EVERGLADES
that in our very midst, in one of our Atlantic coast states, we have a tract of land one hundred and thirty miles long and seventy miles wide that is as much unknown to the white man as the heart of Africa.”
Today the Everglades, which begin in Central Florida with the headwaters of the Kissimmee River and stretch to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, remain the world’s largest subtropical wilderness. The region’s watershed, however, has been drained to a fraction of its size. While the drainage has made modern Florida possible, with the vast construction of some of the most complex water management infrastructure in the world, it has also led to a cascade of environmental problems, perhaps most notably chronic blooms of toxic algae.
The watershed has been the focus of decades of bitter litigation over its water quality and a multibillion-dollar restoration effort, one of the most ambitious of its kind in human history. The restoration will take many decades to complete, but the water quality in Everglades National Park has improved vastly since the initial lawsuit was filed in the 1980s. The park’s water quality now meets or exceeds federal and state requirements, according to the South Florida Water Management District, the state agency overseeing Everglades restoration.
The modern Willoughby Expedition, as it is called, began in Everglades National Park at the mouth of the Harney River in the Gulf of Mexico, where the relatively untouched environment would have been similar to what Willoughby experienced. The project’s team, paddling the entire way in canoes, also took note of egg clusters left by apple snails, the sole food of the endangered bird known as the snail kite. To guard against the razorsharp sawgrass, the team members covered themselves completely and wore gloves like what butchers wear, Oyer said.
“We still had some sawgrass cuts,” he said. “We, not intentionally, just the way it worked out, wound up in sawgrass over our heads, completely surrounding us for probably 10 hours, not consecutively but cumulatively, including four or five hours of it at night, which was not the intention, of course. We hadn’t reached our scheduled destination.”
Within a few days, though, the environment transformed radically as the team reached well into what is now Miami. As its members approached the urban jungle, navigating a series of canals dug for drainage from the Everglades, the water quality went from pristine enough to drink to littered with garbage like Styrofoam and plastic, signaling the high level of microplastics that water testing is likely to detect.
The trip ended in downtown Miami, at the mouth of the Miami River. Charlie Arazoza, who served as the expedition’s navigator, grew up in the Everglades and remains an avid paddler of the river of grass. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the Everglades,” he said, “but for once I finally got to string it all together.”
“It’s really cool to put these, all these historical waterways, together into one trip,” he said. “It’s like stringing pearls.”
This story was produced in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.