Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Famed nature photographer back to work after stroke
Clyde Butcher, slightly hunched and shuffling, pushes a walker slowly down a paved trail into water deep enough to cover his white sneakers.
Camera gear and bug spray is stowed in a basket beneath the walker seat, where a tripod lies. The umbrella that he can attach to the handles in case of rain were left in the car.
Almost three months after suffering a stroke, Butcher and his wife, Niki, are on their way to a spot, a particularly charming spot, in Myakka River State Park near Sarasota.
Oak tree branches, covered in resurrection ferns and draped with moss, arch over the tannic water flowing over the wheels of the walker and into a shady forest.
The iconic Florida wilderness photographer has been to this spot six times already since July, hoping conditions would be just right for the perfect shot.
He’s hoping No. 7 will be his lucky day.
“Sometimes you’ve got to be persistent and patient,” he says.
Butcher, 74, spent three weeks at a Sarasota rehabilitation center after he got out of bed on a Saturday morning in May and couldn’t walk or use his right hand.
He spent four hours a day in therapy, relearning how to put on his shirt and feed himself, and working to walk and take stairs.
Butcher said Thursday that he is surprised at how well he has progressed, proudly recalling pushing his walker — he calls it his off-road vehicle — a mile down a boardwalk at Highlands Hammock State Park near Sebring last weekend.
“Any excuse to get out,” Butcher said. “This is really what helps me try to get back from the stroke.
“If there’s a goal, you walk further. But if you have to just walk back and forth in a hospital room, not much fun.”
Even before the stroke, Butcher, who lives and has a gallery in Venice, had shortened his hikes into the swamps of the Everglades and Big Cypress, where he has another gallery.
He also ditched his oldtimey large-format camera for something smaller and easier to handle. Just days before his stroke, he received the new camera in the mail.
Famously, Butcher also has switched from film to digital, carrying a special tilt-shift Nikon lens he got three weeks ago that allows him to create the same sorts of grand blackand-white images he could with the large-format camera.
“He sees the world in wide angle,” Niki Butcher said.
About 50 feet down the path at Myakka River State Park, Butcher stops to size up his subject.
The last times at the spot, it has been either too sunny or too rainy to capture the image he had in mind. The biggest missing ingredient, though, has been water to complete the scene.
He killed some time eating a cheeseburger at the park’s outpost after a drive that gave him a glimpse of the spot.
“It’s going to be really, really wet, which his going to be really, really good,” Butcher said.
He turns the walker around and sits down. From the seat, he sets up the tripod and puts the camera on top of it. And then he waits. “Here we go!” Butcher said as a cloud moves across the sun.
The shutter whirrs. A white ibis flies overhead.
From beneath his sweat-stained cowboy hat, Butcher looks over glasses that have fallen down the bridge of his nose.
“I think I got it,” he said.