River of Grass

The natural landscape of South Florida, which persists through even the most determined urban construction in Miami was the catalyst for my love of the outdoors; a veritable botanical Eden populated with the ubiquitous palms – coconut, royal, date, queen and more, giant ixora, hibiscus blossoms of every color, massive Bougainvillea, heady banks of jasmine, walls of bamboo. Everything that can grow here, does, erupting in verdant abundance through sidewalks and stone walls and even from cars parked too long in one place.

And at the edge of it all, that massive River of Grass, the place where all roads south of the urban landscape of Miami fall away, one by one, until only a narrow handful venture past the fields and sawgrass prairies of Homestead and the Redlands and enter the stark, beautiful inevitability of the Everglades, a wilderness which so few understand and upon which so much depends. The Everglades is the place where I cut my hiker’s teeth, along the Gumbo Limbo and Anhinga Trails and later canoed miles of river trails. It is the place by which all other wilderness was subsequently measured, and could never compare, but the place which set my heart afire for all things wild and rugged. It is from the River of Grass that my love of wilderness flowed.

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