles. I looked and looked. I mean, I was there on a paid eco-vacation as far as I was concerned, so I wanted to see wildlife. JS on the other hand would rather not see a snake unless it was to avoid stepping on it. The one snake we did see in the woods was a pretty nice sized one at about 30" or so moving calmly about 2 or 3 ft to the right of our path. I saw the snake after JS had passed the spot in front of me obliviously. JS was visibly tense after the encounter. This is when I found out he really doesn't like snakes. Of course, he's better about snakes than Bob is about spiders. Apparently, when JS doesn't have any other help on the data collection trips, Bob has to accompany JS on these hikes (for safety's sake). But Bob has the rather poor combination of poor eyesight and well-developed arachnophobia. Or, at least, this is what JS chuckled about on one of our walks, relating that when Bob inevitably runs into one of the webs he screams hysterically.

And we really only saw one alligator as well, and that one from the boat in the main river channel. Again, a bit of a disappointment. When my dad and I used to go water skiing on the Pearl River in MS we'd see an alligator or two in the shallow sloughs pretty much every time, and maybe the odd gator swimming across the channel. At night on the Pearl you can shine a flashlight on the glassy water and get a good idea of just how many gators are really around all the time from the reflecting eyes that stare back at you. And you hear so much about the density of gators in Florida that I half expected to cross deep pools in the sloughs by walking on the backs of a crowd of gators. But it's not like that at all. There are gators there, no doubt, but I don't get the impression that they are in any greater numbers than on just about any other river in the southeast with comparable degree of wilderness.

Now, that said, JS did tell me about a time when a whole team from his company was down to do the initial installation of all the sites. When the group went to cross a pool in one of the sloughs one of the guys actually stepped on the tail of gator that was just sitting on the bottom. It's hard to say who was more startled, the fella or the gator, but both reacted by violently thrashing about in the muddy water as they tried to get away from each other. The incident got everyone's heart rate up, but no damage was done to either participant.

I suppose the biggest adventure that JS and I had was on our way to the site furthest from the main river. The Moccasin Slough site was about a mile inland along a winding slough. When the river is low, as it was, it's much easier to walk across the floodplain than to try to follow the intermittently shallow and deep channel of the slough. So, Bob put us out on a steep bank of a bend in the main channel and we climbed up to the floodplain and set off. We had with us an up-scale GPS that works even under thick forest canopies (the details of how aren't really important here). JS had marked the site with a waypoint on a previous visit, so we set out with the GPS watching the screen and trying to connect the dots. Incidentally, I had intended to pack my compass precisely for this job, but had forgotten.

The floodplain along the river is, as I mentioned, about 4 miles wide on either side of the river channel. In fact, it is aptly named a "plain" as it is as flat as one can imagine. Once you leave behind the main channel, the forest looks the same in every direction. I don't mean that in the way that all forests look the same in every direction. I mean that having wandered through forests in the hills of MS, this place was eerie in its lack of direction. Thankfully, the GPS worked well under the canopy and we had no trouble following the waypoint to the site. About halfway in we heard a massive grunt off to our right. Then about 60 yards ahead we saw a herd of feral pigs running across our path. Closest to us were a bunch of piglets, at least half a dozen.

Now, snakes and alligators don't make me nervous, but wild hogs put me on edge especially when there are little ones running about. I suppose I've heard too many stories from the Delta about boars chasing hunters and treeing them. The story is that a boar is tenacious and will sit there and wait for you to come down. It might all be wives' tales, but who wants to find out when a 300 pound boar is roaming around the woods around you perhaps feeling that his favorite little piglet daughter is being threatened by a bald ape? So, JS and I kept still for a few minutes to let the pigs get some distance on us. Then we continued on, keeping up a conversation betwixt us mostly to apprise the pigs of our location as we moved on. We made it to the site without further incident, performed our duties and packed up to make the return trip across the forest. We set out in the direction whence we came with JS in the lead with the GPS unit. After about a hundred yards JS started curving the left (sometimes it's hard for the GPS to pick up immediately which direction you're moving, so adjustments to the path are common). Then he adjusted further to the left. And again. And again. Pretty soon I felled compelled to say, "Hey, man, I think we've just about done a 180 in here."

I was adamant that we were about 30 deg short of retracing our steps back to the slough, but JS (having been staring at the GPS screen) seemed sure he was taking us in the right direction because the GPS said so. After a couple of starts and stops, and ensuing discussion, JS had the good judgment to turn on the "track" feature of the GPS which shows your path on the screen. This is how we discovered that the GPS direction arrow doesn't work well under the canopy. It was clear when we plotted our track that we had been headed the wrong direction, but even we we got going in the right direction the GPS arrow pointed us off at right angles to the newly re-acquired route. We made it back to the boat in short order. But this is precisely why I'll have a compass next time.

All the while on these little jaunts through the woods, we were soaked with sweat, rain, and covered with spider webs and mosquito bites. At one point my shirt was so wet and dirty from shoveling an instrument out of four feet of sediment (buried by the slough), that I just took it off and washed it in a pool along the slough. We usually ate lunch in small town restaurants near the river, and I usually ate while still soaking wet. The air conditioning in these places actually made it such that I was far more comfortable being outside in the heat and humidity than in the icebox they called a restaurant. On the third day, the rubber soles of both of my boots came off in the same day! I was reduced to walking on the foam bottoms for the rest of the day (with feet constantly soaked). At lunch that day I was, as you can imagine, particularly wet, and tried my best not to make that squishy wet shoe noise as I walked through the restaurant. I must have looked like Swamp Thing.

So, wild pigs, a snake, an alligator. Add to that spiders, bald eagles, ospreys, kites, innumerable water birds, kingfishers, falcons, raccoons and deer. When we weren't in the woods we were generally eating fresh bay scallops or blackened grouper at a local restaurants where the beverage of choice was sweet tea (they don't serve "unsweet" tea), and the side item of choice was cheese grits. What a nice vacation.

The funniest risk associated with this trip: apparently every year 20 or 30 people are injured when Gulf Sturgeon jump out of the water and hit their boats. According to our boat driver, sturgeon can grow to 6 or 8ft in length and way around two hundred pounds.